Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (17:53): I am going to take the opportunity to discuss our minority report from the bushfire inquiry into the 2026 bushfires. It certainly is a very expansive report that was conducted in a short space of time, and our minority report covers a number of topics. The one that is of interest to me tonight, and I will indulge my interest, is around fuel reduction and risk mitigation in terms of bushfires. We start with:
Fuel is the bushfire risk factor most directly influenced by government action.
My two colleagues Ms Lovell and Mrs Broad and I quoted Forestry Australia. Forestry Australia are a very passionate, very learned, very capable and very scientific group of people. They submitted that:
The scale of bushfire impacts on the community, economy and environment result from a reduced commitment to properly resource the management of public forest lands and in particular a decline in the use of planned (prescribed) fire at the landscape scale.
This is the other part. They further stated that:
Mild extensive burning is not only a tool for fuel management but also contributes to maintenance of forest health and biodiversity and to minimising the impact of fire on distributed assets and infrastructure.
Of course that also relates to our forests.
A couple of weeks ago there was a very interesting article, which flows on from this. Something that I have spoken about regularly in this place, and a passion of mine, is around the active management of our forest systems. I have long argued that there is no point saying, ‘We’re changing land tenure. We’re changing it from a state forest to a national park. We’re locking out certain activities. Lo and behold, the forest systems are now safe’ – far be it.
I want to relate an experiment that occurred some 30 years ago now. This occurred in an area that I have actually visited up at Tanjil Bren. What happened was that in about the 1970s there was clear-felling up behind Noojee. There was clear-felling, and they decided to conduct an experiment on it in the mid-1980s. I have actually spoken to one of the gentlemen who was then a very young man, a young forester out of university, who worked on this. They decided to turn this clear-felled area of many, many hectares behind Tanjil Bren into a large-scale test tube. What they did was they did some different systems. They compared forest regeneration of full-scale silviculture approaches. They included traditional felling, small patch clear-felling and heavy thinning. Indeed they had from 50 per cent thinning. If you picture a full hectare of land, they 50 per cent thinned some of the then sapling trees away, and they also then thinned out part of it to only 30 per cent. Now moving forward, they did their tests back in the 2000s and then basically shut the gate and away they went.
But here are some of the systems that they found. They retested it 30 years later. The trees left behind after thinning were enormous; the ones that had been thinned were enormous. They were only 80 years old, but the largest average size was well over 1.5 metres. Thinning had given these trees, naturally, more space to breathe, more space to grow, more light and more resources. The very exciting part about this is that they also captured and measured the carbon content of the square hectare, and the larger trees that had the area around them thinned could naturally grow and captured carbon to a greater degree than the whole hectare of those that had not been thinned. They also found that Leadbeater’s possums were in the acacias that grew under those. That was really important. They found some really important things. Long-term silviculture experiments are irreplaceable, and I was really thankful to go and visit. Forest thinning is not a trade-off; it can sincerely enhance our forest systems.
Third, and most importantly, there is no silviculture silver bullet for managing forests. The long-forgotten Tanjil Bren experiment has taught us that there are options available for managing our forests, and it was so good to go up there with Professor Patrick Baker a year ago and see this firsthand.