17 December 2024
The Forest Alliance NSW has responded to the release of a three year review by the NSW Independent pricing regulator raising doubts of the economic viability of native forest logging in NSW. The report was released under freedom of information laws to the ABC.
The release of the IPART Report follows the publication of Forestry Corporation's latest Annual Report showing its native forest logging division posted a $29 million dollar loss in 2023/24 bringing total losses over the last four years to over $70 million.
Justin Field from the Forest Alliance NSW said, "Native forest logging is a bad deal for taxpayers.
"In the last four years the NSW Government owned logging company has lost over $70 million dollars logging NSW native forests, has been prosecuted multiple times, and fined over $1.5 million for breaking environmental laws. This report now shows for the last decade it has not even been recovering the costs of logging and transporting timber under existing contracts.
"The NSW Government is currently considering the future of the timber industry in NSW. This is the opportunity to allow native forest logging to end and shift the industry to a sustainable plantation based future. For every year native forest logging is allowed to continue taxpayers will continue to foot the bill.
Dailan Pugh from the North East Forest Alliance said, "The NSW Government needs to heed the advice of IPART that there are concerns about native forestry in NSW due to impacts on the environment and threatened species, climate change impacts and its economic viability, necessitating that they review the long-term feasibility of native timber harvesting.
"NSW needs to stop paying to degrade public native forests and instead profit from them being managed for wildlife habitat, recreation, tourism, water and their essential service of carbon capture and storage"
Susie Russel from the North Coast Environment Council said, "This reports confirm what the greater gliders and koalas already know. The logging needs to stop immediately if they are to have any chance of surviving in the wild for another generation.
"This report from IPART is quite astonishing in that not only does it show what an economic basket case native forest logging is but also highlights impacts on the environment and threatened species like Koalas and Greater Gliders along with increasing the severity of bushfires which is of great concern as the effects of climate change increase" said Scott Daines of South East Forest Rescue.
"Clearly, logging doesn't stack up economically and the cost to the species that depend on healthy native forests has been far too high for many years. We're calling on Forestry Minister Tara Moriarty to recognise this reality and decisively move to a sustainable plantation-based timber industry," said Steve Ryan of the Nature Conservation Council of NSW.
"These reports are the iceberg off the Titanic's bow. No industry can survive so many years of decline, financial loss, criminal prosecution and broad public disapproval. We've already seen that same inevitable conclusion in the collapse of the native logging industry in Western Australia and Victoria last year. For the Minns government, this will be hard to ignore" said Andrew Wong of Wilderness Australia.
