Native forests in Australia have some of the highest conservation value in the world and logging them is a divisive issue. It has already been stopped in Western Australia and Victoria. Now an independent regulator in New South Wales has found native logging is unviable and says the state government may need to consider ending the practise.
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00:00So IPART's the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal in New South Wales, and once every
00:08three years they're required by legislation to sort of open the books of Forest Corp New
00:12South Wales, which is the government-owned logging company, and look at how it's doing
00:18when it comes to making money from its native logging practices.
00:24So each year, each review period, it does that and normally finds that they're losing
00:27money, and this year they found again that it was losing money and it's increased the
00:32losses by about 18% compared to the previous review period.
00:36But what was really interesting was not that they merely noted this, but that they went
00:39on and drew some conclusions and made some recommendations about that to government.
00:44One of them was that the native logging industry in New South Wales is not economically viable,
00:49and they said furthermore that it ought to attempt after 2028, when a lot of the contracts
00:54come up for renegotiation, to transition to become economically viable, and said if
00:59that's not possible, that the government should reconsider the feasibility of the industry
01:04in the future, essentially saying that they should consider whether or not it should continue
01:07at all.
01:08And in fact, they noted that in two other states, very recently in the past year, native
01:13logging has indeed stopped.
01:15So in Victoria and Western Australia, the government has stopped it there, and they
01:19also noted the environmental concerns around it.
01:21The logging industry has said, look, the industry is viable.
01:23So I spoke to James Euster, who's the president of Australian Forest and Forest Products Association
01:28of New South Wales, and he said, well, it's viable, and in fact, we know that we could
01:33be selling a lot more wood, it's just that there are environmental protections stopping
01:36them from doing that.
01:37I spoke to Forest Corp New South Wales as well, and they said, look, they were very
01:40muted, but they said we accept the recommendations from IPART.
01:43So it's been a big discussion point for the New South Wales government, when they had
01:47promised prior to the election to do two things, really, on forestry.
01:50One was to create the Great Koala National Park, which would cut off logging, actually,
01:55from a very large area on the north coast of New South Wales.
01:59It would protect it from logging and other impacts.
02:01They haven't yet done that, but that's widely expected to happen early in the new year.
02:06The other thing they promised to do was to conduct a review of the future of the industry,
02:11and they're still progressing with that.
02:13They've appointed an expert panel, which is going around and consulting, and we do know
02:16that one of the options that they're considering is a transition away from logging, i.e. shutting
02:22the native logging industry down.