NSW is the Only State Paying to Destroy Its Own Forests
The NSW Forestry Corporation’s native forest logging division has become the most expensive loss-making habit in the state—an operation so deeply unviable it makes the Titanic look nimble. The latest Annual Report confirms another $32 million burned last year.
Over the past three years, taxpayers have tipped in $76 million just to keep the chainsaws running. NEFA’s Dailan Pugh says the real figure is even worse: over four years, losses top $85 million.
It is difficult to imagine any other industry being allowed to haemorrhage money at this scale, all while destroying endangered species habitat, releasing massive carbon emissions, and exposing the state to legal and financial risk. Yet here we are, still paying—not to save forests, but to cut them down.
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Greens MP Sue Higginson was blunt about the farce: “The logging of our precious native forests has not produced a single dollar of profit in NSW for almost a decade, and it likely never will. Yet somehow the destruction of these vital ecosystems has been allowed to continue. It is time to call it for what it is—an industry of the past that must be stopped now.”
She is right. There is no profit. No sustainability. No justification. Only loss.
And as NEFA’s Pugh adds, the public is subsidising every stage of this collapse. He notes that:
“Last year it cost $4,330 a hectare to log 7,390 hectares of public native forests. Taxpayers are paying an exorbitant cost to subsidise private sawmillers to log native forests.”
“Forestry Corp continues to spend more to log each tree than it earns from selling them. Rising harvesting costs, shrinking markets and long-term declines in timber volumes have made native forest logging financially impossible,” Clancy Barnard, Senior Forest Campaigner with the Nature Conservation Council, said today.
When added up, the story becomes absurd. Taxpayers fund the Forestry Corporation to cut the trees. They fund the sawmillers to receive them. They fund the transport subsidies that move those logs around. They fund the mill upgrades that process the wood.
And soon, they will be paying compensation for timber the Forestry Corporation promised in legal agreements but cannot deliver. It is the economic equivalent of paying twice for a meal and still going home hungry.
The reason for the shortfall is devastatingly simple: the timber is gone. As Pugh explains:
“Since the 2019/20 wildfires, the Forestry Corporation’s yields from native forests in north-east NSW have crashed by 44%. The timber is simply not there anymore, yet the Forestry Corporation remains in denial.”
The forests are depleted, stressed, and in many places ecologically collapsing. And this collapse happened before plans for the Great Koala National Park were announced—so the industry cannot claim the park is to blame. It was failing long before the first koala boundary line was drawn.
Yet despite knowing yields had crashed, the Forestry Corporation kept signing supply agreements it could not meet—six years of failures that now place taxpayers on the hook for compensation payments. As Pugh puts it, with devastating accuracy:
“We not only have to pay to supply the timber to sawmillers, we also have to pay for the timber they don’t get.”
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Meanwhile, the Forestry Corporation’s leadership has been forced to acknowledge the looming reality of the Great Koala National Park. Chair Stef Loader and CEO Anshul Chaudhary warned that the 12-month moratorium on logging across 176,000 hectares of proposed park area “will have significant impacts on all facets of our operations… our customers and contractors, and our staff.” For an agency already bleeding tens of millions each year, “significant impacts” is a polite way of saying the business model has finally hit the wall.
Higginson, again, is crystal clear about what comes next:
“For Premier Chris Minns and the NSW Labor Government, this has to be it. We can’t afford environmentally, economically or socially to let it continue.”
She notes that the federal government has already begun shutting the door on native forest logging by ending national law exemptions in 18 months. Once those protections expire, NSW logging operations will be required to meet national environmental standards—standards they cannot possibly satisfy. Higginson makes the point brutally:
“I cannot see any native forest logging operation in NSW meet even the weakest national environmental standards.”
The path forward is obvious: plantations already provide 91% of Australia’s sawn timber. That is where the industry is heading, whether the state government admits it or not. Victoria and Western Australia have made the transition. NSW is simply dragging its feet while taxpayers pick up the bill.
And the cost of continuing goes far beyond balance sheets. Leaving forests standing protects threatened species without multimillion-dollar recovery plans. It provides clean water, stabilises landscapes, sequesters carbon, boosts recreation economies, supports tourism, and maintains cultural and ecological continuity. All of these benefits come free. The only thing NSW pays for is destroying them.
Pugh sums it up succinctly:
“Logging public native forests is an economic basketcase… It is in the best interests of the community to stop logging public native forests.”
So the question is no longer whether NSW can afford to stop logging.
It’s whether NSW can afford to keep paying for a practice that costs millions, produces nothing, and is running out of forests to cut.
Koalas don’t cost taxpayers a cent. Logging them clearly does.
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