Before first light in the forest west of Geeveston, a mechanised harvester idles at the edge of a marked coupe, its operator running the pre-start checks that keep a machine worth several hundred thousand dollars safe on a wet mountain track. Forty metres up a swamp gum nearby, a Bob Brown Foundation volunteer who slept the night in a rigged platform checks her phone for a signal, waiting on the Supreme Court's next word on whether this stand holds swift parrots. One of them earns a wage that has supported Huon Valley families for three generations; the other has been arrested twice this year defending a bird that breeds nowhere else on Earth. Between them sits Sustainable Timber Tasmania (STT), the government-owned business that decided this coupe was ready to log — and the Rockliff government that has spent a decade insisting native forestry is a settled, sustainable industry, even as its own courts, its own balance sheet and its own certifier keep suggesting otherwise.
Tasmania is now the only mainland-adjacent state still logging public native forest at scale. Victoria ended it in January 2024, six years ahead of schedule; Western Australia ended it the same month. Tasmania's Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) with the Commonwealth — signed 8 November 1997 and extended by twenty years in 2017 — still exempts native-forest logging on roughly 800,000 hectares of Permanent Timber Production Zone from full federal environmental assessment (Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement, consolidated text). This piece sets out what the Rockliff Liberal minority government has done with that carve-out, states the strongest case for keeping it, tests that case against STT's own financial and compliance record, and asks what Tasmania risks by being the last state standing.
What the government did
Jeremy Rockliff has governed in minority since the 2024 election, and again since a snap poll on 19 July 2025 returned the Liberals 14 of 35 seats to Labor's 10, with the remaining eleven split between five Greens, five independents and one Shooters, Fishers and Farmers member (Tasmanian Electoral Commission, 2025 House of Assembly results). Native forestry has been defended government policy throughout: the line, repeated in successive Budget statements, is that STT manages the production forest sustainably under the Permanent Native Forest Estate Policy — simplified in 2017 from a threshold test to a straightforward ban on broadscale clearing and conversion — and that logging funds itself and regional communities (Department of State Growth; Forest Practices Authority).
The one real retreat came under duress. For more than a decade the Liberals had held back 356,000 hectares of regrowth forest as a "wood bank" — the Future Potential Production Forest (FPPF) — available for conversion once needed, with 27 parcels covering roughly 39,000 hectares already earmarked. In August 2025, weeks after Rockliff survived his second minority Parliament in eighteen months, Resources Minister Felix Ellis announced the government would no longer pursue opening the FPPF, citing community expectations. It followed, rather than preceded, the arithmetic of needing crossbench votes to survive, and it left the existing 800,000-hectare production estate — and every coupe already scheduled on it — untouched.
Neither opposition offers a cleaner alternative. Labor's 2025 platform promised to extend STT's native-forest wood-supply contracts to 2040, further than the government itself has committed. The Greens are the only parliamentary party proposing to end native-forest logging altogether, alongside a proposed $4 billion transition fund and roughly 3,500 new conservation and restoration jobs — uncosted by the other parties and unadopted by any government to date. Tasmania's native forest estate has effectively been managed the same way under Liberal and Labor governments alike for three decades; this is less a story about one Premier than about a policy no major party has yet been willing to end.
The strongest case
Multi-generational towns, a timber grade plantations can't yet replace, and a subsidy no different to any other public asset
Geeveston, Scottsdale, Smithton and the Huon and Derwent valleys have built skilled, year-round regional employment around native forestry for four generations, in towns tourism's seasonal work does not reach the same way. STT paid $109 million to 544 Tasmanian businesses in 2024–25, including $45 million to harvesting and haulage contractors — current wages, not a projection (Sustainable Timber Tasmania, Annual Report 2024–25). Native forest still supplies specialty sawlog — Tasmanian Oak, Blackwood, Celery Top Pine — that plantation softwood, grown for structural framing, cannot substitute for at commercial volumes for at least another rotation; the furniture, flooring and boatbuilding trades built on it have no plantation equivalent on any realistic timeline. STT and its defenders argue its Community Service Obligation payments — for fire management, roading and public access on land the government still owns — are the same public-good funding every Government Business Enterprise receives, not evidence the core business is failing. And Victoria's and Western Australia's exits were not painless: both required large compensation packages and left timber towns absorbing sudden job losses, a caution against assuming an abrupt end is the safe option.
The evidence
STT's own record is the best test of its central claim. Between 1997 and 2017, Forestry Tasmania (STT's predecessor) ran cumulative cash losses of roughly $454 million and wrote down its forest estate's value by roughly $751 million (approx.), a decline that culminated in a $67 million loss in 2015–16 and forced the 2017 restructure into Sustainable Timber Tasmania (Australia Institute analysis of STT/Forestry Tasmania financial statements). STT has since reported eight consecutive years of nominal profit — but that run includes roughly $8 million a year in Community Service Obligation payments plus a further $4 million a year for fire preparedness, both funded by taxpayers rather than earned from timber sales (Tasmanian Budget Papers; Sustainable Timber Tasmania Community Service Obligation Agreement). Strip that recurring support out and STT's underlying trading position sits far closer to break-even than "eight years profitable" suggests.
The market has reached a similar verdict independently. STT has never secured full Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certification for its native-forest operations; an FSC auditor rejected its application in 2020, citing major non-conformities in how it manages swift parrot habitat, retains large habitat trees within harvested coupes, and reassesses old-growth forest after fire (Tasmanian Legislative Council, Government Business Enterprises Scrutiny Committee, Sustainable Timber Tasmania hearings, 2023–24). STT instead holds Responsible Wood/PEFC certification, with FSC Controlled Wood status limited to its plantation estate — a lower bar that has cost it access to FSC-only export and specialty markets and pushed a meaningful share of native-forest output toward lower-value woodchip export instead.
The compliance gap keeps surfacing in court, not just in audits. The swift parrot — critically endangered, breeding only in Tasmania's eucalypt forests — has twice triggered Supreme Court intervention in two years: a January 2024 injunction halted logging near Geeveston after Justice Porter found a serious question that Forestry Tasmania had breached the law, and in December 2025 the Court found the Bob Brown Foundation had established an adequate case that logging again threatened critical habitat (Supreme Court of Tasmania proceedings, reported via Bob Brown Foundation court filings and Tasmanian Times). In takayna/the Tarkine, the Foundation's decade-long campaign for permanent protection of roughly 495,000 hectares continues to produce blockades and arrests at coupes supplying woodchip for export via Ta Ann — logging STT approved under forest-practices rules the state itself administers.
A forestry business that needs the taxpayer's help to call itself profitable, and a certification it has never managed to pass, are not the marks of a settled industry.
The critique
The government's core claim — that native forestry is a mature, self-sustaining industry Tasmania can keep running indefinitely — does not survive contact with STT's own numbers. A business that lost roughly $454 million in cash and wrote down three-quarters of a billion dollars in asset value over twenty years, then needed a decade of Community Service Obligation payments to report a modest nominal profit, has not demonstrated commercial viability; it has demonstrated that the taxpayer, not the timber market, keeps the ledger in the black. Victoria and Western Australia reached the same conclusion about their own state forestry businesses and closed native-forest logging in January 2024 rather than keep funding it. Tasmania has not run the equivalent test in public, despite carrying the worst financial history of any state forestry business in the country — it has simply kept logging, and kept paying.
The FSC failure sharpens that verdict rather than softening it. A government that wanted to prove its forestry sustainable had every incentive to clear the world's most recognised sustainability bar; instead its 2020 application was rejected on exactly the grounds conservation groups raise — swift parrot habitat, habitat-tree retention, old-growth fire assessment — and it has not reapplied successfully since. That is not a marketing problem the government can blame on activists; it is an independent auditor finding the same compliance gaps a court later found. Two Supreme Court interventions in two years, centred on the same critically endangered bird, are not isolated setbacks — they are the same pattern, habitat identified late and logging approved anyway, recurring because nothing in STT's or the Forest Practices Authority's process has changed to prevent it recurring a third time.
The FPPF backdown, taken at face value, looks like restraint. Read against its timing — announced weeks after a Premier needed crossbench votes to survive a second minority Parliament in eighteen months — it reads instead as evidence that forestry policy in Tasmania is currently set by parliamentary arithmetic, not by any audited assessment of what the estate can sustainably produce or what taxpayers should keep funding. A government that abandoned a decade-old expansion plan in six weeks under pressure has shown it can move quickly when it has to. It has not shown it is willing to apply that same speed to the parts of the existing estate its own auditor, its own certifier and its own courts have all separately flagged.
What the government got right
A fair audit separates what Rockliff caused from what he inherited. The RFA, the Permanent Native Forest Estate Policy, STT's corporate structure and its CSO funding model were built by earlier governments of both colours across three decades; native forestry's bipartisan roots in Tasmania run deeper than any one Premier. Within that inheritance, two things count as genuine, if reluctant, credit. First, the August 2025 FPPF decision is a real retreat whatever its timing: 356,000 hectares that could have been opened to logging were not, and the government stopped short of Labor's own 2040 contract-extension pledge, which would have locked in native-forest supply for longer than the Liberals themselves committed to. Second, the compliance record, while poor, is at least visible: STT's CSO payments are disclosed in the Budget Papers rather than buried in cross-subsidies, the Forest Practices Authority publishes annual compliance data, and the courts that have twice intervened on the swift parrot did so through Tasmania's own legal system. An opaque forestry sector would not have produced the paper trail this article draws on.
The risk to the future
A shrinking industry the budget still underwrites, and a wilderness brand it keeps testing in court
Two risks compound each other. The first is fiscal: STT's history shows what happens when a public forestry business runs past the point its cash flow supports it — a slow build-up of Community Service Obligation and fire-funding payments, followed eventually by a loss and write-down large enough to force a restructure, as happened once already in 2015–17. Nothing in the current settlement changes that trajectory; it only resets the clock, on an estate that is smaller and less certified than the one written down last time. The second risk is reputational and ecological, and harder to reverse: a critically endangered species with nowhere else to breed, combined with recurring Supreme Court losses and an active takayna campaign, keeps Tasmania's forestry sector in the same national conversation as a wilderness brand that now draws roughly $3.6–3.7 billion a year in visitor spending and supports about 50,800 tourism jobs — more than fifteen times the jobs the native-forest sector itself provides (Tourism Tasmania, Dec-2025; industry-commissioned forestry jobs study, 2018). A government that keeps winning the political fight to log while losing the legal and certification fights around it is not securing the industry's future; it is spending down a wilderness brand worth far more than the timber, on the assumption someone else will eventually pay to restore what the courts and the certifiers have already said should not have been cut.