Environmental activists have condemned what they call a ‘carve out’ of federal legislation protecting endangered species and have vowed to stand in the way of native forest logging in NSW.
North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) Vice President Susie Russell is unrepentant about her resistance to logging in the area. “We will stand there and say, ‘You’ll have to arrest me before you can start logging this glider habitat’,” she says. “We’ll create enough of a spectacle to force them to go away for a while.”
The Forestry Corporation of NSW (FCNSW) is set to continue logging more than 300ha of Bulga State Forest – 40 per cent of which has been mapped for permanent protection – on the state’s Mid North Coast, from 1 August, 2024.
Logging in this part of the forest was suspended three times in 2023. In a large part, this was due to physical resistance from local community members and activists comprising the Save Bulga Forest movement.
During this resistance, Russell was arrested.

Now retired and spending her days volunteering with a range of conservation groups, Russell has been advocating for native forests since 1992.
“I’ve moved my position over time from thinking that it was possible to have ecologically sustainable forest management to realising we’ve got to shut down this industry now,” she Russell says.
“It’s so destructive and it hasn’t become any more sensitive with the passing of time. It’s got worse.”
This worsening of forest protections, she says, has a lot to do with endangered species and agreements between the NSW and Australian governments which exempt forestry actions from federal assessment.
Regional Forest Agreements ‘carve out’ federal protections
The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) is the key piece of legislation, federally, designed to protect Australia’s biodiversity.
Actions require assessment and approval under the EPBC Act when they are likely to have an impact on one or more of nine matters of national environmental significance (MNES).
One of these matters is threatened species. The act identifies 654 threatened Australian fauna species, including the Southern Greater Glider.
If a project is referred under the EPBC Act due to its likely impact on MNES, the federal Environment Minister is responsible for approval. Actions assessed can include activities like development, mining and land clearing.
However, projects can be exempt from assessment under the EPBC Act if they are covered by a bilateral agreement between the state and federal governments. In the case of native forest logging within NSW, exemption comes from a suite of agreements knows as Regional Forestry Agreements (RFAs).
The RFAs are a mechanism for the NSW Government-owned FCNSW to run logging operations within State Forests without the requirement for each action to be assessed and approved under the EPBC Act – except where they impact World Hertiage areas or Ramsar Wetlands.
According to the NSW Government, this provides a “streamlined approach to satisfying Commonwealth legislative requirements for environmental planning and assessment”.
The three RFAs in NSW are Eden, Southern and North East, signed in 1999, 2000 and 2001, respectively – each with a 20-year expiry. Combined, they cover a roughly 80km wide strip up the NSW coast, excluding an area around Greater Sydney and Wollongong.
The basis of each agreement is to implement ecologically sustainable forest management, maintain a reserve system, support an internationally competitive wood and wood products industry, and promote conservation and management of the private forest estate.
“The Regional Forest Agreements included landscape scale assessments to create a comprehensive, adequate and representative reserve network that protects more than 80 per cent of public native forests in national parks and reserves,” a FCNSW spokesperson says.
A renewal of the agreements in 2019, which came about through a variation implemented shortly before expiry, saw them extended out to 2039.

Russell says the agreements amount to a “carve out where regional forest agreements are basically deemed to be exempt from the EPBC and don’t protect endangered species at all”.
In August 2021, NEFA, represented by the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO), challenged the variation of the North East RFA in the Federal Court on the basis that it did not assess climate change, endangered species, or old-growth forests as it was required to do.
NEFA and the EDO argued that the amended RFA no longer constituted a regional forest agreement because, in amending the RFA, regard was not had to an “assessment” of “environmental values” and “principles of ecologically sustainable management” as required by the RFA Act.
Therefore, NEFA argued, actions taken under the amended North East RFA would no longer be exempt from assessment under the EPBC Act.
In January 2024, Federal Court Justice Melissa Perry dismissed the challenge, finding that assessment was only required when parties entered into an RFA, not upon amendment.
In any case, Justice Perry stated, materials before the Prime Minister during the renewal process did address each of the values and principles required for an RFA.
However, according to Justice Perry, “the effect of an RFA is not to leave a regulatory void with respect to the forest regions”.
“…an RFA provides an alternative mechanism by which the objects of the EPBC Act can be achieved by way of an intergovernmental agreement allocating responsibility to a State for regulation of environmental matters of national environmental significance within an agreed framework,” Justice Perry’s decision states.
“As such, the question of whether or not to enter into or vary an intergovernmental agreement of this nature is essentially a political one, the merits of which are matters for the government parties, and not the Courts, to determine.”
Current state of RFA and five-yearly reviews
Part of the RFA renewals included a requirement for five-yearly reviews, conducted by an independent person or group, which would be tabled in parliament and responded to by both governments.
A key purpose of these reviews is to demonstrate how the parties had provided for the MNES.
The first review since renewal of the RFAs is due to begin in 2024 but Russell says the review process is likely to just be a “rubber stamp”.
“I’ve been around long enough to know that the decisions about whether forests get protected or not are political ones. They can be forced by legal action but ultimately the decisions are political and we expect nothing from a bureaucrat-led review,” she says. “They will say ‘all good, keep going’ when it is clearly not.”
The FCNSW spokesperson says native forestry is regulated by detailed environmental conditions called the Coastal Integrated Forestry Operations Approval (CIFOA), which includes specific conditions to protect threatened species. “A thorough planning process must be completed ahead of every operation, which includes ecological surveys and mapping to identify and protect environmental features such as rainforest and old growth,” the spokesperson says.
In August 2023, the NSW Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) issued a Stop Work Order for FCNSW operations in the Tallaganda State Forest after EPA inspectors found a deceased Southern Greater Glider, listed as endangered under the EPBC Act, within 50 metres of forestry harvest operations.
The Forestry Corporation responded by saying it is “fully committed to investigating what had occurred” and had previously identified almost 400 greater gliders in Tallaganda.
The stop work order was extended for an additional 40 days in October, November and December. Under the CIFOA, FCNSW is required to conduct searches for greater and yellow-bellied gliders, prior to logging, and establish 50 metre exclusion zones around identified den trees.
In the time between the initial order being issued and the first extension, the EPA recorded 89 gliders and 20 den trees in the area subject to the order.
This was around the same time as the EPA issued Stop Work Orders at Flat Rock State Forest after inspectors found a greater glider den tree within 30 metres of operations. This is despite no den trees being identified by Forestry prior to logging commencing.
“The EPA alleges that FCNSW has not conducted detailed and thorough searches necessary to identify all Greater Glider and Yellow-Bellied Glider den trees within the Flat Rock State Forest compartment,” EPA Executive Director Operations Jason Gordon said at the time.
In February 2024, the EPA announced changes which require FCNSW to undertake nocturnal surveys for greater gliders.
In a letter to the EPA in May 2024, a number of conservation groups, headed by South East Forest Recue and including the NEFA, alleged 188 breaches by the FCNSW of the new conditions designed to protect glider habitat.
“We’re in a war of attrition here. The native forest logging industry is on a downhill run to its own extinction,” Russell says. “Part of the role of reports like that is to show the public and politicians that the rules aren’t being followed and the rules are inadequate anyway.
“Change is needed.”
The EPA responded by amending site-specific conditions to now require the Forestry Corporation to implement a 25-metre logging exclusion zone around any tree in which a Greater Glider is sighted during search and survey.
Given den trees can only be identified if a glider is seen entering or exiting a hollow, which take at least 100 years to form, survey requirements were clarified to require the first transect to commence within 30 minutes of sunset – when gliders are most likely to leave their dens.
Changes to the CIFOA also include more protections for larger and hollow-bearing trees, based on identified areas of high glider density.

Citizen scientists using new guidelines to protect native species
Community conservation groups, like Save Bulga Forest, are using new EPA guidelines to protect pockets of native species habitat. “We’ve done four citizen science camps out in the forest and we’ve done numerous random surveys looking for greater glider dens,” Susie Russell says.
Under the guidelines, the group hopes each glider they sight and each den tree they identify will protect and additional 25m or 50m radius of native forest. “So we have been going out regularly for the last year and a bit, trying to find greater glider den trees. In the area that is suspended we have found 21 so far and seen lots of greater gliders,” Russell says.“That punches 21 little holes in their harvest area.”
Despite having an ecologist as part of the group and following what Russell describes as a “diligent” approach to surveys, she is concerned FCNSW won’t accept their findings. “Forestry have said they are not going to accept any of our glider observations, only the ones that they see. But they haven’t, as yet, challenged our den observations,” she says.

The forestry spokesperson says the areas in Bulga slated for logging in August are regrowth forests that have been harvested for timber “many times before”. “Operations will be managed in line with the detailed CIFOA conditions,” the spokesperson says. “If community members have information about records, that information should be provided to Forestry Corporation so that it can be assessed by its ecologists.”
Russell says accountability for FCNSW is inadequate and, despite some progress on endangered species protections, the time has come to end native forest logging on public lands. “Obviously stronger protocols and rules are better, but we can’t be relying on the public to go out and gather the data about what’s being done properly,” she says. “We’re now at the point where the damage being done is so great that we just have to stop it.
“It’s not a case of just improving the logging protocols anymore. We tried that in the 90s and in the early 2000s. Now we just have to stop it.”