Today in Parliament, Abigail spoke in support of Greens MLC Sue Higginson's motion, condemning the Forestry Corporation of NSW for its blatant breaches and maladministration, and calling for transparency, accountability, and ownership of these errors by both the Forestry Corporation and the Minns Labor Government.

Sue Higginson's motion:

(1) That this House notes that:

• in 2024 the North East Forest Alliance and South East Forest Rescue discovered significant discrepancies in the Forestry Corporation of NSW's biomaterial reports and sustainability reports from the 2022-23 financial years;
• after having the discrepancy reported to them, the Forestry Corporation retrospectively amended their reports over the last three years to:
  • reduce the total yield volume from public native forests by 28 per cent;
  • reclassify 65,584 cubic metres of premium large high-quality logs as lower value small high-quality logs; and
  • reduce the claimed yields of low-quality logs by 36 per cent.
• both the biomaterial reports and the sustainability reports are published as supplementary reports to the annual report, as required under the law pursuant to section 69H of the Forestry Act, and provide data on a wide range of environmental sustainability measures that are supposed to align with Ecologically Sustainable Forest Management;
• Ecologically Sustainable Forest Management is the entire basis of the legal framework that allows the Forestry Corporation to operate outside of Commonwealth and New South Wales environment, biodiversity and planning laws; and
• the publishing of sustainable yield volumes is a requirement under the law and the Regional Forest Agreements, and the data is relied on by the public, the Natural Resources Commission, the NSW Environment Protection Authority and the NSW Department of Primary Industries.

(2) That this House further notes that:

• the Forestry Corporation of NSW has:
  • issued no public statement on the revised data or underlying maladministration;
  • blamed a data extraction error for the inaccurate reports in comments to the media; and
  • asserted that the incorrect sustainability reports have no financial impact.
• the Forestry Corporation:
  • has lost $73 million dollars through its hardwood division and logging public native forests over the last four financial years, including $29 million in 2023-24;
  • reduced its expected dividends from all divisions by $55 million over the four financial years from 2023‑27; and
  • has breached its operating conditions an extraordinary amount of times, noting that within just the past five years the regulator has commenced 50 formal investigations into the Forestry Corporation, with at this stage 30 resulting in enforcement action with fines and costs, at this stage over $1.7 million, and in December 2024 we learnt that it had illegally clear-felled an area within Bindarri National Park.

(3) That this House calls on the Government to:

• place an immediate moratorium on all native forest logging in New South Wales;
• table revised annual reports and sustainability reports from the Forestry Corporation of NSW using correct data;
• provide a complete explanation to the Parliament about the scale and reasons for the false reporting of sustainable yield volumes by the Forestry Corporation; and
• end all native forest logging in New South Wales.

After hearing the Government and the Coalition oppose the motion, Abigail contributed to the debate:

I fully support all of the comments from my colleague Ms Sue Higginson and also place on record my admiration for her diligent and fearless fight in favour of protecting our forests. But let's take the nonsense out of this argument. Let's take out the fake outrage and the attempt to make it into some culture war. Let's look at what is actually in the motion. Paragraph (1) is factual. No-one has said it is not factual. Paragraph (2) is factual. Again, no-one has said that this did not occur. In paragraph (3) the offending subparagraphs appear to be (a) and (d). Though we thoroughly believe we should shut down native forest logging in New South Wales, I now propose an amendment so that the motion will be acceptable to all members of this House, based on what they have just said in their contributions. I move:

That the question be amended by omitting paragraphs (3) (a) and (3) (d).

That leaves us with a motion listing factual statements about how this State owned corporation has behaved. We are calling for a tabling of the revised annual reports and sustainability reports from the corporation and for it to provide to Parliament a complete explanation about the scale and reasons for the false reporting of sustainable yield volumes. That is what a responsible House would do.

The Minister for Finance and the Treasurer are the shareholders of this corporation. If any other corporation had misstated its financial statements and then sat on it for six months without telling anybody, the shareholders would have the heads of that board. All we are asking for now is accountability over what has happened. By moving this amendment, we take away the offending paragraphs, which are the whole reason why the Government has said it cannot support the motion. Instead what we should now see is support from everybody for this corporation to actually own up to its mistakes, tell us exactly what happened and table its revised reports immediately.

Abigail's amendment and the overall motion were sadly both negatived by the Government and the Opposition.

Read the full debate in Hansard here.

12 February 2025