As senior manager at the Forestry Corporation, Mr Dean Kearney manages logging and timber harvesting for native forests and eucalyptus plantations across New South Wales. Source: ABC News
The organisation has come under criticism from former Labor environment minister Bob Debus and environmental groups who say it’s destroying koala habitats and leaving forests “smashed to the ground.”
“Koala populations have plummeted by 50% on the north coast in the past 20 years due to under-regulated logging,” Susie North from the North Coast Environment Council said.
Mr Kearney strongly disagrees.
“We’ve got the balance right between protecting koalas and harvesting timber,” he said. “We’ve got some exciting research that’s showing there are healthy koala populations out in the bush.”
Mr Kearney he said that harvesters used digital technology to map out projects. In a joint project with the Department of Primary Industries, sound recorders called song meters are being used to map out koala populations — particularly areas that are being harvested.
“Song meters provide us with some pretty good data on the koala populations we do have,” Mr Kearney said.
“The results from the first 100 sites showed 80% occupancy and there are good signs we have a stable koala population.”
Mr Kearney said Forestry officers go out to digitally map koala populations on iPad technology, before any harvesting of the area takes place.
Habitat trees are left alone, while groups of trees containing more substantial koala populations are highlighted red on iPad software and made off limits to loggers.
“The timber we produce are independently certified by the Australian Forestry Standard,” he said. “The idea is that we’re here to produce timber in perpetuity.”
Environmental groups and former Labor environment minister Bob Debus said they were not so confident about Forestry’s practices.
Mr Debus recently joined the North East Forest Alliance to inspect logging sites around Port Macquarie and Taree, including Lorne State Forest, which the groups are claiming as “illegal”.
“What I saw was clear felling, forests smashed to the ground over 10 to 15 hectare allotments,” he said.
“Many years ago we had a settlement whereby particularly under forestry operational agreements where logging would be carried out in a sustainable way.
“What we now see is completely destructive.”
Forestry NSW has maintained it does not clear fell any native state forests. It said the picture was likely to have been taken at a log dump that was cleared to store the timber harvested from the area.
It also said eucalyptus plantations, which are heavily harvested, were located near some of the state forests in that area.
During protests outside Forestry’s Coffs Harbour office, the North East Forest Alliance called for logging to be banned in 175,000 hectares of north coast state forest to help create a Great Koala National Park.
The proposal has been rejected by the State Government, but the timber industry was concerned about the traction it had gained with the Greens, and the opposition Labor Party.
The timber industry contributes more than $1 billion to the NSW economy per year and employs more than 22,000 people, according to Forestry Corporation figures.
Most of the timber logged on the north coast is used for high end-timber flooring and products for architectural design.
Douglas Head is the director of Australian Solar Timbers, a 100-year-old local family-run timber business at Kempsey. He was worried the region’s entire timber industry would be obliterated if plans for a Great Koala Park ever went ahead.
“It’s ludicrous, absolutely ludicrous. This will destroy us and any other timber business on the north coast. His timber business, worth tens of millions of dollars, is one of the biggest on the north coast and employs between 60 to 100 people at any given time.
“Nothing goes to waste because you’ve got to use everything including the sawdust; you’ve got to process everything,” he said.
Mr Head argued there was a complete lack of economic detail behind the plan for a koala park, as well as the cost to consumers and the community.
“These are some of the greatest hardwoods in the world; they’re sustainably logged,” Mr Head said.
With many of his workers in their early to late twenties, Mr Head said towns like Kempsey, which already had high unemployment rates, would be devastated.
“There are limited opportunities in the Malley Valley; they [workers] will either retire or go on the dole,” he said.
Mr Head hoped environmentalists and the forestry corporation could find a way beyond the impasse because he explained there was potential for incredible growth for the timber market going into the future.
“The fibre of the century has been declared as timber — how dumb are we if we can’t run forestry?”
