In a Wood Central article on 12 April, I am accused of falsely claiming that Wood Supply Agreements (WSAs) are provided to sawmills for free, and without tender, that those holders can then sell them, and that they need to be paid compensation if the WSA volumes are not provided.
These statements are all true.
WSAs are contracts issued by the Government to select sawmillers, guaranteeing set volumes of timber for up to 20 years. There is no open tendering process, though this has been recommended for fairness. There is no charge for the WSA’s; sawmills can, and do, sell them to other millers, and if the Forestry Corporation fails to provide the contracted volumes, then they need to pay compensation. It is only when the mills are supplied with timber that they are charged for it.
For example, the current WSA’s for north-east NSW were first issued to sawmillers in 2003 for 20 years, and later extended to 2028. Boral (now owned by Pentarch) successfully prosecuted the Forestry Corporation for failure to supply the contracted volumes every year from 2004 to 2010, receiving millions in compensation. Then, in 2014, the NSW Government was forced to pay Boral $8.55 million to buy back 50,000 cubic metres per year of their WSA allocation.
Boral paid nothing for the promised timber but was paid millions when it was not provided.
Timber NSW CEO Maree McCaskill and Steve Dobbyns are the ones misleading the public. In his rebuttal Steve Dobbyns goes off on a tangent, claiming that the Government pays the Forestry Corporation $17 million a year for their Community Service Obligations (CSOs) to manage native forests on State Forests, though last year the Government actually paid them $32 million for their CSOs, almost twice what Dobbyns claims, as well as another $12 million in Government grants.
Though he is right that this does not cover their full costs. The Forestry Corporation lost an additional $32 million last year on its hardwood logging operations, despite being subsidised by hardwood plantations.
The industry is simply not paying the cost of the timber they receive. In 2024, IPART found that the Forestry Corporation was selling timber at a loss of $4.67 per gross metric tonne, commenting, “This means that FCNSW is selling native timber to sawmills for a delivery charge which is below the cost of harvesting and hauling that timber alone”.
Taxpayers should expect the industry to pay a substantial resource rent for the use of public forests, not pay to have them logged.
Another part of the problem is that the timber is simply not there. For the four years after the 2019/20 wildfires, the Forestry Corporation supplied less than 80% of the volumes of high-quality hardwood logs contracted in north-east NSW’s WSAs, despite premature logging of hardwood plantations. Supply from native forests plummeted by an additional 29% last year. The failure to honour WSAs has increased the Forestry Corporation’s financial liabilities, though these losses are not quantified in their annual reports.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dailan Pugh OAM is President of the North East Forest Alliance (NEFA), the NSW conservation group that has campaigned for the protection of native forests on the state’s north coast for more than three decades. This piece is his right-of-reply response to Wood Central’s report of 12 April 2026, “NSW Supply Chain Rubbishes Free Kick Claims on Wood Supply Agreements,” in which he was named. The views expressed are the author’s own.
