Steel Redux

Further to your other points:

Clearfelling is strongly preferred in wet Mountain ash forests such as those in the Otways, because it allows an burnt ash seedbed to be created under full sunlight. Selective logging does not, and the distant past history of the Otways features forests degraded by selective felling because of poor or no regeneration occurring in the gaps between retained trees.

There are record hardwood woodchip exports because the plantations established during the MIS era are being harvested. Plantations grown for only 12 - 15 years specifically to produce woodchips are different to older native forests that grow larger trees for sawing and other uses. So your claim that these record harvests undermine what I said about native forests is simply wrong.

The fact that removing an industry that supplies man-power and machines with experienced operators to the fire-fighting effort is just common sense that has been widely acknowledged, including in the 2009 Royal Commission report, and the recent Victorian Govt inquiry into the 2019/20 fire season. You won't find it in the literature produced by mostly ANU ecologists with no fire experience, who are pursuing an agenda of trying to blame timber harvesting for recent bushfires. They wouldn't admit to something that would undermine their agenda would they.

Canem Malum, if you did a little more research you would have learned that it takes more than water to grow anything useful. Much of the area around that Hervey Bay/Torbanlea & hundreds of miles north of Bundaberg is coastal Wallum country. Highly acid & poisoned with aluminum it won't support even the humble gum tree, & is mostly garbage Tea tree & Banksia scrub. Some have tried to produce Tea tree oil, but it needs better country to be economical.

The only man I know of who made this stuff, & the transitional areas which are mildly less bad productive, used 4 ton of lime to the acre, after clearing to establish Rhodes grass, then a ton & a half every 2 years to overcome the low PH. I very much doubt it ever returns the cost of this improvement.

Rainfall is very varied, & it is only when a couple of consecutive high rain fall years occurs that even native seedlings survive, as I mentioned earlier.

You really do need to do a bit more research, Queenslands best grain country is in the treeless plain area, a couple of hours drive west of the Great Dividing Range, All dry land farming. I doubt the people of Young NSW, dry land producing most of the countries cherries would agree with you either.

Dear Mark,

If you really were familiar with the Otways then you would have known another one of the more substantive cases against clearfelling the mountain ash forests in the Otways was the impact on water supplies.

OREN was able to show that the meagre royalties from native forest hardwood was in not way commensurate with the value of the water foregone.

Applying the Kuzera Curve to supposed 80 year rotations in catchments showed substantially reduced water yields.

The 22% you spoke of was mostly in high rainfall mountain ash areas thus was way more impactful.

This from you is telling:

“Clearfelling is strongly preferred in wet Mountain ash forests such as those in the Otways, because it allows an burnt ash seedbed to be created under full sunlight. Selective logging does not, and the distant past history of the Otways features forests degraded by selective felling because of poor or no regeneration occurring in the gaps between retained trees.”

Degraded only in the eyes of someone like you? Clearfelling with its accompanying weed spraying created monocultures with little biodiversity. The few remaining big mountain ash giants in the wet old growth forests are testament to a forest which was not often impacted by fire and the biodiversity in those areas is stunning.

You might have to face facts mate, people are valuing places like the Otways for many other things like tourism and water etc than just their timber resources, and that is fine.

The billions in foregone tax to support a burgeoning plantation industry should allow us to step away from old growth native forest harvesting. We should be getting value for that money.

Might be time to move on.

Finally.

I am more than happy to acknowledge the potential loss of machinery and skills was touched on by the latest inquiry:

“OBSERVATION 4.3 The timber industry provides an important support capacity to fire management in Victorian forests with a skill set, knowledge base and operational experience in forest landscapes. The cessation of native forest harvesting by 2030 poses challenges for the fuel management program and bushfire response capacity across the state. Planning currently being undertaken by the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning should be supported and continued to ensure the skills, knowledge and equipment of the industry remain accessible to land managers and fire agencies.”

But that certainly doesn't allow for any conclusion by you that it was: “significant factor in the increasing incidence of mega-bushfires over the past twenty-years"

Steele Redux

I could go on arguing like this for a long time, but I was asked to write about why we have a timber shortage, and the reality is that a part of the reason why we do is the banning of all timber production from huge parts of our native forests to appease the sort of preservation ideal that you are espousing.

Yes, plenty of people think like you, but there are also large segments of society that value hardwood timber products and want them to still be available. The really sad part is that we can have both nature conservation and still supply timber from only a small portion of the forest, and this is essentially the situation we still have, but unfortunately it seems that total elimination of wood production is the aim of idealistic and influential environmentalists.

You are right that the 22% available in the Otways forests were obviously concentrated in the productive forests where the better trees grow, and that does correllate with higher rainfall. However, the amount of annual harvesting was so proportionally small, and area limits were applied to particular catchments to further minimise impacts on water yield, that the effect was not regarded as significant. I can recall the Otways Hydrology Study done by Sinclair Knight Merz in 2001 which confirms that view.

BTW... you don't know as much as you like to make out if you think there is weed spraying associated with clearfell-burn-sow silviculture in mountain ash forests which progressively regenerate back to their pre-harvest biodiversity. You seem to be confusing this with plantation establishment.

You are entitled to your views, but those who have campaigned to remove native forest harvesting from forests are effectively accountable for our now gross over-reliance on imported tropical hardwood timbers from Asia-Pacific rainforests, which are associated with far greater environmental impacts than were ever associated with our domestic industry. Surprise, surprise when those countries decide not to export to us, we are in trouble despite having the sixth greatest per capita forest cover of any country in the world.

Stele Redux

Furthermore, you still talk as though old growth forests are logged, when that hasn't happened for decades in most places, although a more recent ban in Tasmania where it was happening on a proportionally small scale.

Re fire and the timber industry, you'll just have to accept that those like me who have been around for 40-odd years have seen the effect that losing most of the industry has had. For example, in the mid-1980s in Vic, there were 135 contracting crews scattered around the bush working each summer and available for rapid deployment to any nearby fire. Now there are about 25, and there are large parts of the state, such as the Otways, where there are none. That makes a big difference in reducing the chance of controlling fires while they are small.