“A dog of an industry.”
This is how Ecology and Conservation Biology Professor David Lindenmayer from ANU describes native logging, adding that it costs taxpayers a fortune.
In Australia, there are two types of logging: plantation and native.
Plantation logging grows mostly radiata pine and blue gum eucalyptus on designated estates across the country, primarily for construction timber and woodchip exports.
Native forest logging, meanwhile, targets eucalypts like mountain ash and alpine ash in Victoria and river red gum and ironbark in NSW.
Native logging also occurs in Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia.
Plantations cover about 1.8 million hectares in comparison to the 27 million hectares of native forest designated for current and future logging.
Plantations produce 90 percent of Australia's timber by volume.
The trees are cut down for timber and other products including boxes, woodchips and paper pulp.
🪓 The chop: Lindenmayer is a key voice against native logging, a topic he has researched for decades. He says every year, around 715,000 rugby fields worth of native forest are cleared. Roughly twice the size of the ACT.
Visit a harvested native forest one to two years later and you may find sun-baked ground, waist-high timber debris and virtually no signs of recovery.
According to Federal Government data, on average one in five logged native forest areas in NSW fails to adequately regenerate after logging.
Lindenmayer says it doesn’t need to be this way, and that there are workarounds to ensure native forest is protected.
📉 Lose lose lose: Native forest logging is "a lose, lose, lose all around", he says. "Economically it doesn't work, ecologically it doesn't work, and the industry employs very few people, so socially it doesn't work either."
The waste: Between 40 and 60 percent of every tonne of harvested native forest is left behind as debris, also known as forestry slash.
For every hectare of forest chopped down there can be 450 tonnes of waste.
Forestry slash is set alight in a regeneration burn, and what’s left will release carbon dioxide over time.
This is not the only way native forest logging releases carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. Another large contributor is the burning of fossil fuels in the harvesting process.
🪵 Product: The industry likes to say some of the carbon is still stored in the products made from the harvest. Lindenmayer says it’s only a fraction of what was originally being stored.
He says only four percent of logged native forest ends up in timber products, half of which is high quality timber and half of which is used in pallets.
"It's a really silly use of a really important forest," Lindenmayer says.
💧 What we're giving up: Lindenmayer argues the economic case is hard to make when you consider what intact forests are actually worth:
Healthy forests produce clean, reliable water supplies. The older the trees, the more water flows into catchments rather than being absorbed by the trees themselves.
It takes decades to fully grow native trees in place of those logged, and during that time the younger forest drinks more and delivers less.
🔥 Fire risk: Lindenmayer says younger forests aren’t as resilient as older ones. The Federal Government’s Climate Risk Assessment states that forests aren’t growing back as fast as they they used to due to the effects of climate change
He says the Victorian Government is legally required to restore logged forest to its original condition, but that this has not occurred. He said a warming planet will make it more difficult for a government to meet that requirement.
🧾 The bill: In Tasmania, the native logging industry cost the state more than $1.3 billion between 1997 and 2017, according to the Australia Institute, a think tank dedicated to “a fairer Australia”.
In Victoria, the government spent more than $1.5 billion, much of it transitioning the industry out of native forests altogether when they became financially unviable.
"The taxpayer is paying for the ‘privilege’ of having its own forest cut down," Lindenmayer says.
👷 What about the jobs? According to the Australia Institute, few workers are employed in native forest logging in Tasmania - between 0.1-0.3 percent of the workforce in that state.
NSW employs fewer than 300 people in jobs directly and indirectly related to native forest logging. The Eden Woodchip Mill, in the region, employs 30 people.
Commercial pine and eucalypt plantations, operating in many of the same regional towns, could meet the same timber demand, Lindenmayer says.
In a 2025 submission to the federal government, the Australian Forest Products Association identified significant shortages across forestry occupations, some of which it attributed to a lack of undergraduate training programs.
Lindenmayer says native loggers have the skills plantations need.
🤷 So why do we still log native forests? Lindenmayer says the Construction, Forestry and Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU) donates to the Labor Party, which puts pressure on the party to maintain the status quo.
He also says Forestry Australia, the peak body for the profession, is institutionally committed to logging. Forestry Australia’s constitution says one of its goals is to: “Develop and represent the issues around best practice sustainable forestry standards to governments, regulators, other professional associations and the community.”
🌳 The fix: Lindenmayer says Australia needs to protect large areas of native forest, shift all wood production into plantations and use intact forests as long-term carbon stores.
"That forest is extremely valuable for water production, carbon storage, biodiversity, tourism, recreation and cleaning the air above our cities," he says. "We are making a very silly use of a very high value asset for very low value outcomes."
Thumbnail: An area in Tallaganda State Forest logged in 2023 showing very few seedlings emerging two years later in 2025. Credit: David Gallan WWF.