Public forest lockups are bad for the community

Public forest lockups are bad for the community

Friday 15 Aug 2025

The Australian Forest Products Association (AFPA) is renewing calls for governments nationally to maintain more multiple-use public forests, better recognise their community amenity benefits and their critical provision for sustainably sourced timber and wood-fibre resources to build the nation, Deputy Chief Executive Officer of AFPA, Richard Hyett said this week.

“The NSW Parliament has been inquiring into access restrictions to public lands and waterways. This is a timely opportunity to remind policy and decision makers of the benefits multiple-use public forests provide for the community, through recreation and other uses and through sustainable forestry. It’s also an opportunity to call out the worrying trend of more forest lockups and conversion to national parks,” Richard Hyett said.

NSW has a very large conservation reserve network including a comprehensive, adequate and representative reserve network encompassing more than 7.5 million hectares of national parks and reserves. In NSW alone over the past 30 years, more than 1.2 million hectares of state forests have been converted to national parks, meaning nearly 10 per cent of NSW’s total area has become national park. At the same time, Australia’s total forest area grew by 2.8 million hectares from 2008 to 2021, while total multiple-use public native forest area, has more than halved since the mid-1990s, equating now to about three per cent of Australia’s total forest area.

“This is minuscule compared with the European Union where 84 per cent of the Native (Natural) forest is available for sustainable wood production and it needs to be considered in that context,” Richard Hyett said.

“Despite this, activists continue to demand that well managed multiple-use public native forests be locked up instead of demanding that under resourced National Parks be better managed to deliver the appropriate protections for biodiversity and threatened species for which they were created.”

Multiple-use public forests provide an enormous array of benefits, including:

Sustainable timber and wood-fibre resources
Recreational and educational opportunities for bush users
An active management style that encourages carbon sequestration
Flexibility to manage for fire, disease and other risks
Often, better biodiversity and habitat outcomes

“In many cases, the revenue generated from activities in these forests, helps contribute to their conservation and ongoing management. We should also remember and acknowledge that many of Australia’s private forestry estates are made available for recreational activities, broadening the benefits these forests provide to the community,” Richard Hyett said.

Furthermore, the recently released Federal Government’s Timber Fibre Strategy points to the growing gap between domestic sawn timber demand, for activities like housing construction, and domestic supply capacity – already exacerbated by reduced access to sustainable native forest timber.

“Sadly, multiple-use public forests have become a soft target for governments to satisfy misguided activists who irresponsibly demand that forests sit under lock and key. It’s time for governments to better recognise the value of forests that are open for use, including sustainable forestry, and give them better consideration, rather than the lazy approach of lockups and conversion to national parks,” Richard Hyett concluded.

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Source: Australian Forest Products Association (AFPA)

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