Formal complaints from three of Australia’s peak forestry bodies have hit the ABC over its Four Corners investigation, Timber Turmoil, and the broadcaster is standing by its program, insisting no single factual error has been identified. That is according to Brendan Gullifer, whose report in The Daily Telegraph confirms the complaints reached ABC managing director Hugh Marks and the broadcaster’s Ombudsman in the month since the program aired on 22 June.
Pressed by the Telegraph for its first public response, the broadcaster defended Timber Turmoil as a fair report, one that gave the featured companies and key industry figures the chance to put their side. “No factual errors or failures to include material context have been identified,” an ABC spokesperson said.
Forestry advocates claim the program’s producers bundled standard contract penalties and redundancy payments to present one major timber mill as propped up by more than $110 million in taxpayer subsidies. Four Corners counters that it ran the figures past three accountants and itemised each type of government payment across eight years, never presenting the money as a single class of support.
Andrew Hurford, the 64-year-old Timber NSW president who winched the crew’s bogged vehicle free on his 5,000-hectare property south of Casino, told the Telegraph the questioning “all came from the anti-forestry lobby” in an interview he found “aggressive, like an inquisition”. “All their propositions were basically put as facts,” Hurford said, adding that after years of fair treatment from ABC journalists, he no longer cared whether the broadcaster was defunded if this was its “best and brightest”.
Leading the crew off the property with wife Gaela, Hurford noticed the ABC vehicle had vanished from the rear-view mirror, and turned back with a “surely not” to winch the bogged four-wheel drive free. That account squares with executive producer Jonathan Miller’s own message to Hurford, thanking him for getting the crew out of the mud and conceding they could have been left in there.
Timber NSW chief executive Maree McCaskill, whose letter to Marks four days before broadcast opened the industry’s campaign, wrote that reporter Jessica Longbottom’s description of Hurford as a “formidable opponent” was “an odd word to use” given that impartial and fair reporting is required. “He refused each time,” McCaskill wrote of attempts by Longbottom and Miller to have Hurford say “end native forestry” to the camera.
Along with Timber NSW, Forest and Wood Communities Australia chair Steve Dobbyns has gone further, taking his 3,000-member group’s complaint to the ABC Ombudsman’s office and arguing the program presented activists as forest guardians while treating timber workers as remnants of a trade that should disappear. “It is advocacy dressed up as investigation,” Dobbyns said.
It comes as the Australian Forest Products Association told Marks in a letter dated 6 July that the program was “misleading” and “deliberately ignored the latest scientific evidence”, while Australian Sustainable Hardwoods, one of the companies featured, prepares its own statement on claimed errors.
