The NSW government’s Independent Forestry Panel stakeholder consultation report has laid bare a deep divide between the timber industry and environmental groups over the future of the Great Koala National Park, with the document released as an active 12-month logging moratorium covers 176,000 hectares of state forest, and the still-pending Forestry Industry Action Plan (FIAP) is yet to be drafted. That is according to the NSW Cabinet Office, which published the report on Thursday, May 7, after receiving 1,500 individual submissions and 160 organisational responses from industry, environmental and community networks.
Speaking to Wood Central about the report, Timber NSW chief executive Maree McCaskill described the document as a faithful summary of the themes the panel had been tasked with capturing for the public consultation phase, with the next stage of the FIAP — and whether the industry has any genuine hand in shaping it — now the central test of the Minns government’s intent. “What is much more appropriate is the promised industry plan going forward,” McCaskill said.
Pressed on consultation to date, McCaskill said the sector was yet to see what had been drafted. The response from the Minns government will determine whether the FIAP delivers genuine engagement or repeats the pattern of “previous governments who have given the industry a roadmap or plan without industry input.”
Appointed in August 2024, the three-member Independent Forestry Panel was tasked with consulting on the FIAP, with the central unresolved question — whether native forestry will continue, end, or be wound back, and over what timeframe — left for the next stage of policy development. Industry argues that native forestry is sustainable, essential to the state’s supply of housing materials, and environmentally preferable to imports, whilst environmental groups have called for a managed exit from public native forests.
Despite disagreement over native forestry’s future, the panel identified 10 shared goals across submitters, including expanded plantations, improved stewardship, increased bushfire resilience, biodiversity protection, sustainable building materials, maximised carbon benefits, and long-term certainty for regional communities. The report urges the government to rely on peer-reviewed, contemporary scientific consensus as the FIAP moves into drafting, as several scientific disputes on native forest management remain unresolved from the consultation phase.
The North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) said the document “raises more questions than it answers,” with NEFA President Dailan Pugh OAM pointing to a finding he says was buried on page 42 — that 70 per cent of submissions backed an end to public native forestry in NSW. Pugh said two of the panel’s three members had forestry backgrounds and that the FIAP framework was structurally unsuited to deciding whether logging on public land should continue.
The Independent Forestry Panel sits within a wider state-level reckoning that includes the Great Koala National Park, where Premier Chris Minns announced a 12-month logging moratorium across 176,000 hectares of state forest in September 2025. The move cut supply overnight to six mills, including Hurford Hardwood’s Casino and Kempsey operations, with a formal reservation Bill expected in NSW Parliament under the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974 later in 2026.
Beyond the state moratorium, final GKNP creation hinges on registering a carbon project under the Improved Native Forest Management (INFM) Method, which is now moving through federal assessment. The federal EPBC Act review runs in parallel, with native forestry exemptions a contested element of the broader national reform.
The Cabinet Office has indicated that the FIAP itself will move into the drafting stage in the months ahead, with industry, environmental, and community stakeholders all expected to test the document against the consultation report’s 10 shared goals. The full Independent Forestry Panel stakeholder consultation report is available through the NSW Cabinet Office.
