Ridiculous Government sits on forestry report as logging resumes

The state government is refusing to release a report into how logging operations should change in the wake of the Black Summer bushfires even as felling begins in a sensitive South Coast region hit hard by the blazes.

Planning Minister Rob Stokes asked the Natural Resources Commission to examine forestry operations after the Environment Protection Authority and Forestry Corp, the state-owned logging body, clashed over so-called site specific conditions that limited the amount of native trees that could be felled in state forests.

A logging truck is loaded up with timber in a region of the South Brooman State Forest. A report by the Natural Resources Commission into forestry after the bushfires is sitting with ministers but has not been released because of ‘cabinet confidentiality’.Credit:Janie Barrett

The Commission has completed its report and sent it to Mr Stokes and his colleagues, Deputy Premier John Barilaro, and Environment Minister Matt Kean.

A spokeswoman for Mr Barilaro said the report was “being considered by the NSW government and remains Cabinet in Confidence”.

Pressure to release the report, though, is likely to mount as logging issues in the south and north heat up.

Harvesting work has begun at Shallow Crossing, not far from the Brooman State Forest where the EPA and Forestry Corp were at loggerheads over timber curbs earlier this year. Separate legal action has also commenced to challenge the North-East Regional Forest Agreement in the wake of the severe 2019-20 bushfire impacts in areas that rarely burn.

Nick Hopkins, a member of the conservation group Coastwatchers Association, said it was “ridiculous” the government was sitting on a report detailing the state of native forestry after the fires. “It’s absolutely in the public interest” for it to be released, he said.

Independent MP Justin Field said it was “a gross act of bad faith” by Forestry Corp and Mr Barilaro as Forestry Minister to keep the reports finding secret while continuing to log in the South Coast area where 80 per cent of the forests were burnt.

“It is totally unacceptable that a taxpayer-funded assessment of how to manage environmental risks from logging after the bushfires would be hidden under cabinet-in-confidence rules,” Mr Field said.

Mr Hopkins, meanwhile, said he had also written to the EPA to ask why logging plans for Shallow Crossing changed markedly in recent months, sharply reducing the “sensitive area exclusion zones”.

“What’s changed so much, from May to September, to allow for the transition of the forest from sensitive to harvestable?” he asked.

A Forestry Corp spokeswoman said the corporation had amended safeguards “to incorporate updated NSW government fire mapping and fire severity data and forest ecology surveys ... to ensure the areas with fire sensitive ecological value are appropriately managed.

“The plan to selectively harvest and regenerate a small proportion of the regrowth forest in Shallow Crossing State Forest sets aside more than half of the compartment in exclusion zones that will not be harvested as well as a minimum of 50 per cent of the Local Area Landscape to assist in forest recovery,” she said.

According to a Planning Department report, about 900,000 hectares of the State Forest land burned during the 2019-20 fires. Some 43 state forests out of 522 in NSW were almost completely burnt.

Members of the North East Forest Alliance audit logging in the Girard State Forest.Credit:Jimmy Malecki/NEFA

Separately, the North East Forest Alliance has challenged the state and federal governments in the Federal Court over the decision to roll over a Regional Forest Agreement without taking necessary assessments of the environment.

The pact, renewed in 2018 for 20 years, covers logging in coastal areas between Sydney and the Queensland border, and exempts them from requirements of the federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

“We say there was no assessment of the impact of climate change on the forests,” alliance spokeswoman Susie Russell, said. “It is appalling that in the face of the twin global crises of rapidly changing climatic conditions and biodiversity decline, that all they could do is agree to more of the same without considering the science.”

David Morris, chief of the Environmental Defenders Office which is leading the legal action, said “under the current system, if a population of koalas is being threatened by a new development, the project needs to be assessed at the Federal level”.

“But if the same population of koalas is being threatened by a logging project, it’s been rubber-stamped on the basis of 20-year-old environmental assessments,” he said.

Environment Minister Matt Kean said the bushfires were a catastrophic natural disaster that “put huge pressures on our environment, our wildlife and our local industry”.

“It is important that we do everything we can to ensure that our natural environment and local businesses recover,” he said, adding that it was not appropriate to comment on matters that were currently before the courts.

Regent Honeyeater with juvenile chicks waiting for a feed in the forests of north-east NSW.Credit:Mick Roderick/NEFA

A spokesman for Mr Stokes said the minister could not comment on cabinet processes.

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Peter Hannam writes on environment issues for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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