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.

None of this happened. Was the Andrews government caught in a bind of someone else's making? Or did left-faction ministers and department heads undermine VicForests over several years, sabotaging its legal standing while staging a performative waffle of apostasy for media that included Forestry Plans and Code of Practice legislative changes? Yeah – I'm not sure either – but let's not get sidetracked.

In Timber Turmoil, Jessica Longbottom reruns a ploy that tries to insinuate 'illegal' dealings in the timber industry – echoing the theme of genuinely corrupt contract behaviors on Victoria's Big Build. Somehow the government is ignoring 'illegal' practices by timber companies in both Victoria and Tasmania – and the taxpayer is footing the bill.

The timber guys who were interviewed on camera couldn't see what was coming in the final edit. It was padded out with resolute Forensic Accountants and spectral folk with torches counting gliders. Timber miller Vince Hurley from ASH did his level best for a bloke who just can't act. Maaate – try to look guilty on the count of three… you've taken the compensation money for breach of contract by Dan Andrews and gone and invested it back in the town. You've got some serious explaining to do.

Here reporter Jessica Longbottom steps neatly over real forestry news like it was a dog turd. Hurley's company, Australian Sustainable Timbers in Heyfield, Victoria has developed a seasoned appearance-grade timber product they call Plantation Oak sourced from Shining Gum plantation logs from Tasmania. Not your regular sawlog harvest of log diameters exceeding 400mm. Instead, they mill a timber resource that didn't have sawlog capability a decade ago - small diameter logs which used to go to woodchip.

The logs from Tasmania, milled, then kiln-seasoned and profiled for use as Masslam 38 beams, were sent back to Tasmania for use in an important building: The Shed – a UTAS project in Launceston by Wardle Architects which won Sustainable Architecture of the Year Award 2025. Investing in Tasmanian woodchip resources then sending them back again in the form of high-value Glulam beams.

This is good news for innovation and sustainable hardwood – but not what reporter Jessica Longbottom really wants. For Longbottom, issues that divide people in Australia are the ones she prizes, and the aftermath of the Andrews government provides scope for this sort of journalism.

Four Corners should report on compensation payments for the cancelled Commonwealth Games hosting promises, however I can't see them unfairly besmirching the athletes or smearing the Glasgow committee on how they spent wasted Victorian taxpayer money just because we're all miffed. But the timber industry – yeah. Smear they did. The ABC and the producers of Four Corners misread the tea leaves. They saw a cheap shot. They thought it would be 'popular'. They trusted a recent activist bulletin - applying none of their own scrutiny. That's not what the ABC should do by anyone's standards.

The 'gotcha' moment for the Tasmanian minister for timber who didn't know Tasmanian logs were headed to Victoria for primary milling might earn a Mercury reporter a drink at the pub with colleagues. But there's not enough gravitas in the moment to hold Timber Turmoil together. The program didn't get a grip on Jacinta Allen. She stuck to the script. Jobs for Victorians.

On screen Longbottom hails a passing activist taxi. Quick, driver – follow that timber jinker. But there's nothing dodgy about the log traffic. The Tassie government moved with great haste to make intra-state primary milling a contractual requirement for log supply – and before they did, Tasmanian timber mills were operating in a legal manner.

Jessica – here's some context for you. Research you might have done before the story. The Tasmanian timber industry mainlines on the mainland. Tasmanian hardwoods are, and always have been, tapped directly into the Sydney and Melbourne consumer markets. All Tasmanian hardwood products, except a few packs here and there, are sold to mainland consumers. Primary milling, kiln-drying and profiling are routinely done to completion in Tasmanian mills because that's the most cost-efficient way of doing things. Sometimes resizing or profiling from sawn is done interstate because it's unforeseen or of the moment – but no one would seriously suggest it is illegal. No one except activists. At the federation of Australian states in 1901, lots of freedoms to trade across state borders were insisted upon, written into law, and businesses given those same freedoms they hold to this day. I wouldn't call them loopholes. Nor would anyone else.

Eerily, Longbottom pulls her every punch in Timber Turmoil – and I have a feeling it's not just the ABC legal team holding her back. She knows she has nothing kosher against the timber guys. Nothing illegal.

Behind NSW mill owner Andrew Hurford, you can see the ABC plastic tape stretched on a gum tree if you squint. It's a crime scene. They're keeping it undisturbed till the Forensic Accountants arrive. Hurford has been Miranda-ed. You do not have to say anything to camera – but if you do, please say something that can be edited and used against you – otherwise I'll have to use footage of the harvester stripping a log and finish with a clumsy visual metaphor about native timber across Australia being squeezed and a self-satisfied comment about a fight for survival in timber towns – as if I cared.

When you watch it all again and dismiss the weak whodunnit as a spectacular irrelevance, you are left with just a zombie walk through activist talking points with the WWF researchers – old uni mates, I'm guessing .. I'm making all this up – yeah – but it's an intuitive response that gets stronger with every viewing. I just know Longbottom was never ever going to the cops, ICAC, anyone - with this dossier after the program aired. It is a thin gruel and its protein is mischief. Longbottom and crew will be too ashamed to walk the main street of Heyfield again.

Four Corners is a program that once forged Australian media culture. In Timber Turmoil it has surrendered autonomy and found a worked-out doctrine. Somehow it has lost its unique voice and, in this airing, failed as an independent media unit. All of this is seen incongruously against a backdrop of recent public agony about what free speech, free thinking means. In particular, the need for the ABC to resist their voice being modulated by an outside lobby – Israel, Greenpeace – or whoever.