The forester who advised successive Australian governments on forest policy for eight years has argued that a country cannot stop making the wood it uses without importing the environmental cost along with the timber. That is according to Rob de Fégely, whose column ran in the Australian Financial Review on Thursday, twelve days before the Senate votes on whether to disallow the Improved Native Forest Management method behind the Great Koala National Park.
“Ending native forest harvesting is not environmental leadership,” de Fégely wrote of plans to run public forests solely for carbon. His council carried the statutory forest products function under the Regional Forest Agreements Act from 2015 to 2023, and he led Forestry Australia for five years before that.
“The demand does not disappear,” de Fégely wrote of what follows when a country stops making its own wood, an effect economists call leakage, which moves the harvest rather than ending it. Australia already runs a wood trade deficit, buying $6.9 billion in wood products a year and selling $2.8 billion, according to ABARES.
“Hardwood and softwood are not interchangeable products,” de Fégely wrote, with conifers cut for the structural framing Australia already fails to grow enough of and eucalypt hardwoods going into flooring, panelling, and durable products that stay in service for a century. Softwood plantations cannot stand in for what the native estate supplies.
“Harvesting changes forests, but it does not destroy them,” de Fégely wrote of an estate the latest State of the Forests Report puts at 132 million hectares of native forest, held stable across three decades as regrowth offset clearing for towns and farms. Public forest cut for timber must be regenerated by law, with compliance checked through regulation and independent certification.
Victoria and Western Australia both closed their public native forest industries in January 2024, leaving Sustainable Timber Tasmania and Forestry Corporation of NSW as the last state managers of the estate the method would pay to lock up. De Fégely chairs the first and sits on the board of the second, and wrote in a personal capacity rather than for either organisation.
Foresters are not the only critics of the method’s science, with John Raison, a former CSIRO chief research scientist who co-authored the IPCC’s land sector accounting guidelines, asking Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen to withdraw it and putting the over-crediting of forest carbon at 50 to 100 per cent. Forestry Australia’s own assessment found the method structurally biased toward over-crediting, with the leakage cap set between zero and 40 per cent despite evidence the real figure runs far higher.
De Fégely rests part of his case on new science, citing a University of Melbourne team that revisited 1980s trials in Victoria’s mountain ash and found, on his account, better growth and lower fire risk. The published result was narrower, with the Tanjil Bren revisit reporting trees 20 per cent bigger in diameter, carbon storage matching untouched controls, and Leadbeater’s possums across every treatment plot.
Fire risk was not among those findings, and researchers at the Australian National University argue the opposite, estimating up to 24 tonnes per hectare of debris left on the ground after thinning and citing Victorian forestry manuals that warn thinning raises fire risk in ash forests.
It comes as the Senate prepares to vote on 18 August on the disallowance motion lodged by NSW Nationals Senator Ross Cadell, with wood processors and forest industry groups pressing the same objection through 371 submissions in June and the moratorium already costing 300 jobs across six mills.
The credits would flow to the government that created them, with Chris Minns and Penny Sharpe, the Premier and Environment Minister who lodged the park with the Clean Energy Regulator, directing whatever the method earns. Meanwhile, NSW’s longest serving Environmental Minister, Bob Debus, today attacked the model, calling New South Wales judge, jury, and beneficiary of a method it designed and would profit from.
Harvesting pays for more than sawlogs on de Fégely’s reckoning, funding road access for tourism and camping, apiary sites, picnic grounds, and the fire protection that keeps the rest standing. ABARES counts 64,661 hectares harvested across Australia’s multiple-use public native forests in a year, or 0.7 per cent of that estate, in a country that still buys more wood than it sells.
