Pressure is building to stop logging along the south coast after a week of protests, public information nights and a NSW Parliamentary Inquiry meeting in Moruya.
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The NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into the Future of the Logging Industry met at Eurobodalla Shire Council Chambers in Moruya on April 5.
Local residents are calling on the inquiry to end native logging, while forestry organisations want to see changes in forest management.
Protestors lined the Princes Highway near Dog Trap Road, Mogo as members of the inquiry drove to Mogo State Forest before meeting in the council chambers.
South East Region Conservation Alliance (SERCA) volunteer Julie Taylor-Mills told the inquiry 96 per cent of native timber ended up as woodchip and pallets, native forest harvesting accounted for less than 1.5 per cent of employment in the south coast and that this number had been decreasing since 2017.
"$8 million has gone to create mountain bike trails through dead and recovering forest near Mogo full of logging stumps. Why?" she asked the inquiry.
Nick Hopkins from Friends of the Forest Mogo also addressed the inquiry. His Malua Bay home was destroyed by fire on New Years Eve 2019. He was horrified to see logging commence in Mogo State Forest in March 2020, so soon after the fires.
He showed the inquiry an image of an endangered greater glider displaced by the fires and the destruction of hollow-bearing trees upon which it relied for shelter.
"The Environmental Protection Authority had imposed site-specific operating conditions," Mr Hopkins told the inquiry. "One of these recognised the critical importance of retaining all the remaining hollow bearing trees. No such trees were to be felled.
"When the Coastwatchers and Friends of the Forest members started compliance monitoring we found hollow-bearing trees scattered throughout every compartment we checked."
Earlier in March, NSW Foresty Corporation was fined more than $45,000 for breaking regulations while logging in Mogo State Forest.
However that is because the Integrated Forestry Operations Approvals (IFOAs) - NSW logging laws - are too precise, according to South East Timber Association secretary Peter Rutherford.
"The way they [IFOAs] have been developed, you can basically give anyone a uniform and a tape measure and they can go out and find fault," Mr Rutherford said.
Mr Rutherford, who worked in the timber industry for more than 40 years before retiring in 2018, also addressed the inquiry on April 5.
He said the timber industry had to be managed sustainably, and this involved reviewing fire-management policies to include regular low-intensity burning which he saw as important to the health of forests and biodiversity.
He said mismanagement of forests was "basically destroying our forests and will underpin the next avalanche of species extinctions in this country".
"We have to manage forests - there is no argument about that."
Mr Rutherford told the Bay Post it was "selfish, immoral, and just plain wrong" to stop logging in Australia, because it forced demand to be outsourced to countries where the industry is far less monitored, and the environmental destruction and working conditions were far worse.
"People who think we should stop harvesting here should get in a plane to Sumatra and have a look around to see what we are doing to help Indonesia destroy their forests," he said.
He acknowledged the NSW Forestry Corporation had been fined for not following all the regulations, but said it was "not like clear-falling a rainforest from one horizon to the other".
Mr Rutherford said there was no correlation between protecting forests and saving animal biodiversity.
"On page two of the New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, September 2021, zero extinctions report, it states there is evidence the overall decline in biodiversity in New South Wales is occurring even in National Parks," he told the inquiry.
"The more National Parks we have got in New South Wales, the longer the threatened and critically endangered species lists have become," he told the Bay Post.
The previous evening - April 4 - more than 100 local residents gathered to hear Professor David Lindenmayer present an alternative vision for logging on the south coast as part of a Nature Conservation Council (NCC) event.
Nature Conservation south coast community organiser Wilson Harris said the research presented by Prof Lindenmayer demonstrated logging exacerbated the effects of bushfires.
"Protecting native forests is good for the environment, good for regional economies, and we now know it is good for reducing the risks from bushfires," Mr Harris said.
He said it was time for NSW to follow Western Australia and Victoria and commit to ending native forest logging.
"This Parliamentary Inquiry is a real opportunity to understand native forests are worth more standing than logged - largely for woodchip - and to recommend an end date to native forest logging."
The NNC event came just weeks after Eurobodalla deputy mayor Alison Worthington raised the issue of logging at a council meeting on March 22.
"We need to make a stand and call for the end of native forest logging in our backyard," Cr Worthington said.