The NSW Forestry Corporation has lost a further $32 million of public money through their logging of public native forests. The Forestry Corporation's 2024-25 Annual Report was tabled in the NSW Parliament and reveals that the NSW community has had to pay $76 million to the Forestry Corporation over the last three years to keep the failed native forest logging division of the business going.
Greens MP and spokesperson for the environment Sue Higginson said,
"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,"
"The Federal Labor Government, along with the Australian Greens, have now essentially put the final nail in the native forest logging industry - with exemptions from federal environment laws for the logging industry coming to an end in 18 months. I can not see any native forest logging operation in NSW meet even the weakest national environmental standards, because native forest logging is so destructive, it's driving forest dependent species to extinction and it's fueling the climate crisis through the massive amounts of carbon released through logging,"
"For Premier Chris Minns and the NSW Labor Government, this has to be it, now is the next best time to end public native forest logging, we can't afford environmentally, economically or socially to let it continue. It is also the case that the Forestry Corporation is facing a litany of prosecutions for breaking the environmental protection logging rules, the whole gig has become completely untenable,"
"We know that our native forests are worth so much to us all when they are standing intact providing the essential service they provide, clean water, threatened species habitat, carbon draw down and storage, landscape stability, recreation, education and culture and the ever increasing pollination required for agriculture. To have to pay to destroy our precious forests is incomprehensible and is political failure." Ms Higginson said.
