 Alex is in conversation tonight with our news world-leading forest expert, Professor David Lindemeyer. David's new book The Forest Wars lifts the lid on destruction of native forests by government corporations and logging industry that is making bushfires worse, healing wildlife and costing taxpayers millions for the sake of woodchips for export. David reveals an unholy alliance between state forestry, the timber industry and the unions. Loggers routinely breach regulations and industry intimidates anyone who questions what they are doing. Worse still, even when native forests logging is supposedly ending, efforts are being made to continue it under a different name. As Tim Winton states on the cover of the book, in the face of all the lies and the industry spin, David's book is evidence-based account that's clear, humane and trustworthy. Please, it gives me great pleasure to now welcome Alex and David in conversation. Thank you. Thanks so much, Katarina, who is just a legend and we love everything that she does towards Meet the Author. Thanks so much. And of course I've been emailing with the fabulous Colin Steele today and he's feeling much better and was devastated. He couldn't be here but he's read the book and he's fired up. I too want to acknowledge who are on Aboriginal land. Country never ceded our first peoples and thank our first peoples who've cared for this country for many, many thousands of years and I'm glad that I live in the ACT which voted to both acknowledge our first peoples in the Constitution and to give them a voice on policies and laws that affect them. And acknowledging this care of country is central to this latest book from Professor David Lindemeyer, The Forest Wars, The Ugly Truth about what's happening in our tall forests. Now my mob, British invaders, treated forests in this country as if they hated trees. As Professor Lindemeyer points out in the book, within just a few decades almost all of the red cedar had been cut out and literally billions of trees were removed from the Murray Darling Basin. Some people even called this rampart exploitation scrubbing so as to scrub the land clean of trees. And I remember as a kid my own mother's fury as we were driving to school that trees were being ringbacked on the country road leading to our property. If I was to ask just a general Australian audience how much sawn timber for furniture and houses comes from native forests, I wonder what their answer would be. Would it be that it's actually just four percent? The rest going to woodchips and pulp. Would the majority of Australians say, look you've got to think about all the jobs. It's the jobs particularly in regions versus the environment. In this book, Professor David Lindemeyer turns his 41 years of research to myth-busting. The 37 myths are presented against thorough, peer-reviewed research with a reality check at the end. Importantly, Professor Lindemeyer, a dedicated and world-leading forest expert outlines a vision and a board for a new approach. So when it comes to the forest, the animals, the issues of fire, climate, wasting taxpayers' money, who you're going to call? Professor, please welcome Professor David Lindemeyer. David, and look, thank you for this amazing turnout tonight too. Nearly full room and he absolutely deserves this. David, you've written many books during your ongoing career, your long and ongoing career. Why did you want to write this one? I wanted to write this book for many reasons. The first one was that when there was a change of government here in Canberra, I had many, many phone calls from teals, from cross benches, from nationals, from right across the board asking about native forests, native forest management, native forest logging. And after about the 25th or 27th discussion, sometimes lasting a couple of hours in each case, I thought I actually need to sit down and I need to write down issues to do with fire, issues to do with wildlife, issues to do with plantations and put them in one place. And also to arm people about many of the myths that get peddled over and over and over again. So there was a Senate inquiry and senior lobbyists for the industry carted out the same old myths that I've heard for many, many years and I just thought, right, that's enough. There needs to be a response to this so that people are able to respond when they hear some of this rubbish and be well armed with some of the facts. It's a brilliant format. So you have these encapsulated and then within those, you know, the chapters, you have the links to all the research and then at the end a reality check. Yes, yeah. And that's a lot of that's got to do not only with my publishers, but also my wife who edits better than I can write. But there's this notion of, you know, we need to log for us to make them safe. Okay, and I've heard that many times. And in the book, I talk about an instance not long after the 2009 fires. I was giving a seminar about the recovery process immediately after the fires because we had worked for 25 years prior to the Black Saturday fires. And someone called out from the audience their question without a question mark was if it wasn't for you effing greenies, none of this would have happened, which was basically code for we need to log for us to reduce fire severity. Now, the scientific data now shows not only from our work, but from many parts of the world. It's the other way around. And so there are the kinds of things that really... You actually think that questioner in the book. I do. You went off and did the research. Well, I've restated the question from the audience as, so your hypothesis is that if we log for us that will reduce the severity of the fire. But I need to take that as a question on notice because I don't know the answer to that. And so we went away, first of all, and did a survey of the literature. And then there were data sets that started to come in, which we were able to analyze with statistical scientists in our group. And we're actually showing that when we log for us, there's a long period of flammability after they begin to regenerate. And that can last for between 40 years. That's from our lab that shows that. But University of Wollongong shows lasts for up to 70 years. So we have that now. The other one that just springs to mind while you're talking is that when Victoria announced it was going to stop native forest logging, I think it was a national party politician. And Victoria said, oh, well, there goes the poor old orangutan. So that's a common one that gets said. That's a common one because people say, well, if we don't log our forests, we're going to have to get a timber from somewhere and it's all going to come from Borneo. And the person who made this statement, it's in a press release, was actually the forestry minister in the naphthen government. And the reality is that the vast majority of timber in Victoria at that stage was about 80%, 85% to 90% was already going into the paper pop and wood chip stream. So this notion that we were going to be importing timber from Asia, from Borneo for wood chips and paper pop was almost extraordinary. And either this was duplicitous or this person didn't understand the industry. Now we do import timber from places like Vietnam and it's plantation eucalypt that comes into Australia. So the structure of the industry is really very important in this space. Now we also do import other timber, but it's largely from places like New Zealand and Europe. This book is so brilliant, honestly. You need to take it to your next barbecue or dinner party when you have any argument. I love the fact that you give David about photocopy paper because it halved in Australia because we had to print it at home and it cost us money rather than the good old workplace. That's right. That's right. So that really did change significantly, particularly during COVID. And the reality was that reflex paper, Australian paper or Nippon paper actually wasn't making any money from paper copy for quite some time. So this was really an important part of the exit of the industry. Just before we get into the really nitty-gritty, why did you decide to be a forest ecologist? Tell me about that. Well, I didn't actually start as a forest ecologist. I was wanting to be the next Jacques Cousteau as a marine biologist. And I actually got a job, first of all, working with a very famous ecologist at the University, Henry Nix. Henry was working on the conservation value of military training areas, which is quite extraordinary. Military training areas in Australia are actually very vulnerable. They're very, very important. They're not so vulnerable because they're covered in unexploded ordinance, which means people don't build on them, which means every now and then the occasional penguin gets hit by a missile, but the rest of it doesn't get covered in houses. Anyway, Henry was very much into field surveys and other such things, and I got really excited about that. And then I got a job working in the Tall Wet Forest in Victoria in July 1983, and I'm still doing the same thing. What do you want years later? Because, I mean, I'll blow your trumpet, but you've had many offers to work overseas, but you've made a decision to stay here. Why? I've made a decision to stay here because Australia is a very special place for biodiversity. You can make discoveries here that are very hard to make elsewhere. I'm very passionate about this country. I think we have such an extraordinary set of environments that need good science and good evidence to make sure that we do evidence-based policy and management. And so rather than working in Stanford or Oxford or other places, I always felt that it was best to work out of here and make a contribution from here rather than overseas. So as you said, the Tall Wet Forest in Victoria, and you studied Victoria's faunal emblem, the Leadbeater's Possum. You write in the book, studying them is no casual bushwalk. No, it's not. The forests that they work in that they live in are some of the most densely stocked, wettest environments that you can first imagine to work in. In fact, you need to get a set of forest legs when you first start working there. So people talk about sea legs when you go out to sea. Well, when you work in a mountain ash forest, there's a lot of hauling over big logs and pushing past tree ferns and the like. So it takes a bit to get to getting used to work in those kinds of environments. They're tiny and they're lightening fast and you can speak their language. You know what I'm going to ask them to do. Leadbeater's Possum is about the size of the palm of your hand with a long tail, like a little baseball bat. And at times what happens is that animals, they challenge each other at the boundaries of their territories and they have a special chatter challenge call. But also as a colonial animal, when they're attacked by a predator such as a boo boo cow, they make an alarm call and then other animals in the colony come in to mob that predator. And if you've got a reasonable ear, you can pick up the sound that they're making and it's pretty straightforward to mimic the call. And the next thing that happens when you mimic the call is that you've got possums coming in quite close. Can you do it? Can you do it? It's just a tss tss tss. And then there are Leadbeater's possums that come in and you can catch the things by hand. If you learn the calls well enough, it's so much so that they'll even come in and bite you. And so I've told the story many times but I've actually got a little scar just between my eyes here. It's not a Harry Potter scar, but it's enough. I had a Leadbeater's possum in one hand which I had hand caught but I didn't see the other one was coming across and it actually bit me. And it's quite remarkable. So these little colonies up to 12 animals are run by a dominant adult female who rules the roost. But the colony members are really very aggressive in maintaining the cohesion in the colony so it's pretty special. Fantastic. So to get down into the myth busting, for many years you were told, we were told that logging did not affect the plants and animals of the forest. What's the reality check? That's right. And I had that discussion over and over again on field tours and elsewhere. And the reality is that when we cut down a forest many of the mammals actually die on site. And that's work going way back into the late 1960s and early 1970s it actually showed that through the process of land conversion. But the same thing happens when you do intensive clearfelling or clear cutting is that the animals die on site. In the case of some birds, they will move out into the surrounding forest. But the territories nearby are already occupied and so there's a short-term concentration effect before those animals die as well. So the mortality rates are very high. So those animals, depending on hollows, so gliders, lead, beaders, possum, all sorts of animals die? They die. So one of the things that's important to understand is that for many, many of these species they don't just use a single hollow. So when we study gliders, possums, what happens when we radio collar these animals is we see them move from tree to tree to tree day after day after day. And there's actually a set pattern for many of these individuals. And so an individual greater glider might use up to 13 different hollow trees in a year. An individual mountain brush tail up to 16. An individual lead, beaders, possum, 5 or 6. And so all of these animals are moving regularly through the forest, which tells us that to maintain a population of each of these individual species you actually need quite a lot of hollow trees in an area for those animals to survive. It also tells us in an evolutionary context that Australia's forests were probably dominated by largely old growth over time because we have proportionately more animals dependent on hollows than virtually anywhere else in the world. The only place that comes even remotely close to Australia is South Africa. And it's still a distant second. So it tells us a lot about the biology. It's quite a special thing. You can't just whack up a box on a tree. That's another one of the myths you talk about. No, no, there are some animals that do well in nest boxes but some animals are so specialised and need multiple hollows that quick fix is sometimes counterproductive. In some cases you can end up with things like hollows and Indian miners and other things in your nest boxes which you don't want, which compete with the things that you do want. So the best form of nest box is actually a tree hollow, a real one. And how old are the trees that have the tree hollows? So many of the eucalypts don't first start developing hollows. First start developing hollows until they're about 120 years old and many of the big trees that some of the bigger possums and gliders need might be in at least 170 years and up to 300 years in some cases. Now forestry departments, they claim that they do proper pre-logging surveys for animals and VicForest claims that they do this extensively. What's the actual reality check on that one? The reality check was that in fact there weren't good pre-logging surveys. At one stage there was a claim in court that it was too dangerous to do the field surveys. The reality was that we had been doing that kind of field survey for at that stage 40 years. So there was a problem there. VicForest said they couldn't send their stuff out because it was too dangerous. That's right. They might have bumped into you. I think the reality was that there needed to be there needed to be a set of surveys done. You can do a set of surveys before you even think about the process of logging. So there are ways of doing what we call species distribution models which tell you where you're most likely to get species first. And one of the difficult things that we found was that the places that were scheduled for logging were also the most important ones for biodiversity based on those species distribution models. And what about the argument that it's only a small part of the forest that's been logged and enough big trees remain for animals and biodiversity? Okay, so one of the problems was that was not only the places that were being cut because they had high conservation value, but as time goes on in what's called a rotation time, you cut a particular area and that remains unsuitable for most critters for 50, 60, up to 170 or more years. But then the following year, so that won't be the only place in a landscape that's cut. You might have seven or eight or 10 other, in some cases, up to 30 logging coops in a landscape. And then what happens is that as time goes on, the next year you have other logging coops added, and then other ones, and so you get a cumulative effect in the landscape. Now, when you study areas for prolonged periods of time, so we have long-term sites where we go back and count animals year after year after year, what happens is that the surrounding landscape has more and more pieces cut out of it, and we can actually see the relationship between the amount of forest that's cut and the occupancy of those sites. And so the more that's cut, the occupancy rate declines over time. And so it's a cumulative effect that we see. Now, there are ways of studying that, and I talk about that in the book, to provide the evidence base that there is actually this cumulative effect taking place. It's not easy to find, but if you design your studies in the right way, the signals are actually very strong. At the moment, and I know you care very deeply and you acknowledge our first peoples, their custodianship of this country, and you consult. But at the moment, there is a move towards what's called forest gardening and thinning of forest. Can you talk to us about what's going on here? Oh, dear, this is a very difficult space. So essentially what has happened is that in some of the First Nations corporations, they've taken on conventional western foresters. So just a couple of days ago, the Tanarong Biocultural Report was published. Two of the authors are western white foresters. And one of the approaches to forest management is this thing called forest gardening. And I talk about this in the book. Forest gardening is actually logging. And if you look at the photographs, you actually can't pick the difference between a conventional shelter wood operation or in some places a clear-felling operation in forest gardening. So the bottom line here is that a very large proportion of what we call the stand basal area or the stems on a site are being taken out of the forest under this process of forest gardening. Now we need to understand what's going on here. This is a thinning operation. The thinning operation has very, very substantial consequences for the forest. The first one is that the reason to do the thinning was to reduce the risk of fire. But what we know is that thin forests actually have an increased risk of high severity fire. We've looked at that after the 2009 fires and after the black summer fires. And there is a strong relationship between thinning and fire severity. In some cases, in other cases, there's no effect. But the thinning doesn't solve the fire problem. The second thing is that when you thin a lot of forest, you create a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. You're taking a lot of the timber out. So proposals for thinning of the mountain ash forest would generate about 1,000 tonnes of carbon biomass emissions per hectare. So we would blow our greenhouse gas emissions reductions target completely out of the water. The third thing that's really important is that when you thin a forest, you actually simplify the structure. There's some of the key structural components of the forest. And what we know from our work and work by many, many people around the world is that structurally complex forests are the ones that have the highest species richness. So the more layers you have in the forest, the more niches you have, the more niches you have, the more species you have. And many species of mammals and birds are strongly associated with that structure. So what's going on here? What's going on here is essentially cultural misappropriation, which to me is so painful to watch. This is taking corporate advantage of some of the most disadvantaged people. And personally, I find this very, very difficult to watch because we know from the financial records in Victoria that native forest logging doesn't make money. Okay, so we're essentially setting up some of these corporations to fail. But at the same time, we're setting... Will they wear the losses? They will wear the losses. So indigenous organisations will wear these losses? They will lose. They will lose. And there are already court cases that have been prosecuted in this space where First Nations have lost. So we're going to see losses in the courts. We're going to see losses in terms of public support. And we're going to see losses in terms of the ecological integrity of some of these forests. Historian Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe, of course one of our great elders, they claim that Australia is more wooded now than it was in 1788. And Gammage actually claimed in the greatest estate on Earth, his book in 2011, that tall wet forests were open and park-like. Can you talk to us about that? Well, I think it's important to recognise that Bill Gammage, was writing about in temperate woodlands and grasslands, was spot on. But when it came to tall wet forests, I think it's certainly not right. Let's be fair. So that the data and the evidence, and we have a paper just accepted and to be published in the next couple of weeks, indicates that Australia's tall wet forests, particularly the ash-type forests, were not open and park-like. Their natural state of development is very dense, very wet environments that weren't routinely burnt and had in many cases in an older state a very dense wet understory. So as the forests get older and older, they get darker, they get wetter, they get less fire prone and less at risk of high severity fire. And there is actually no evidence in the carbon dating or in the charcoal in the soil or other kinds of evidence from photographs or historical paintings, indicating that those forests were open and park-like. Because that's one of your reality checks. You say cultural burning is a real thing. It's complex and it's highly varied in its application. Absolutely. Absolutely. So we have Dr. L Bout is leading a fantastic project on cultural burning and the temperate woodlands at the moment. In very, very close partnership with a whole series of First Nations people, the Honour Wall and the Honour Wall and the Wiradjuri peoples, that's the right fire for the right country led by First Nations people. And I think that's crucial. But the notion of these tall wet forests, the natural fire regime is very rare, very high severity wildfire, not frequent low intensity, low frequency fire. And so this is where the nuance becomes really important about the right fire for the right country. So are you going to face, though, the argument that you're a white filler scientist and you don't know what you're talking about? I've already faced that. And my response is I'm a scientist. I bring together the evidence. The evidence is that this is the natural fire regime for these tall wet forests. And it's a fundamentally different fire regime than what we would see in the open woodlands or the grasslands or some of those other environments. But you'll continue to consult, because that's... Absolutely. Consult widely. You know, I've been writing to Bruce Pascoe yesterday and the day before about some of these things. And I think it's important to have a respectful discussion about... You went and spent a couple of days with him, didn't you? I did. I had a day with Bruce at Malakuta. I got a speeding phone on the way. Because I was thinking about what I was going to talk to him about rather than working out whether I was in a 60s zone or an 80s zone. But I think it's important to have those respectful conversations and to respectfully disagree on things. So just to keep working through some of the myths, logging is good business. It's more lucrative than other forest uses. Don't you love David's body language? Sorry. I'll be positive. So this is work... We did some spectacular work led by Michael Varden and Heather Keith using the United Nations approach to economic and environmental accounting. And they looked at the relative value of the different natural assets in the Central Highlands region of Victoria, where I hope we're going to see a great forest national park. Now the importance of that work is that this was really the first time, one of the first times in the world, where people were looking at these relative values. And the value of the water from these ecosystems, so the older the forest, the more water we get, the value of the water was about 25.5 times the value of the wood chips and paper pop that were coming from this area. So we're talking it's right near now what's going to be Australia's biggest city. It's right, it is Australia's biggest city. It's an hour and a half drive from the MCG. But it was also where approximately 70% of all Victoria's native forest logging was taking place. But the water industry, this was based on Melbourne Water's own annual reports and Vic Forest's annual reports was 25.5 times the value. The value of the plantation sector in that area was three times more than the value of the native forest sector, even though the plantation area is relatively small. So the important thing here is to think about the contribution of those different natural assets to economic activity in those regions. So why is the economic argument not working if they won't listen to the environmental argument? Well, I think in the case of Victoria, two things happened at the beginning of this year. The first one is that the state was hemorrhaging lots of money through the industry. So the last two years, Vic Forest cost the state $269 million, not including an $80 million loan that it still had to repay. Tasmania is far worse than Victoria. Tasmania is at $1.5 billion. New South Wales is about the same as Victoria. But not only were there problems with the amount of money that was hemorrhaging from the economy, there was also the issue of the industry basically having significantly overcut the forest. So the reality here was that there wasn't the timber to... At the end, you know, it's Easter coming up and you need to get a baker's dozen of this book. But David, who knew that perhaps the forest needed very, very, very tall giraffes? Could you tell us this story? Oh, gosh. OK, so I want you to cast your minds back to the Howard government. And there was a certain new minister who was elected from a seat in West Australia, a very ferocious political opponent. And he made a press release indicating that we had to log our forests to save them because we didn't have giraffes in Australia to eat the leaves. And I'll see if anybody can guess who might have said something like that. I have this recorded in my diary. And I got a phone call from some of the ABC and it wasn't you, Alex, at that time. And they said, did you hear what the minister just said? I'm so lucky. And I was quite raw to this and I didn't say, like I do these days, off the record. And so I didn't do that. And I said, well, gosh, that's a pretty amazing thing to say. Last time I thought about it, there were in fact animals that ate eucalypt leaves in Australia. The good minister might have even heard like the koala. And then I went on to say there are other animals like the greater glider and in fact trees don't grow endlessly. And indeed, even if we did have giraffes, they don't have wings because we have some and they're only five metres tall and there are some trees that would be needed another 95 metres for the... Anyway, the journalist wasn't very interested in that. He just reported that the forestry minister didn't know about koalas and I got hauled in to the parliament house. Seriously, I got hauled in and then I got absolutely pilloried by the minister for my public comments. And then I got a sermon about Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and how we needed to privatise forest as soon as possible because that was going to solve everything. So I wonder if people know who that might have been. It wasn't Tucky. And people might be thinking about having a pizza after this tonight and one of the more crazy marketing notions from a pizza... I did laugh out loud at the madness. Just tell us about this especially flavoured pizzas. Especially flavoured pizzas. So I don't think... Well, it's not the ABC but I'm not going to mention which pizza maker it was but I'm going to talk about how they had just decided that they were going to release their new brand of pizza with a special topping and it was Mount Ash Woodchip Smoked Pork Bellies to put on your pizza. I kid you not. And this particular company had full-on telling us that with their new pork belly pizza if you were worried about your local firies then you could make a donation of your pizza of your choice to your local fire station. Anyway, other people got online and said, do you want to top them with barbecued swift parrots and barbecued lead-beater spossums? So the notion of what was at Mount Ash was actually being used for in this space was actually really quite sad when you think about what's happening to one of the world's flowering plants. You and I have had this conversation before. Do you think there is very low literacy or knowledge from the general Australian public about our forests? In fact, a lot of Australians are quite frightened to go into the forests. Do you think that's part of the problem? We just don't understand them. Yeah, I think there is a general perspective in Australia that maybe it goes back many, many centuries this notion of entering into forests as dark, red environments. Yeah, a little red riding hood, the ants and all that sort of stuff. And so the notion of understanding environments like this and how they put together and what stunningly beautiful places they are is quite foreign to many people. So if we think about the average Malburnian or five million of them, hardly any of them will know about these forests. They know who plays full forward for us and they'll know Carlton or Collingwood and they've got no idea where their water comes from and these extraordinary forests are an hour and a half's drive away. And yet when you put out infrastructure for some of these people to go visit, it just takes off. It's quite extraordinary. So we do have a role to connect people to these environments for their mental health and their physical health. And we need to create infrastructure to re-establish this constituency for conservation. I'm going to come up to ask questions because in the end of the book your dear, dear late mother always said if you're going to knock something down, you need to come up with solutions and you do have a way forward. It would be better for everyone including the taxpayers. That's right. Mum always used to say if you're going to knock something down you have to put something better in its place. And she made those statements about these kinds of things. And so we thought deeply about the importance of forest management in this space. So we have large areas of native forests that have not regenerated after logging and have not regenerated after successive fires. So there's an enormous amount of work to put the forest back where it should be. Now that means people working on country. That means people with forestry skills to put trees back. We have a massive problem with feral deer. Millions of deer that need controlling. So again, there are opportunities in this space for people to be working in the forest. We have to have people working in the forest but regenerating them and restoring them, not knocking them down. We're going to need to have people working in the forest as part of dealing with fire problems and using new technologies to help us detect fires more quickly and extinguish them more quickly. So I see a whole range of opportunities in this space for people to be working in more jobs better jobs, longer lasting jobs on a different trajectory for these kinds of forests. And many people might have done that tingle forest walk in West Australia. I mean, that's quite an extraordinary thing and you get the education you walk up amongst the tall trees. People really respond. Absolutely. I have a story back in 1986 when I was cycling from Perth to Esperance and I was at Walpole and it was a pretty run down kind of place and since the Valley of the Giants walkway has gone in, that town has been completely rejuvenated just like places at Jeeveston, the Otways in Victoria. There's exciting opportunities here to create regional rejuvenation through how we manage forests how we create infrastructure for people, how we look at new kinds of work to help us make that transition and make it quickly to the worst possible thing we can do is to leave people hanging for year after year after year about the possibility of this coming back or that coming back when A, there's no money in it and there's very few jobs. When it comes to politics you say both the right and the left side of politics are stitched up and that politicians are scared of a future they cannot see. Tell us a bit about that. Well, that's true. The centre left side of politics is clearly stitched up by the CFMU and the right side of politics is stitched up by industry lobbyists but you need to recognise that they don't fight against one another. They're fantastically collaborative in working what they do and I think the reality here is that one of the failings of the conservation movements has been they've been unable to paint that alternative vision. What does it look like? We haven't looked across the ditch to New Zealand for example that actually exited native forest logging 20 years ago or longer and where their investment in the plantation sector took place once we move out of native forest logging that will open the way for more investment in plantations but also farm forestry and other industries in that space. That's very exciting to me as well as in ecotourism, carbon management, fire management and other areas. Please make your way. It's time for questions. Please make your way to either side. This is for the podcast sake of the microphone. Is it just one side? I can't see the other one on this side. Please come up and ask a question. It looks like someone ah come on Professor Konofsky make your way. I'll just ah jobs Professor Linda Meyer. Are there any jobs? That's obviously why the unions fight so hard. The unions fight so hard because there's actually a difference in which union represents native forest logging versus which union represents plantations. There's actually a demarcation there which is a problem for one of the unions, the CFMEU. The interesting thing is that if you actually drill into the job side of things and I remember distinctly a situation where I was asked to go to a Leadbeater's Possum workshop in Victoria and the first session in the morning was how many Leadbeater's Possums were there and I was saying well somewhere between 2000 and 4000 I was pilloried for an hour and a half about why I couldn't after 25 years of work, 30 years of work, why I couldn't tell them how many precisely Possums there were in the forest and I said things like well it's actually pretty hard to detect animals but this is our best estimate. So then we stopped, we had scones, jam and tea cream, came back after into the next session and it was about the industry and I put my hand up and said how many people are employed in the industry and they I'm serious and they said that's a very difficult question for us to answer. It's a very difficult, we think it's about 24,000 and I said this doesn't quite compute with me because I had data on how many sawmills there were and then they said maybe it's 21,000 and that still didn't work and then I realised what was happening was that the plantation sector were being added to the native forest sector so at the time that workshop was taking place Heather Keith had done some work on the economics and the employment in the industry and it was about 1,100 in the native forest sector and then the hell of a difference and what had happened was that it had actually dropped to 535 by the time Vic forests were putting in the FSC certification attempt for the third time. That is pretty common. Southern New South Wales the numbers from Frontier Economics Angus Taylor's favourite consulting company with somewhere between 280 and 300 for the industry direct and indirect from Sydney to Eden. That's pretty common. So when I hear lobbyists say we put bread on the table for tens of thousands of families I rest their case. Great question. Professor Peter Konofsky you've got a question and please anyone else come down I'd love you to ask questions. Thanks Alex. Hi David thank you too and hi everybody. For those who don't know me I'm Peter Konofsky I'm the professor of forestry at the ANU. I'm in the same Fenners School as David. We're a broad church and we have a respectful discussion in the way that David just mentioned. So David thanks there's lots to talk about but I won't take too much time. There's a strong strand in the forestry literature dating from the 1960s around foresters thinking that they knew best about how to manage forests and your books are critique of that and the myths associated with that. That literature could probably be summed up in the title of a 1966 paper that was called The Myth of the Omnipotent Forester. Clearly foresters aren't they? We do have a question mark at the end coming up. A question mark. So what I'm wondering about the new paradigm in the form that you've outlined because forests have a plurality of values they deliver a diversity of values and services how do we maintain a decision making process that doesn't just repeat that era of the past where the omnipotent forester is replaced by for example the omnipotent ecologist or the omnipotent economist or omnipotent legal scholar. The question and second Alex is very briefly you've described the work you've done in the tall wet forests of Victoria and the differences between those wet forests and the other sorts of forests in Australia which are the majority of our forests are drier forests. So I wonder how much you think the results of the work from those tall wet forests can be directly transferred to the majority of the drier forests. I think it's important to understand that I acknowledge quite clearly that the first conservationists in the country were foresters that prevented some of our most important forests from being converted to agriculture. That was crucial. I think one of the things that started to unravel in the 1920s was this extensive push to convert old growth forests to regrowth forests and that actually persisted right through until the mid to late 1980s and so therein is a fairly deep problem. There is no doubt that forester skills are really important. I remember Peter because I've got it in one of my diaries a walk along a beach in Kiola where we talked about the future of forestry was 1994 and we talked about the importance of foresters in the plantation context landscape restoration, urban forests and other kinds of areas. I think the importance of all these kinds of discussions is that people continue to talk just as I was talking to Bruce Pascoe about our differences in thinking. The second question is a very complex one because the fire regimes are different, the biodiversity is different, the management is going to be different for each of the different forest types that we work within. I think there are some factors across the fire footprint for 2019-20 the relationship between logging history and fire severity was pretty consistent. The fact that we're seeing increases in fire frequency across many forest ecosystems and its relationships with pre-fire management I think is pretty telling. It doesn't mean that that dismisses the complexity, there is enormous complexity as you know and therein lies the importance of collecting the evidence to guide how we do good evidence-based management and evidence-based policy. Was that both questions? Yes. Have we got any more? Fantastic. Thank you so much. Alex, David, everyone. I've got two questions but I'll start with one and we'll see. We are all familiar with the FSC symbol on paper that we buy. So my question is about FSC and about New South Wales. So are New South Wales woodchips, firewood and low value products such as pallets made at Naruma approved by the Forestry Stewardship Council? I don't know the precise answer to that. I'll have to take that as a question on notice and I will get back to you. But if you send me an email I'll follow that up with people that do know and they'll connect with you if I don't. Okay. They're not. Can I ask another question? Was that a Dorothy Dixon, was it? Yes. So I live on the south coast of New South Wales. I grew up in Canberra and my question is about the relationship with Victorian contractors and mills coming into New South Wales now that logging has mainly ended in Victoria. We see on the Lower Shoalhaven both sides of the Clyde River we see crews coming from Bansdale and moths logging. We look at the insignia on the trucks. We look them up. There's a harvester operator, a snigger operator, truck driver, small family businesses two or three in the forest at one time. So I wonder if they're unionised but with all these Victorians coming across the border are we actually providing jobs in New South Wales? And also we're seeing our forests at Shallow Crossing on the Clyde River going down to the Eden Woodchip Mill for export wood chips. So are Victorian forests still being logged and going to the Eden Woodchip Mill? I'm not aware of forests now coming over the border from Victoria into Eden but I'd have to follow that up because I think there are there's no doubt that there's been major structural changes in Victoria just in the last few months alone with the closure of the industry but there's still a lot of post-wind damage salvage logging taking place in places like the Wombat State Forest and in other areas and there's a lot of logging associated with forest fire management which is problematic because in places it's going to make the forest more flammable. With the movement of logging contractors from place to place that isn't not uncommon. We saw that extensively after structural changes in the industry where there was a big reduction in sustained yield across large parts of Victoria except for the Central Highlands and many logging contractors moved from elsewhere such as East Gippsland to Central Highlands during those phases of change in sustained yield so I'm not surprised to see contractors coming over the border and elsewhere but one of the interesting things in this space is that the plantation sector is screaming out for people to be involved in the haulage area so there are still lots of jobs in this space that's really important to support the plantation sector that we're not often forgetting about that and many of the workers can actually transition relatively straightforwardly in that space at least that's what the ones that I've talked to have told me. Thanks so much Emma I think this will be the last question before we go to the vote of thanks. Thanks Alex and thanks David both for your comments tonight and your decades of work to protect our forest and if you could talk a little bit about one of the things that you've been working on for a really long time I thought it would be useful for all of us to kind of hear about the future of those mountain ash forests and the idea around a great forest national park. Yeah thanks so we've worked extensively on this idea of moving the the area that we call the Great Forest which is the mountain ash forest and the alpine ash forest in central Highlands moving it into a great forest national park Victoria has had huge changes in its population Melbourne has added the equivalent of Adelaide's population to its population in the last 14 years but it hasn't added any new areas of parks and reserves and so the aim of the game here is to transition that area that central Highlands area to a great forest national park and we end up being called some other name depending on what the three nations decide in that area but that then opens the way for investment in infrastructure there are lots of people that are interested in investing in that area so once there's been that certainty created by the tenure change that opens up lots of opportunities for area walkways, for great walks for all sorts of access for people and then to build a constituency for people to want to visit the forest and understand, for example, where their water comes from and understand how the first nations people used and occupied parts of those forests over the last 60, 70,000 years Imagine saying that, Dad still going to Crown Casino perhaps I could go to the Great Forest National Park Emma, thanks so much look at the back of David's book this is the amount of references a lot of research and science if we stopped logging native forests we could reach our 43% greenhouse gas emission targets by 2030, that's in six years that's not to say that we shouldn't stop mining coal but there's a little comment from me but look, before I hand over to the incredibly generous and wise professor and new law professor, Asmi Wood for a vote of thanks to you, as I said, to buy multiple copies forget about taking wine you take a copy of this book, maybe two as I said it's Easter so think about a baker's dozen and look, I promise your barbecue and dinner parties you're just going to flip it open to okay, let's talk about this myth and reality check, you'll be the most popular person at the party, I promise you better for our health all round and also Gavin Blake is our amazing visual scribe he's here working away and it's really wonderful to have you here Gavin he's asked at the end after the vote of thanks, after Asmi gives the vote of thanks that we all can just stay in place for a minute for is that right, Gavin? One minute, just one minute following the vote of thanks, it's really lovely to have you here Gavin but let me hand to our great friend and very wise friend, Professor Asmi Wood who is Torres Strait Islander and for the vote of thanks tonight thanks, Asmi Good evening everybody and thank you very much for having me here I'd like to acknowledge Numball and Ambry Country on which we stand and to acknowledge my own elders up in the Torres Strait and in the country where I was born and raised thank you Professor Lindemar and Alex Lawn two of my favorite people I think here so this is a very easy thing to do though on a very hard subject a central premise of Aboriginal existence is care for country our creator spirit created us in small groups I come from an island where we don't burn we have small gardens where we grow things where we don't burn a few miles across the Torres Strait there are places where people burn but we are geographically not confined but in a discrete areas where these people know the country and care for country Australia is a mega diverse nation or continent and it makes sense to break up the country in the way Aboriginal people do in terms of caring for those local areas it's the lawyers who homogenized us as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people you know it's easy it's easy to do it's easy to call everything one size fits all one answer for everything one right answer thesis it's easy it's political and of course Australia is built on myths there are these 37 myths but I'm a lawyer so let me talk about the myth of Terran alias so I don't know how to put these two things together so people who didn't exist burnt rainforests you know it's just it's beyond comprehension how people come to these these kind of conclusions and not only did these invisible or non-existent people burn rainforests they burnt other people's rainforests they crossed through countries something that we don't do I mean you know it's not an acceptable thing in our ontologies so truth telling is long overdue truth telling is always overdue and also these people who didn't exist are magical because we have 300 year old trees that need to be burnt so we knew that Captain Cook was going to come 100 years in the future the lies and the myths that are built upon is really damaging for Indigenous people in this country actually I don't like the term First Nations but you know that's a different issue for our friends it doesn't matter with your black, white or brindle care for country is care for country get the best information you can and look after a country because that is our obligation to our creator spirit and whether you know your Aboriginal alright doesn't really make any difference there is a saying in the Torres Strait when a wise person dies you lose a library and similarly when a large tree is felled for no good reason you destroy a small universe so how do we care for country when people yardstick is money it's not about care it they don't add up it's not a suitable criterion for determining what should be done and what shouldn't be done economics is a poor guide for these things particularly when it comes to care for country so to conclude I urge you to care for country in the way you can get the best information you can about the colour of the skin of the person who does that and of course if many white people think we don't exist so you don't have to worry aboriginal people please look after those giraffes and orangutans thank you