The NSW Agriculture Minister has been urged to halt negotiations to increase North Coast Wooden Provide Agreements, with critics saying native forest logging makes no environmental or financial sense post-bushfires and now floods.
Key factors:
- Negotiations are underway to increase authorities wooden provide contracts regardless of depleted provide in native forests
- Unfulfilled contracts might expose taxpayers to vital monetary legal responsibility
- Critics name for an finish to finish unprofitable native forest logging and transition to sustainable plantations
In Funds Estimates this week, Agriculture Minister Dugald Saunders admitted he had not learn a Natural Resources Commission report leaked last year which discovered native forests have been liable to “severe and irreversible hurt … from the cumulative impacts of fireside and harvesting”.
He confirmed Forestry Company NSW, the state’s principal provider of native timber, despatched letters to North Coast logging firms late final yr saying negotiations had commenced to increase their contracts for an additional 5 years.
If prolonged, the contracts would lock Forestry Company into harvesting “current annual portions” of native bushes in state forests.
Unbiased South Coast MP Justin Area grilled Mr Saunders on the feasibility of guaranteeing such volumes given the discount in viable timber provide in state forests after the Black Summer season bushfires.
Mr Saunders mentioned Forestry Company manages wooden provide over a 100-year sustainable yield mannequin.
“State forests generate renewable timber merchandise … in a method that’s rigorously managed in order that forest values are preserved, and forests proceed to develop and produce renewable timber in perpetuity”, Mr Saunders mentioned.
However Mr Area argued there was no motive or crucial to resume the contracts.
The NRC report, commissioned by authorities, decided the amount of high-quality wooden provide on the north coast has been decreased by almost 20 per cent.
The report really useful a three-year suspension of all logging from February 2020 in excessive danger zones and restricted logging in high-risk areas.
“Let’s examine a proper authorities response to [the NRC report] earlier than [they] begin signing the state as much as wooden provide contracts that [they] could by no means be capable to ship.”
Taxpayers uncovered to hundreds of thousands in monetary legal responsibility
There’s concern the contracts are financially irresponsible given the federal government must pay compensation if it didn’t fulfil them.
“Think about signing the state as much as tens if not a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} of contracts which you could’t ship,” Mr Area mentioned.
In 2014, the government paid Boral $8.5 million to purchase again a few of its timber allocations.
Nature Conservation Council chief govt Chris Gambian mentioned the state wanted to verify they weren’t “unwittingly signing as much as commitments it will not be capable to meet”.
In line with Greens MP David Shoebridge, earnings from Forestry Company’s plantation enterprise subsidise “loss-making native forestry operations” which noticed a $20 million loss final yr.
That determine solely took under consideration the price of logging and the bushfire restoration invoice, and didn’t embody the potential fallout from breached contracts or the missed alternative to revenue from carbon credit.
Forestry Corporation has also recently faced fines for unlawful logging in makes an attempt to satisfy contractual obligations.
Loggings contracts at odds with koala technique
President of the North East Forest Alliance, Dailan Pugh, mentioned the extension of logging contracts contradicted the federal government’s verbal commitments to double koala populations by 2050.
“We recurrently exit to the forests, we do surveys, we discover areas the place koalas survived the bushfires,” Mr Pugh mentioned.
“The NRC really useful there needed to be elevated retention [of the largest trees] but the federal government refuses to implement that recommendation.”
