If I were a native tree in an old-growth forest, I’d be worried about now.

The straws are in the wind; the frighteners are on: see Fin Rev August 7, 2026 for “Ending Native Forest Harvesting for Carbon Credits is Madness” by fragrant Geelong Grammar old boy Rob de Fegely. 

That was followed by “Why is The Australia Institute opposing saving the forests?” from Atticus Fleming (August 10, 2026), and “Native Forest Carbon Credits aren’t counting Real Climate Benefits” by Michelle Freeman (August 12, 2026).

To be fair, the latter two articles do not promote rapine and pillage on the scale that the subs have suggested with the neon headlines, but the first calls for comment.

De Fegely, a non-executive director of Forestry Corporation of NSW, and Chair of Sustainable Timber Tasmania, gets straight into why chopping down old-growth native trees is a jolly good thing, and how arguments to the contrary are misguided.  Apparently, to stop “harvesting public native forests and instead manage them solely for carbon credits” is not only unrealistic, but environmentally counterproductive.

Observe the straw man in this loosener: native forests are portrayed as surviving on the argument for carbon credits, and we all know how flimsy that is, or at least we feel something like that ever since Tony Abbott did Julia Gillard down on economic models regarding carbon abatement.

The real argument for native forests lies elsewhere and more fundamentally, as we’ll come back to.

De Fegely then gives us three paras about the utility and necessity of wood in our lives, finishing with the threat that if we turn off our supply, the demand will simply move overseas. None of that goes to why we need to chop down native forests, as opposed to new growth trees, exotics as opposed to indigenous species, but some paras later he returns to this theme to point out that softwood (presumably exotics such as pine) is used in structural framing, while hardwoods (native species) are needed for functions requiring durability such as flooring and furniture. 

The two varieties are not interchangeable for these different purposes. But it cannot be beyond the wit of man to come up with products that can take the place of durable hardwoods. There’s an intellectual sloth here that mirrors the arguments for continuing with fossil fuels: inertia is working its magic.

Then we get the economic argument: Australia spends $7 billion annually importing wood products, some of it from countries with less wooded area than Oz.

The real nub of de Fegely’s beef is: “… harvesting can play an important role in maintaining forest health. Active forest management, including thinning …” allows the remaining trees greater access to light, water and nutrients, and they’ll grow bigger and so more fire-resistant.  And “… harvesting changes forests, but it does not destroy them”.

The scribal bestiary is now filling up like Noah’s ark. Will the weasel words, “harvesting … thinning”, scare off the elephant in the room, the reality of clear felling of native forests?

This stuff is straight out of Dr Syd Shea’s playbook from 25 and more years back, Shea having then been for near two decades the Director General of CALM (Department of Conservation and Land Management) in WA.

There’s more in the same vein from de Fegely, no doubt unconsciously mirroring Shea, with native wood proclaimed as renewable, where manufactured materials are not. Harvesting native forests supports regional jobs and pays for the infrastructure for community access for tourism, fishing and fire protection.  

Endangered species are, of course, protected. (Dear old Syd made a particular thing of keeping a colony of numbats alive, which was pretty rich, as it was his activities that were bringing the numbat, WA’s symbolic marsupial, to the brink of extinction.)

A glance at the WA Legislative Council’s Ecologically Sustainable Development Committee “Report on Logging Practices” from 1999 delivers the gold standard for forest plunder.

First, ensure that the body managing the public resource (of course for conservation purposes) is government-run so that it gets all the litigious advantages of being the Crown. 

Secondly, management of the resource (here, State forests) must be unified with power to allocate the disposal of the forest. 

Thirdly, push back very hard indeed at any ideas floated in public doubting the wisdom of a few logging companies having access to native forests.

In that context, the benefits of logging are bruited abroad: thinning is good; fires are abated; amenities are improved; and above all, trees are renewable, while manufactured products, or those mined, are not. Never discuss the environmental impact of clear-felling coupes (as selected logging sites are called).

A quick trawl through the voluminous reported litigation concerning forest management in the last decade disassembles the whole propaganda routine from the logging industry. 

Take as an example Debbie Mortimer J’s monumental 1,464 para judgment in Friends of Leadbeater’s Possum Inc v VicForests (No 4) [2020] FCA 704; 244 LGERA 92. It’s the usual David v Goliath, but now the environmental defenders are allowed standing, a critical improvement over the last three decades.

Adhering to the WA model, VicForests is a Victorian statutory agency responsible for the management and sale of timber resources in Victorian State forests.

Within the first 70 paras of the reasons, the evidence (by way of scientific reports) makes plain the deleterious impact of logging native forests. First of all is the importance of hollows that develop in old-growth forests, in the words of Professor Woinarski’s report:

“There’s about 30 per cent Australian vertebrates species depend upon hollows. So it’s a really large component of the forest fauna is totally dependent on naturally occurring hollows. Naturally occurring hollows occur, as we’ve talking about previously, sort of they – they become established after 100 years or so, so it’s a really slow process. And there’s much more likelihood of the hollow in any forest to be declining than increasing, simply because of that age – that age disturbance factor. There’s a range – we know Greater Gliders, Sugar Gliders, Squirrel Gliders, a whole lot of owls, Pardalotes, kookaburras, cockatoos, parrots, all of those species are dependent upon hollows …

Secondly, the general destruction of forest habitat puts at least some vertebrate species at risk of extinction. The reasons quoted the Conservation Advice prepared under the Commonwealth Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999:

‘Wood production practices are known to substantially deplete Greater Glider populations and gliders usually die if all or most of their home range is intensively logged or cleared [scientific report cited]. Unless they are linked as part of an interconnecting network of reserves, local populations risk extinction through catastrophe or by loss of genetic vigour through inbreeding.’ (emphasis in original)”

And thirdly, given the paucity of scientific evidence presented by the logging industry that its practices do not operate to the severe detriment of a number of identified species (the case was about Leadbeater’s Possum and the Greater Glider), it was appropriate to apply the precautionary principle to VicForests’ activities. The reasons read:

“… in the absence of any scientific evidence (by way of studies and monitoring) that existing prescriptions and mitigations are effective in reducing the population decline of the Greater Glider and assisting its recovery, I find the need, in forests where the Greater Glider may be present, for a complete application of the precautionary principle in VicForests’ forestry operations is imperative. The absence of such studies was a point repeatedly made by [scientific reporters] Dr Smith and Professor Woinarski. I also find the likely impact of forestry operations in forests where the Greater Glider may be present is significant.” (emphasis in original)

Near thirty years ago Dr Shea refused to answer questions from a WA Parliamentary Committee as to whether the logging he allowed was defiant of the precautionary principle. That scientific concept has had a significant place in Australian jurisprudence since Paul Stein J elaborated on it in Leatch v DG Parks and Wildlife (1993) 81 LGERA 270. 

Shea’s best shot was to thunder at the Committee as to the renewable quality of the forests. This response totally failed to address the barren monoculture that his replanting enforced, in place of the richly diverse ecology that existed prior to the industrial clear-felling that he licensed.

The likes of the latter-day de Fegely need to come clean with the public about the reality of native forest “harvesting” and “thinning”: the environmental impact goes way beyond a few trees waiting to be hugged. A whole ecology is involved and is at risk.