In early January Susie Russell was arrested on a road that runs through the Bulga state forest on the New South Wales mid-north coast.
She and about 30 protesters – the NSW Greens upper house MP Sue Higginson among them – were there to support a young local woman who was sitting atop a tripod used to block trucks and logging crews from entering the forest.
Russell lives in the small village of Elands in the Bulga plateau – in a region that has habitat for koalas and other endangered species, and that was devastated by the 2019-20 bushfires.
“When Forestry Corp started logging the Bulga state forest in December, it was pretty much the last straw for our community,” she says.
A meeting was called at the time.“We agreed we would do whatever we could do to save the forest,” she says.
“But it’s not just about our patch. It’s about the wider management of forests and what they’re managed for.”
As NSW approaches a state election, the future of forests is a key question for many communities, conservationists and the timber industry.
Russell says there is a “frustration and desperation” about the inaction over the future of native forest logging on public land.
“We are six weeks out from an election, and the major parties are offering nothing,” she says.
No plan in place
The NSW Greens last week announced a policy to immediately end all native forest logging on public land, along with a $300m transition package.
Independents targeting Sydney seats, including Pittwater – the seat held by the outgoing senior Coalition minister Rob Stokes – are also calling for an end to native forest logging and new protections.
Such moves are already occurring in Victoria and Western Australia, which have committed to end dates for native forest logging. But there is no such plan in place in NSW.
Last year the Perrottet government was criticised when the annual accounts for the Forestry Corporation of NSW showed its hardwoods or native timbers division ran at a $9m loss in 2021-22, largely due to flooding on the north coast and costs associated with bushfire recovery.
A report published by the Natural Resources Commission in December warned the government that forests across NSW could become net carbon emitters in coming decades, undermining government efforts to reach net zero emissions.
The NRC wrote that the many benefits the state’s forests provided were degrading and needed “major intervention”, prompting calls for greater regulation of clearing.
At the time, the agriculture minister, Dugald Saunders, said more than half of the 2m hectares managed by the NSW Forestry Corporation was conservation land, and just 1% of the total area was harvested each year.
The Coalition has been notoriously split over regulating land to protect habitat and address the state’s high rates of clearing, with the National party threatening war over koala protections during the last term of government.
The campaign
The National party launched its election campaign in Taree on Friday. MPs were greeted by about 20 protesters, some holding “protect native forests now” banners.
Saunders says he is proud of the Coalition’s record on forestry – “not just for the employment, tourism and economic benefits the industry provides, but also for the strict environmental protections we have in place to guide operations now and well into the future.”
“Native harvesting in NSW provides us with top-quality timber for house frames, flooring, furniture and packaging used by Australians every day,” he says.
“Renewable native timber harvesting, done sustainably, will continue to have a future under a Liberal and Nationals government.”
Meanwhile Labor has renewed a promise to create a great koala national park stretching from Kempsey to Coffs Harbour and protecting about 20% of the state’s wild koala population, under an $80m commitment.
The timber and logging industry has previously claimed the park would cost the state thousands of jobs.
Some conservationists have raised concern that Labor is focused on a consultation process instead of providing clear commitments on where the boundaries for the new park would be, or ruling out any logging while it consults.
Labor’s spokesperson for natural resources, Courtney Houssos, said the party wanted to save koalas and to work with “all stakeholders” that would be affected by the creation of the park.
“That includes a commitment to no net job losses and an independent skills audit to guide investment and incentives and encourage new economic opportunities in the forestry industry,” she said.
‘It’s not just the koala, it’s a whole raft of species’
The January protest Russell joined at Bulga was just one of many.
Amid a crackdown on environmental protesting, activists have been arrested at Yarratt state forest near Taree, Doubleduke state forest north of Yamba, and at the Herons Creek sawmill.
Dailan Pugh, a long-term forest advocate who is the president of the North East Forest Alliance, says work to protect their conservation value has been gaining momentum in recent years.
“It’s not just the koala, it’s a whole raft of species. I think people are aware our threatened species laws are fairly dismal and protection of habitat is the best way forward,” he says.
Polling commissioned by the Wilderness Society found broad support for the protection of native forests among residents in Sydney’s northern beaches, north shore and eastern suburbs.
Victoria Jack, the NSW campaign manager for TWS, said the organisation had wanted to understand the gap between community expectations and the actions of state MPs after the 2019-20 bushfires.
“It wasn’t so much a gap as a chasm,” she says. “It is clear these communities want NSW native forests protected, yet the NSW parliament has been delivering outcomes that are the antithesis of the community’s demands.”
That gap is now being targeted by independents like Helen Conway in the North Shore electorate, who said it was “a critical decade for nature protection in NSW”.
After the Greens called for a transition to 100% sustainable plantations, the party’s environment spokesperson, Higginson, says she had observed growing community sentiment that “the right thing to do right now is to end the logging of public native forest”.
She says participants in some of the protests included older people who were involved in similar actions 30 years ago, as well as a wave of young people coming to the forests for the first time.
“It’s because it’s urgent,” she says. “The evidence really is that our forests can’t continue to withstand the level of harm of industrial-scale logging.”
But Victor Violante, the chief executive of the Australian Forest Products Association NSW, says the protests are “incredibly damaging for the mental health of workers”.
He says the position of parties such as the Greens and some independent candidates is also detached from reality.
“To replace the native vegetation volumes currently being harvested with plantation hardwood, we would need 250,000 additional hectares of hardwood plantations,” he says.
“Australia and NSW could not turn off hardwood today and import the difference without significant delays in housing construction and renovation and also significant price increases.”
Russell, however, says she wants to see public land managed “for the good of the public” – that is for water, carbon and wildlife.
“We are facing a crisis here on many levels.”
