Now is not the time for landowners and operators in forests to be alarmist and fearful of changes to Australia’s environmental laws. That is, according to Senator Murray Watt, the Federal Environment Minister, who on Friday spoke of the reforms to the EPBC Act, the first major reform of its laws in decades.
“It will take the government a bit of time to properly explain the changes,” Senator Watt told the Week in Cattle podcast. “What these changes do is bring agriculture (and forestry) in line with all other industries. This is a change, but it doesn’t mean the end.”
Wood Central understands that the Commonwealth is working on three separate pathways for businesses that operate under RFAs to continue working in forests after the exemptions sunset on 1 July 2027. However, according to Stuart Coppock, one of the few legal practitioners with a deep working knowledge of how the RFA framework operates, there has been no material evidence of progress in these pathways.
“The clock is ticking much faster than the bureaucrats realise. It’s crucial that we hear from the state governments on these pathways as they are a joint signature to any future arrangements.”
Appearing before the Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee, Coppock said the newly minted changes to the EPBC Act have opened a constitutional fault line between state and federal jurisdiction that nobody has resolved — and nobody appears to be resolving.
“None of these pathways seems to be operational at the moment,” he said. “And with less than 16 months until the exemption expires, not one has been finalised for any of the ten RFAs across New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia and Tasmania”
“As soon as the legislation kicks in, the RFAs will go, and there is nothing left to replace them,” according to Coppock, in response to Senator Susan McDonald, who asked whether the bill alters the practical operation of the NSW and other state RFAs. “We are heading into a maelstrom of legal nonsense … literally no man’s land.”
‘The state controls the land’
Coppock laid out the constitutional problem in terms that cut through the legalese. “The state controls the land. All the Commonwealth have is protected species,” he said. “There is a mismatch.”
And that mismatch goes to the heart of what happens when the RFA exemption disappears. The agreements were designed precisely to resolve the tension between state land management powers and Commonwealth environmental protections — a framework painstakingly negotiated over a decade from 1990 through to the early 2000s across four states and ten separate agreements. Remove them, and the question of who has authority becomes legally unclear.
“Will the Commonwealth laws override the state’s? We don’t know if the federal legislation will take precedence over the state legislation,” Coppock said.
He told Senators the existing system is legally robust and has been tested at the highest levels of the court system. “There is in place a very good system under the RFAs. They weren’t invented yesterday; they’ve been around for a very long time. The Full Federal Court has a very solid judgment which sets out the precedent on why they work,” he said.
“The only comment you might make is that they only cover select areas and not all areas.”
Contestable science and inevitable lawfare
But it was Coppock’s analysis of the decision-making framework — or lack of one — that may prove the most consequential warning for the industry.
The way the legislation is drafted, he explained, the process is built around decision-making: start with legislation, then work to standards. But it does not deal with the commercial and economic realities of forestry. And in the area of timber, the environmental science that underpins those decisions is highly contestable.
“What is data and information in terms of environmental legislation? It’s about science,” Coppock said, speaking on behalf of Timber NSW. “And where you land in the area of timber is in a highly contestable area of science. And that’s where you end up in lawfare — where you have arguments over scientific papers.”
In other words, the reforms risk turning every harvesting decision into a courtroom battle.
Coppock pointed the committee to established legislative models that could offer a way through — frameworks already proven in Australian law. The first was work health and safety legislation, which uses the concept of “reasonably practicable” to set a compliance threshold. The second was the business judgment rule in corporate law.
Both provide a defence structure and a compliance standard that allows a decision-maker to demonstrate they worked diligently through the material before them. “If you do the best job you can in front of you, at least you can say you did the best you can,” he said.
The sweet spot, he said, lies in embedding a high-performance compliance standard within the decision-making framework. It would give operators a defensible pathway through the regulatory thicket — something, in his view, the current legislation simply fails to provide.
‘An act of vandalism’
Coppock’s testimony comes mere days after Rob de Fégely AM — the former Chair of the advisory committee that counselled multiple Agriculture Ministers on forestry matters — slammed the review used to justify the EPBC reforms.
Speaking to Wood Central last week, de Fégely described the 2020 Samuel Review of the EPBC Act as “deficient and underwhelming,” challenged the government’s ability to measure “net gain” without baseline data from national parks and reserves, and invited the Prime Minister to visit Tasmania to see sustainable forest management in action.
Today, de Fégely went further, arguing that the Samuel Review’s consultation process excluded the very people who manage forests — the practitioners of the RFAs — and that, without their input, Professor Samuel could not have understood the depth of planning, expertise, and biodiversity knowledge embedded within forest management agencies.
“The report does not in my opinion justify the cessation of RFAs in 2027 and as a result has created massive uncertainty for literally thousands of people who not only work in forests or process wood — the world’s most renewable product — but all the contractors, businesses and communities that rely on forests and the businesses and values they support,” de Fégely said.
“RFAs can be improved, but abolishing them not only destroys 35 years of dedicated work — it is an act of social, environmental and economic vandalism, simply because the Commonwealth government does not have a better system to replace them with.”
Where de Fégely has attacked the quality of the review and the absence of practitioner input, Coppock has now laid bare the legal consequence: a framework that is constitutionally uncertain, operationally unworkable and, in the contested world of forest science, a guaranteed pipeline to the courts.
What comes next?
Wood Central understands that the Environment and Communications Legislation Committee is due to hand down its report on the Environment Protection Reform Bill by 24 March. The existing exemption for RFA forestry activities will formally end on 1 July 2027, at which point forestry operations with a potential significant impact on matters of national environmental significance will require EPBC assessment, approval and compliance with National Environmental Standards that are yet to be finalised.
- To find out more about the EPBC Act and its implications for Australia’s forests and forest products value chain, click here for Wood Central’s special feature.
