The NSW Government has undertaken an extensive consultation on the proposed Great Koala National Park. Wood Central understands that the cabinet were to receive papers from this consultative process on 25 November, with an announcement made early next year. Thus, there will be no Christmas closures or job losses over the festive season.
However, the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), which was tasked with the consultative process, has a flaw: The two senior NPWS officers who fronted the consultancy process were Atticus Fleming, the Director of the NPWS, and Trish Harrup, the executive director of Conservation and Aboriginal Partnerships.
There was always a conflict of interest, which ensured the consultative process was never even-handed.
One of the starting points was that the two government agencies that held data on state-owned native forests, the Forestry Corporation of NSW and the NSW Natural Resources Commission, were excluded from active participation in the consultative process.
Another was that NPWS, in conjunction with the Minister, determined to use the maps created by the National Parks Association as the starting point to create an assessment area. The National Parks Association wanted all the state forest areas to be transferred to the national park system. The assessment area became 176,000 hectares of state forest on the north coast.
The latest conflict of interest in the process concerns the appointment of a consultancy to review the economic and social impacts of establishing a Great Koala National Park.
NPWS engaged Mandala Partners as consultants in Oct-Nov 2023. The consultancy had been operating for six months. Mandala Partners was established in June 2023 as an economic and strategy consultancy. Among its foundation members are senior policy advisors to the Gillard and Rudd Governments and the Andrews state government. Press reports identify the firm as an ALP-strongly affiliated business.
By December 2023, Mandala was contracted to assess the economic and social impact of the Great Koala National Park. The first issue concerns the National Parks and Wildlife Service’s procurement process.
How does a company of less than 6 months achieve such a significant consultancy with a profile of completed projects?
Mandala received data from Forestry Corporation but never followed up with detailed information on how timber, once harvested, was allocated, an important factor in determining the impact on timber supply. When issues of this nature were raised, there was no follow-up or engagement with the analytical skill base of Forestry Corporation.
Mandala assessed that 40% of the timber supply on the North Coast would go with establishing the 176,000-hectare assessment area for the Great Koala Koala Park. It then looked at the contractual volume of each wood supply agreement and reduced the volume by 40%. The native forestry industry does not work that way—timber distribution and mill use are complex and sophisticated.
What Mandala did not examine was the distribution of harvested timber through the structure of the wood supply agreements on the North Coast, commencing with Sawlogs Type A agreements.
A cursory look at this material on the Forestry Commission’s website would tell anyone a mathematical reduction is not how to formulate the economic impact on sawmills. Rather, you can see that with a preferred species contract with caps and floors, the economic impact is highly variable, and Lidar data and other information is needed.
Forestry Corporation has this information and data, but they were never consulted. If Mandala had properly consulted, they would have quickly realised the economic impact was highly significant to businesses and communities on the entire North Coast.
The industry advisory panel members called for active participation and ongoing consultation with the Forestry Corporation during the entire process yet this request was never actioned and until recently did not appear in the notes. No formal minutes were kept or recorded.
In last month’s meeting of the Industry Advisory Panel, the Panel raised concerns about a conflict of interest in the use of Mandala Partners for the Economic and Social Assessment while appearing to be contracted to undertake work for the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation (ACBF) on carbon modelling in native forestry.
The Panel then learned that Mandala Partners, in a letter dated 16 May 2024, addressed to the Secretary of DCEEW, had outlined that they were taking up a project for the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation (ACBF) but that the scope of the projects was different. The Secretary of the department with legal advice determined that there was no conflict of interest.
The questions from the Industry Panel arose from the Federal Minister Bowen’s public announcement on 30 October 2024 concerning Improved Native Forest Management in Multiple-use Public Forests proposed by the NSW Government. This proposal would incentivise government forest management agencies to deliver carbon abatement by harvesting native forests grown for timber. This modelling was undertaken as part of the GKNP process by an ANU academic who is largely opposed to native forestry.
The same day, the ACBF issued a media statement that they commissioned Mandala Partners to evaluate the costs and potential income of implementing a forest carbon project across all public native forests in NSW and to model scenarios of the jobs and economic outcomes that could be generated by reinvesting all carbon projects in regional forestry areas. The press release has quotes from Amit Singh, Managing Partner of Mandala.
The ACBF is chaired by Dr Ken Henry whose CEO is Lyndon Schneiders…
[The ex-CEO of the Wilderness Society, whose partner is Felicity Wade, who drafted the ALP’s policy for the Great Koala National Park when working in the NSW Parliament and who now convenes the Labor Environment Action Network and has the objective to shut down native forestry.]
Schneiders sits on the Community Panel of the Great Koala National Park process representing ACBF along with other ENGO representatives, some of whom are on the ACBF board.
And here is yet another example of a conflict of interest…
Parliament has legislated on conflict of interest matters, along with its delegated legislation, and now requires transparency and ethical conduct, including dealing with conflict of interests.
The next conflict of interest is how Atticus Fleming and the NPWS could engage a consultancy working on a brief to close the industry upon which an independent economic evaluation is being conducted.
The explanation is that Mandala Partners worked between contracts with the NPWS.
NPWS never advised the Advisory Panels of any of this.
Irrespective of the failure of Government officials to conduct themselves appropriately, if Mandala Partners were concerned about the potential conflict of interest when confronted with entering a contract with the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation (ACBF), why did they enter the contract?
Given this conflict of interest, why did the Government officials involved with the GKNP consultative process enter a second contract with Mandala Partners?
The conflict of interest is substantial.
One contract is the economic and social analysis of the GKNP assessment area, examining the sustainable native forest industry. The other contract is carbon modelling, which examines avoided harvesting and tries to present an economic case for the closure of the native forest industry, including the NSW Northern sector of the industry.
Mandala Partners is a new consultancy established six months before gaining the GKNP contract with the acknowledgment that they have a small workforce. It is most certainly the case that the same people worked on both projects. Industry and Union officials gave confidential material to Mandala Partners, thinking they were investigating a case for a sustainable native forest industry in Northern NSW.
How can NPWS engage Mandala Partners from December 2023 until May 2024, ACBF engage Mandala from May to July 2024, and NPWS re-engage Mandala Partners from August onwards?
Simply put, this does not pass the “pub test” or the Minn government’s transparency claim.
How do the same people remove from their minds that knowledge gained from one project when working on the closure of the same industry? They cannot. They cannot say they did not use the confidential material. It is in the heads of the consultants.
The economic, social, and environmental consultative process has modelled the annexation of 176,000 hectares to make an adventure precinct in their national park for koala conservation. Forestry Corporation of NSW already operates and maintains adventure facilities (mountain bike tracks, zip lines camping grounds, etc.).
There is a wild breeding koala enclosure already built and ready for launch at Port Macquarie in conjunction with the Port Macquarie Koala Hospital. Hiking tracks can readily run through national parks and state forests without annexing state forests. They will have another koala enclosure so tourists can see koalas—those facilities are already duplicated across the coast of NSW. And Why? NPWS admitted that tourist will want to see close up the koalas not spend days hiking in the park perhaps seeing none. Koalas are generally hard to spoRt!
NPWS uses similar statistics for the success of an adventure precinct as in the Red Gum Forests debate in 2010. The success of that proposal can be seen in that virtually no one visits the Red Gum Forests, and the town of Mathoura has all but died. The promised management and employment of First Nations people has not occurred. NPWS statistics show that the most visited national park is Royal National Park, which is 20,000 hectares in size, with very few facilities on the doorstep of Sydney.
In April 2024, Mandala posted its PsiQuantum Launch Research Report, which can be viewed as a sample of the consultancy’s work:
The PsiQuantum project is highly contentious, as is the Mandala Report. The report does not readily reveal any terms of reference. It reads like a historical analysis, and it appears to be missing what one would expect in an economic report.
That is clearly set out costings, known facts assumptions, and conclusions so that a reader is able to evaluate the conclusions of what is purported to be an economic analysis. Instead, the Reports reads with amazing support for an idea with no obvious stated scientific or validated economic data.
Regarding the Great Koala National Park Consultative Process, Mandala Partners has now been embroiled in a conflict-of-interest claim that thoroughly taints any Report or Reports they might have issued.
As the NSW Cabinet has received its papers and deliberates, the focus should be on whether the Premier and his colleagues take conflict of interest matters as a serious and fundamental point.
