The Victorian Nationals are finalising a native timber policy for November’s state election, with the industry closed since January 2024. That is according to Danny O’Brien, Leader of the Victorian Nationals, whose commitment ABC Gippsland Breakfast replayed on Monday.
“We will continue to support the native timber industry in Victoria,” O’Brien said, with the party still working through what it can put to voters and no announcement made.
“There would be some renaissance of a native timber industry in some form,” presenter Mim Hook told listeners, with post-fire cleanups still taking timber, private-land mills still operating across Gippsland, and Australian Sustainable Hardwoods still running at Heyfield.
It comes mere days after Jacinta Allan, the premier who wound up native forestry resigned as premier, with Ben Carroll taking the top job. Newspoll has the Coalition ahead 52 to 48 after preferences and the first poll since the change puts its primary vote at 30 per cent against Labor’s 23, with One Nation in the twenties.
Silviculture expert Patrick Baker, Professor of Silviculture and Forest Ecology at the University of Melbourne and Director of the AFWI Centre for Climate-Smart Forestry, has put thinning forward for forest Victoria has already harvested or burnt. “Thinning would probably be a reasonable thing to consider in those places,” Baker said of forest clear-felled in the past three or four years and country the fires have been through, which between them cover much of the Central Highlands.
Best practice is not the claim he makes, and pressed on whether a silviculturist would always reach for silviculture, Baker answered that no single method delivers biodiversity, carbon, resilience, and timber at once.
Thirty years of measurement stand behind that, with the Victorian Forest Commission having cut seven treatments at Tanjil Bren between 1988 and 1990 and the results published on 1 July in the journal Forest Science. The heavily thinned stands now carry the biggest trees on the site at 108 centimetres, having regained every unit of basal area taken out three decades earlier.
Hollow-bearing trees run six times denser in those plots than in the clearfells, and camera traps recorded Leadbeater’s possum in every treated plot and none of the untouched controls. Hollows rarely form below 100 centimetres, which takes close to 120 years in mountain ash and puts them beyond an 80-year clearfell rotation.
The way out has already been audited, with the Auditor-General unable to show that displaced workers were better off and their share in full-time work down from 80 per cent to 60 after the closure.
