The NSW government has received a report on its native forestry logging activities, with a new Independent Forestry Panel report revealing divisions and common objectives across industry, environmental groups and regional communities.
The independent panel has engaged with stakeholders around the NSW government’s Forestry Industry Action Plan (FIAP), and has replaced its stakeholder consultation report.
The Panel, appointed in August 2024, received more than 1,500 individual submissions and 160 organisational submissions, alongside interviews, focus groups and stakeholder meetings.
At the heart of the consultation is a single unresolved question:
“Whether native forestry… will continue… or whether it will end, within what timeframe, with what workforce and timber supply impacts.”
It comes after decades of court actions, EPA fines against the government-run corporation, protests, and shifting regulatory settings.
While the industry argues native forestry is sustainable and essential for housing materials, and is environmentally preferable to imports, environmental groups claim otherwise.
The executive summary said that regional communities were split, valuing both jobs and environmental protection.
Tourism and recreation groups meanwhile, emphasised access to State forests.
Despite the disagreement around its future, the Panel identified 10 shared goals across stakeholder groups:
• Address timber and forest scarcity
• Expand plantations
• Improve stewardship
• Increase bushfire resilience
• Protect biodiversity
• Use sustainable building materials
• Maximise carbon benefits
• Base decisions on scientific evidence
• Recognise regional differences
• Provide long‑term certainty
Despite the recommendations, scientific disputes remain unresolved. The Panel urges the government to rely on peer‑reviewed, contemporary scientific consensus in the next stage of policy development.
Destructive industry, says NEFA
Dailan Pugh from environment group North East Forest Alliance (NEFA), said the report ‘raises more questions than it answers, though with 70% of submissions expressing support for ending native forestry it confirms that most people want an end to this archaic and destructive industry’.
‘The Stakeholder Consultation Report by the Independent Forestry Panel was intended to summarise community attitudes towards public native forestry as an input to the NSW Forestry Industry Action Plan.
‘This report demonstrates that a logging industry review is not appropriate for deciding whether we end logging of public native forests and instead protect them for wildlife, carbon sequestration, recreation, tourism and water’, NEFA spokesperson Dailan Pugh said.
‘As two of the three panel members have forestry backgrounds, it is unsurprising that their industry biases are evident throughout the report, with a variety of industry positions wrongly intimated to be generally supported by most submitters.
‘In other instances key issues raised by conservationists are not considered.
‘Generally the report tries to downplay the fact that 70% of submissions expressed support for ending native forestry in NSW, with this admission buried away on page 42 of the report.
‘Some of their reporting is bizarre, for a variety of issues they report on whether they were raised more or less often in industry submissions compared to “all stakeholder groups”, with no indication of what any groups’ opinions were on that issue (section 4.1).
‘Overall the report highlights some of the conflicting opinions and views between the general community and the timber industry, without resolving any of them.
‘They say these will need to be resolved by the Forestry Industry Action Plan (FIAP), though it is evident that this process is not designed to answer the fundamental question of whether we log or protect our public native forests.
‘Time and time again opinion polls have shown that the majority of the community want public native forests protected for wildlife, carbon sequestration, recreation, tourism and water.
‘It is not appropriate that this continues to be viewed through a logging industry lens, the NSW Government needs to make a decision based on a wholistic consideration of all values, and the growing threats of climate change and wildfires.
‘Now that the Commonwealth has identified that we need to protect most State Forests in order to honour their commitment to protect 30% of Australia by 2030, it is evident that it is time to stop paying to log our public native forests’, Mr Pugh said.
The report is available at https://www.nsw.gov.au/departments-and-agencies/cabinet-office/resources/independent-forestry-panel-stakeholder-report
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