Sustainable Timber Tasmania's (STT) 24/25 Annual Report attempts to project an image of strategic progress and financial health, proudly declaring "eight years of consecutive profitable results." However, a rigorous, critical examination of the financial statements, viewed through the lens of industry realities and basic economic principles, reveals a far harsher truth: STT's reported profitability is an accounting construct, propped up by non-cash revaluations and heavily reliant on a substantial government grant for unavoidable public land management duties, and crucially, benefits from the undisclosed, massive subsidy of free access to public land and its timber resource. This deceptive facade of success not only masks a core operation that is economically unviable but also obscures the ongoing accrual of significant, unquantified societal and environmental liabilities that would largely cease if native forest logging operations were to stop.
