Susanna Freymark
The Pentarch Forestry Mill in Kyogle is closing at the end of October and 25 workers will be made redundant.
Five Pentarch staff will stay on to decommission the Summerland Way site and make it safe – this will take about a month.
It’s a huge blow for a town the size of Kyogle to lose that many jobs in one go.
(There is some confusion between the union and other reports on whether 25 or 31 workers are being laid off as the five staying on may have been counted twice).
The Timber, Furnishing and Textiles Union (TFTU) NSW secretary Alison Rudman blames the layoffs on the State Government decision to create the Great Koala National Park.
“The wood supply stopped the day the koala park was announced on Father’s Day, 2025,” Ms Rudman said.
The picture may be more complicated. Pentarch reported log shortfalls at its Koolkhan mill six months before the moratorium.
If the mill closure is a result of the government’s moratorium on timber harvesting within the proposed park boundary – the moratorium covers 176,000 hectares of state forest from Kempsey to Grafton – it means a government support package for the laid off workers.
IndyNR.com has asked State MP Janelle Saffin and Pentarch Head Office for comment.
Pentarch Head Office said it was unable to assist with our enquiry at this time when we asked questions about the Kyogle closure. That’s a no comment from them at a time when information is needed.
Ms Rudman confirmed that the support package for Kyogle redundancies will be handled by the government.
The government redundancy package includes four weeks of base pay for each year of employment with an impacted mill capped at $150,000. This amount includes the employer’s own redundancy payment; it isn’t paid on top of it.
The package includes extra for workers over 45 with three more weeks of pay for every year of service after age 45, capped at $50,000 and calculated separately from the top-up.
Other offers include retraining money up to $9,000 and a relocation amount up to $45,000 for workers who move more than 50 kilometres for a new job.
The package covers North Coast workers (full-time, part-time or casual) who were employed on September 7, 2025 and are made redundant by March 7, 2027.
However, eligibility to this package also depends on the employer being a wood supply agreement holder with demonstrated impacts from the moratorium. Each worker needs a separation certificate or a letter from the employer saying the redundancy was because of the Great Koala National Park moratorium.
So whether Kyogle workers get the government money depends largely on how Pentarch describes the reason for the closure. The package was originally framed around the six mills directly affected by the moratorium.
When the State Government imposed a temporary moratorium on timber harvesting within the proposed park boundary from September 8 last year, it said it would affect six of more than 25 mills in the region and about 300 jobs.
In early July this year, Pentarch closed one of its mills at Herons Creek, south west of Port Macquarie, with then Pentarch director Stephen Dadd saying the operation had been running on stockpiles that had now run out.
In March last year, 38 workers were stood down at Pentarch’s Koolkhan sawmill near Grafton. At the time Pentarch cited a shortfall in logs from Forestry Corporation.
Kyogle sits well north of the Great Koala Park. Pentarch clearly runs a sizeable operation at 13056 Summerland Way and as recently as April this year it was still advertising permanent roles at the Kyogle sawmill.
Information about the closure is still coming in and IndyNR.com will update and offer more stories on this news that will affect all of Kyogle, not only the workers who are laid off.
According to the 2021 Census, the town of Kyogle had a population of 2804 and the wider Kyogle Council area had 9359 people.