Forestry losses criticised after release of annual report

GREENS MP and spokesperson for the environment Sue Higginson says that Forestry Corporation NSW’s (FCNSW) 2024-25 Annual Report, recently tabled in the NSW Parliament, reveals that the state has spent $76 million over the last three years to keep the native forest logging division in business.

Ms Higginson said that having to pay to destroy precious forests is incomprehensible and a political failure.

“We know that our native forests are worth so much to us all when they are standing intact, providing the essential services [of] clean water, threatened species habitat, carbon drawdown and storage, landscape stability, recreation, education and culture and the ever increasing pollination required for agriculture.”

North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) spokesperson Dailan Pugh, said, “Last year [the division] cost $4330 a hectare to log 7390 ha of public native forests.”

“Taxpayers are paying an exorbitant cost to subsidise private sawmillers to log native forests.

“Since the 2019/20 wildfires, the Forestry Corporation’s yields from native forests in north-east NSW have crashed by 44 percent, the timber is simply not there anymore, yet the Forestry Corporation remains in denial.

“This is before the creation of the Great Koala National Park (GKNP), and so cannot be blamed on it.

“Logging public native forests is an economic basket case, and with plantations now providing 91 percent of our sawn timber, it is no longer needed.

“It will be of far greater economic benefit to the community to complete the transition to plantations and stop degrading public forests.”

A spokesperson for FCNSW said that it is appointed to manage almost two million hectares of public native forests on behalf of the State, and harvests around one percent of this area each year.

She said land management services are only partly government funded and that last financial year, investment in land management exceeded government funding by approximately $26 million.

Forestry Corporation remains the appointed land manager for state forests on the North Coast.

The spokesperson said the cost of providing community services such as extensive tourism facilities and a 51,000km road network, and the management of fire, pests and weeds, would need to be met by the NSW Government regardless of the land manager.

These costs should not be conflated with the cost of harvesting timber, she said, adding that revenue from hardwood timber production was reduced due to access restrictions caused by extreme and ongoing wet weather, including a tropical cyclone and flooding on the North Coast – as well as changes to regulations.

Ms Higginson suggested that many people would support that amount of money and more being spent to manage the public forest estate “if they weren’t trashing it”.

She said, “The logging of our precious native forests has not produced a single dollar of profit in NSW for almost a decade, and it likely never will.

“Yet somehow the destruction of these vital ecosystems has been allowed to continue.

“It is time to call it for what it is – an industry of the past that must be stopped now.”

By Andrew VIVIAN