Tipping Points: How Five Years of Forest Court Wins Changed Everything
If you have been part of Victoria’s forest movement for a while, you will know this truth: change rarely arrives all at once. It comes in moments. Small, fierce, hard-won tipping points. Each one shifts the ground just enough for the next to land.
Looking back over the past five years, you can trace this pathway clearly.
The Possums' Case
It begins in 2020, when the Friends of Leadbeater’s Possum case changed the rules. Justice Mortimer found that destroying Tree Geebungs, those ancient slow-growing understorey plants, was unlawful and that VicForests had put endangered wildlife at risk by ignoring the precautionary principle. It was a line in the sand. A declaration that the law could be used to protect forests, not just to enable their destruction.
Friends of Leadbeater’s Possum Inc v VicForests (No 4) [2020] FCA 704
That ruling lit the path for what came next.
The Tree Geebung Case
Warburton Environment brought its own Tree Geebung case soon after. In 2022, Justice Garde found VicForests had illegally logged areas containing some of the oldest living plants in the Central Highlands and ordered surveys and protections. It was the first time the Supreme Court had ever stepped in to defend Victoria’s endangered flora from logging.
Warburton Environment Inc v VicForests (No 5) [2022] VSC 633
The Glider Case
Only one week later, another historic win arrived. Environment East Gippsland and Kinglake Friends of the Forests proved that Greater Gliders and Yellow-Bellied Gliders in logged coupes would probably die as a result of VicForests’ operations. stronger surveys, larger exclusions and real protections were ordered. For the first time, endangered animals in Victoria had enforceable legal safeguards against logging.
What was now undeniable was that VicForests was not simply cutting down trees. It was breaking the law, again and again.
These back-to-back community wins did more than protect individual patches of forest. They opened the door to real accountability, proved that the law could hold the state to account and helped push VicForests toward shutdown. They
showed what becomes possible when science, persistence and courage meet the rule of law.
The Burns Case
Fast forward to 2024 and another turning point. The Save Our Strathbogie Forest case confirmed that DEECA must seek EPBC Act referrals when federally listed species are at risk. No shortcuts. No pretending the impacts are not significant. That ruling is the direct legal stepping stone to the Hollow’s Case now before the Federal Court, challenging the widespread destruction of hollow-bearing and recruitment trees during so-called hazardous tree operations.
Five years. Four major cases. And a community that refused to give up.
These wins are not dusty files on a shelf. They are the foundation beneath our feet today. They shape every protection we fight for, every forest still standing, every threatened species that still has a chance.
And here is the real truth: none of this happened by accident. It happened be
cause people like you showed up, spoke up, held the line and believed that forests deserve defenders.
