Forestry Corp’s wooden-headed inflation of timber stats is no surprise

On the eve of the expected announcement of the boundaries for the promised Great Koala National Park on the Mid North Coast of NSW comes the disturbing revelation that the state government’s troubled logging arm exaggerated the volume of timber it extracted from state forests by nearly 30 per cent.

The Forestry Corporation of NSW, which sells state-owned native and plantation forests timber to private millers, quietly uploaded updated figures for the 2022, 2023 and 2024 financial years to its website last month. It has blamed a “data extraction error” for the massive discrepancies in the biomaterial reports, and emphasised that the mistake did not alter its financial reporting.

It is the latest bungle of the strife-prone Forestry Corp, which reported a $29 million loss in its hardwood division for 2023-24. The NSW Land and Environment Court found the corporation had a history of unlawfully carrying out forestry operations and over the past five years had racked up more than $1.1 million in penalties for more than a dozen instances of unlawful activity, including seven criminal convictions. In December, we reported that Forestry Corp had admitted to accidentally clear-felling 1.5 hectares of Bindarri National Park near Coffs Harbour – because of a mapping error.

Incredibly, Forestry Corp has continued logging in the Great Koala National Park assessment area at a greater rate than surrounding areas as the declarations date loomed, surely a wooden-headed move for an organisation that describes itself as in the forefront of managing environmental sustainability and tourism.

North East Forest Alliance president Dailan Pugh noticed inconsistencies in Forestry Corp data in June 2024 and started asking questions. Forestry Corp redid its 2022-23 report in October and again in January, and also updated its 2021-22 and 2023-24 reports last month

Pugh’s analysis, based on figures independently verified by the Herald’s Caitlin Fitzsimmons, show massive discrepancies between the original and revised reports, including lower timber volumes, a substantial reallocation of high-quality logs from large to small, and a reduction of low-quality logs.

Greens MP Sue Higginson has written to the auditor-general asking for an investigation into Forestry Corp’s “maladministration”. Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty, who has ministerial oversight of the state-owned corporation, declined to comment.

Clearly, these are sensitive times as the Minns government prepares to unveil the Great Koala National Park. It has been a long time coming: environmental groups commissioned a report in 2012 on koala populations on the Mid North Coast between the Macleay and Richmond Rivers, and nine years later the Greens introduced draft legislation. Nothing happened but Labor gave enthusiastic support.

After nearly two years in office, Labor is poised to deliver on the promise and now Forestry Corp has undermined the moment by being caught ramping up the volume of timber extracted from state forests.

Conspiracists suggest it could somehow sweeten the compensation package to be offered to the timber industry for losing access to the Great Koala National Park. But given Forestry Corp’s history of gaffes, it’s more likely just bad business as usual.

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