STATEMENT REGARDING THE PENTARCH TIMBER MILL AT HERONS CREEK ON THE MID NORTH COAST - 17 November, 2025

Breaking

3 Dec

Any suggestions that the big Pentarch Forestry mill on the Mid North Coast will close rests entirely with the duplicitous and fallacious actions of Labor Governments.

In its perpetual and misguided quest for Green votes and preferences, and a new-found zeal for potential earnings from Carbon Credits, the NSW ALP machine is dumping the jobs of many hundreds of workers, including 80 at Pentarch’s Herons Creek mill, and changing the tenure of 176,000 hectares of State Forest to create a so-called Koala National Park.

How the ALP can ignore the interests of all these mill workers and Union members to instead satisfy the ideology of a handful of conservationists, is beyond hypocrisy; it is a lamentable exercise in base politics.

Let’s be clear: this Park is not really about saving Koalas; it’s about Premier Minns’ and Prime Minister Albanese’s net-zero deals. A closure of this timber mill shows the stark reality of the pursuit of net-zero rather than the sensible approach to emissions reduction and putting Australian industry and jobs first and foremost.

Further, the decision to create a so-called Koala Park - besides ignoring the facts and science on best-practice forestry and koala habitat management - will end up being both counter productive and very expensive:

Counter-productive because the National Parks service is not sufficiently funded to actually and properly manage their estate, especially for wildfire prevention, and
Very expensive because the taxpayers of NSW will have to foot the massive bills for all the redundancy packages, mill closure compensations, business continuity arrangements, social dislocation, community support, alternative employment arrangements and the almost-inevitable court cases seeking redress.

For anyone associated with this decision by the NSW ALP to suggest that this whole process is just, dignified, warranted or in the State or National interest, is delusional.

ENDS

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