DEAR News Of The Area,

VESTED timber industry interests will always try to cook the books to suit their narrative.

The reality is that as at 30 June 2023 the Forestry Corporation lost about $15 million of our taxes logging our globally significant native forests.

This fact is contained in their annual report.

In losing this precious public money they are sending our Koalas and Greater Gliders and globally significant biota rapidly towards extinction and destroying our water security.

This includes befouling the regional drinking water supply for all municipal residents from Sawtell to Yamba.

The cost to ratepayers to fix this is uphill of $100 million and may not even be possible because of how putrid the rivers have become because of landscape-scale industrial logging and the broad-acre poisoning of the landscape (including with nasty chemicals like Simazine banned in other jurisdictions) by this loss-making crown logging company.

The $15 million loss to taxpayers delivered profits to loggers, haulers, millers and the entire retail chain. This is kleptocracy.

Vested interests will also try to deceive with other narratives to suit their profit-taking interests.

The reality is that industrial logging dries out landscapes, makes fires much more severe and frequent and destroys our water security.

Homes were destroyed at Nymboida in November 2019 because the Forestry Corporation of NSW lit significant lines of fire across the western and north-western Dorrigo Plateau.

This was despite numerous local landholders, multiple local RFS brigade members and any sane folk looking on and asking (and at times demanding) them not to.

They did this because these forests were the driest that they had ever been and it was impossible to extinguish fire in these conditions.

But still Forestry Corp kept lighting fires in a massive arc from Dundurrabin to Ellis, Chaelundi, Boundary Creek and Sheas Nob.

These fires all joined together under a massive westerly wind, became the Liberation Trail mega-fire and did so much harm to these globally significant forests that places such as Hortons Creek are dead to this very day.

Thankfully nobody died.

Our economy and our survival is underpinned by our water security and our safety depends upon the climate stabilising role that our forests play (making it rain and keeping the landscape moist).

The NSW Government (via Forestry Corporation) is going hammer and tongs to industrially log the best parts of the Dorrigo Plateau within the Great Koala National Park whilst they still can, including destroying old growth koala habitats right now in Sheas Nob State Forest between Nymboida and Dundurrabin.

The carnage must stop or further irreparable harm will be done to us all and the Great Koala National Park will have no Koalas in it.

Don’t believe the hype of the vested interests profiting from this harm to us all.

Regards,
Mark GRAHAM,
Coffs Harbour.