In 2024, the Victorian and Western Australian governments announced they had ended commercial logging in native forests. But did they?
In Western Australia, ’ecological thinning’ is applied annually to up to 8,000 hectares of native forest. The Coalition in Victoria has pledged to apply thinning to 5,000 hectares per year across their native forests if they win the upcoming state election. Thinning has long been recognised as a form of industrial logging, but it is currently being rebranded by government and the logging industry as a strategy to restore ‘forest health’.
So, what is thinning? Forestry guidelines describe thinning as ’the removal of surplus trees in order to concentrate the future growth of a stand on to a limited number of selected trees’. The primary outcome of most thinning operations is the removal of around 50 per cent of the trees, with the logs cut from the forest sold to timber and pulp mills, and the retained trees are expected to grow faster with less competition. The retained trees would be logged in the future, but the logging rotation would be decreased as the retained trees reach a greater size for saw-milling sooner than if the forest were left unthinned.
In recent years, thinning has been rebranded as ’ecological thinning’, as some foresters argue more open forests are ‘healthier forests’. It is no longer described as logging, but is now branded under the rubric of ‘active forest management’. However, past thinning operations reveal anything but a ‘healthy forest’.