Four Corners and the decline of an icon of Australian media

Tuning in to Four Corners Timber Turmoil a few weeks ago, I wasn't expecting a pro-forestry view to emerge – still, the opening statement was insightful – and left no one in any doubt as to where we were headed.

Across Australia native forest logging has long been unpopular…

That's a stretch. As a presumption, it informs us of the degree the new knowledge class wants us re-directed towards their better, systemic and global ways of thinking. In truth, we don't know what the average Australian believes because native forest logging territory is dominated by heavy hitters – activists, politicians, department heads, and media. To the rest of us, just thinking out loud, disputation kept in simmer mode is surely not the same thing as grassroots popularity.

Current activist strategy against native forestry relies upon unrelenting repetition of talking points. Activists start them. Friends in the mainstream media repeat them.

1. Let people know forestry is unprofitable for states. Embarrass governments regularly with questions and reveals.

In this modern era, governments set budgets for their entities and the entities always spend them entirely. In adversity, they exceed them. Some have little notion of a business balance sheet. Smaller agencies set up to do a defined task – like VicForests – might fare better, as they are able to bring in constant income flow if enabled. Problems start when that enabling ceases to be given.

The next layer of the activist message is to the loyal troops out there and it cuts deeper into government resolve. Make forestry bodies increasingly unprofitable by continuous legal action in the environmental court, by challenging faunal surveys, watercourse protections and insisting on more paperwork. And maybe some machinery and infrastructure might get sabotaged – but it wasn't us.

2. Use the word 'Illegal' as much as you can – even if no real laws are broken.

For decades now there has been a dittoed moment for people like Paul and Alison, close friends of mine. Strolling down Smith St, Collingwood on a Sunday afternoon recalling days of share houses, shared ideas, and the righting of old wrongs – and somewhere on that familiar pavement they found themselves in conversation with a Friend of the Earth on the plight of koalas. After a marsala chai together, they signed up for $80/month to protect the cuddly critters.

It's also a zombie moment for Paul and Alison because their money doesn't help koalas. In woodlands near Gunnedah, NSW whole colonies of koalas are dying of chlamydia, and research is needed to determine whether transmission is via feral animal scat or contact with grazing sheep and cattle. Or something else. While Alison still believes research gets some of their money, it doesn't. All their money goes to environmental lawyers to pay legal fees to bring court cases against state forestry coupes in East Gippsland. Hundreds of these cases are brought. Most are unsuccessful – but thanks to a stream of zombie income from Paul, Alison and their ilk, the volumes of litigation have started to tell.

In Victoria, this deluge of cases brought a state premier to his decision to cease native forest logging in Victoria because ….in his words – "It was a lawyers' picnic" and costing the state too much money. Thus spoke Dan Andrews in his final months as a half-hearted political shit-magnet. Cancelling the Commonwealth Games, cancelling the timber industry in Victoria, and wondering whether he can retire before his political backers in the CMFEU self-destruct. Hard rain. Realpolitik. Not grassroots insistence. Not unpopularity. Nothing resembling the naivety of reporter Jessica Longbottom's opening claim on Timber Turmoil.

There was no electoral mandate for the cessation of forestry in Victoria. In an ideal world a government would provide a legal basis for VicForest operations as a prelude to its formation. This would include necessary environmental protections. The same protections will be needed in the coming Plantation Era because plantations and regrowth forests attract abundant native fauna and are part of the existing riparian landscape.