The NSW hardwood supply chain has rubbished claims that the state’s $2.9 billion timber industry holds its wood supply agreements for free and without tender. Timber NSW CEO Maree McCaskill told Wood Central that Dailan Pugh of Forest Frontline had made “a number of false claims” around the basis on which agreements are held: “Wood supply agreements are not free, and the government sets the royalty, harvest and haulage rates,” she said.
Pugh, who is pushing a petition to establish new Richmond River Koala Parks across 56,200 hectares of state forest in the Richmond Valley in addition to the 175,000 hectares already promised by Premier Chris Minns, told supporters the NSW Government gives operators “set wood supply agreements, for free, and without tender” and that those holders could “sell them.” “We give them the timber, they don’t pay anything for it,” he claimed, “and when we don’t supply them the timber we promised them, we have to pay compensation.”
Steve Dobbyns, executive chair of Forest and Wood Communities Australia, rejected the narrative outright, pointing to the Community Service Obligation funding Forestry Corporation receives each year “to provide a range of community services including recreational facilities, education, regulatory and fire protection services.” He said the annual cost runs to around $17 million across 2 million hectares of state forest at approximately $8.50 per hectare, a figure that does not cover the full cost of managing the 50 to 60 per cent of state forest held purely for conservation and never logged.
“Actively managed state forests are better for the environment than locked up national parks and cheaper to run,” Dobbyns said, pointing to the last available NPWS Annual Report, which showed the NSW Government paying around $850 million annually to manage national parks at approximately $121 per hectare against forestry’s $8.50. On the economic cost of closure, he pointed directly to Victoria, where winding down the native timber industry has run to between $875 million and $1.5 billion, with a further $72 million per year now spent engaging the very forestry contractors put out of work to fight bushfires every season.
It comes as environmental groups have faced separate challenges over koala population figures cited in support of further forest lock-ups. The Bob Brown Foundation, as Wood Central reported in March 2026, declined to engage with CSIRO’s National Koala Monitoring Programme data, placing Australia’s eastern seaboard koala population at between 729,000 and 918,000 — more than 18 times higher than the 15,000 cited at the 2024 NSW Koala Summit — whilst maintaining the species was “on the brink of extinction.”
McCaskill said the industry, which harvests timber from just 0.3 per cent of available NSW forests each year whilst contributing $1.1 billion annually in gross value added product and supporting 8,900 full time jobs in regional communities, could not afford false claims to go unchallenged, with wood supply agreements due to expire in 2028 and hundreds of businesses still waiting on the certainty needed to plan, refinance and invest.
