00:00So IPART's the Independent Pricing and Regulatory Tribunal in New South Wales, and once every
00:08three years they're required by legislation to sort of open the books of Forest Corp New
00:12South Wales, which is the government-owned logging company, and look at how it's doing
00:18when it comes to making money from its native logging practices.
00:24So each year, each review period, it does that and normally finds that they're losing
00:27money, and this year they found again that it was losing money and it's increased the
00:32losses by about 18% compared to the previous review period.
00:36But what was really interesting was not that they merely noted this, but that they went
00:39on and drew some conclusions and made some recommendations about that to government.
00:44One of them was that the native logging industry in New South Wales is not economically viable,
00:49and they said furthermore that it ought to attempt after 2028, when a lot of the contracts
00:54come up for renegotiation, to transition to become economically viable, and said if
00:59that's not possible, that the government should reconsider the feasibility of the industry
01:04in the future, essentially saying that they should consider whether or not it should continue
01:07at all.
01:08And in fact, they noted that in two other states, very recently in the past year, native
01:13logging has indeed stopped.
01:15So in Victoria and Western Australia, the government has stopped it there, and they
01:19also noted the environmental concerns around it.
01:21The logging industry has said, look, the industry is viable.
01:23So I spoke to James Euster, who's the president of Australian Forest and Forest Products Association
01:28of New South Wales, and he said, well, it's viable, and in fact, we know that we could
01:33be selling a lot more wood, it's just that there are environmental protections stopping
01:36them from doing that.
01:37I spoke to Forest Corp New South Wales as well, and they said, look, they were very
01:40muted, but they said we accept the recommendations from IPART.
01:43So it's been a big discussion point for the New South Wales government, when they had
01:47promised prior to the election to do two things, really, on forestry.
01:50One was to create the Great Koala National Park, which would cut off logging, actually,
01:55from a very large area on the north coast of New South Wales.
01:59It would protect it from logging and other impacts.
02:01They haven't yet done that, but that's widely expected to happen early in the new year.
02:06The other thing they promised to do was to conduct a review of the future of the industry,
02:11and they're still progressing with that.
02:13They've appointed an expert panel, which is going around and consulting, and we do know
02:16that one of the options that they're considering is a transition away from logging, i.e. shutting
02:22the native logging industry down.
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