The NSW Forestry Corporation has retrospectively slashed timber yields by 28 per cent each year over the last three years according to the North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) once again calling into question the viability of NSW’s native logging forestry industry.
‘We welcome the NSW Forestry Corporation admitting gross errors in their reporting of timber products by releasing revised Biomaterial Reports for the past three years, though we are flabbergasted that they have retrospectively reduced volumes by 28 per cent from what they previously certified they obtained,’ said NEFA spokesperson Dailan Pugh.
The misreporting of yields was discovered by community members from NEFA and South East Forest Rescue in 2024. It is following ongoing questions from NEFA over a range of inconsistencies in their reporting that the NSW Forestry Corporation has since re-assessed their yield loads.
Auditor General investigation?
Following the NSW Forestry Corporation’s release of the changed data sets Greens MP Sue Higginson has invited the NSW Auditor General to investigate the Forestry Corporation for maladministration.
‘The reported yield from native forest logging forms a critical part of so-called ecologically sustainable forest management. For this data to be revised down by 28 per cent, without any public announcement, calls into question the entire justification for continued native forest logging,’ explained Ms Higginson.
Should be objective fact
For the past three years they have reclassified 65,584m3 of premium large high quality logs as lower value small high quality logs, and reduced claimed yields of low quality logs by 616,384 tonnes (36 per cent), NEFA spokesperson Dailan Pugh said.
‘For the Forestry Corporation to now claim that they have been certifying grossly inflated yields for years is shocking, though to now retrospectively and systematically change the volumes of each product they previously claimed to have obtained from each logging operation beggars belief.
‘The volumes of timber products obtained from a specific area and sold to mills should be an objective fact and not open to revision years later. If the new data is to believed, it means that all assessments the NSW Forestry Corporation’s performance have been based on inflated false information for years.
‘It is also now apparent that assessments of the economic and employment impacts of the proposed Great Koala National Park have been based on grossly inflated claims.
‘As a result of NEFA’s complaints about gross errors in the 2023 Biomaterial Report, and inconsistencies with other data, in October the Forestry Corporation released a revised 2023 Report that halved the volume of products, claiming they had rectified gross errors by removing erroneously included data from the previous year.
‘Despite oversight by the EPA and auditing by the Auditor General, these gross errors would not have been identified or rectified except for our repeated questioning of errors and inconsistencies in the Forestry Corporation’s data.
‘The question is how far back do these erroneous claims extend beyond the three years, as they have also admitted they have been wrongly reporting the areas logged for the past decade.
‘We welcome The Greens requesting the Auditor General undertake an independent audit of the Forestry Corporation’s data to get to the truth of how and why they produced false data for so many years, and the accuracy of their current claims,’ Mr Pugh said.
NEFA and South East Forest Rescue highlighted additional errors resulting in the NSW Forestry Corporation releasing revised Biomaterial Reports for the 2022, 2023 and 2024 financial years in January, which claim major reductions in the volumes of timber they previously claimed as recently as October to have obtained. These reductions are on top of the halving in 2023 volumes identified last year.
Transition workers
‘As part of the environment law exemptions that native forest logging operates under, there is a legal obligation for yields to be measured and sustainable. We have known for decades that neither of these obligations were being met and now the data has been retrospectively amended to back that up,’ Ms Higginson said.
‘The native forest logging industry in NSW is on its knees and has lost $73 million taxpayer dollars since 2020 according to the Forestry Corporations own annual reports. If the timber yield from native forest logging is 28 per cent lower than the government has been told, then the health of the forests is also clearly much worse than the Forestry Corporation is willing to admit.
‘The Minns Labor government needs to read the writing on the wall and end the logging of our public native forests immediately. We know what it will cost to transition workers and communities, and it’s significantly less than the continued destruction of our precious native forests,’ Ms Higginson said.
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