It’s time!

TIMBER Workers For Forests’ years of lobbying State Government and Forestry Tasmania to fulfill their responsibility to the Tasmanian community has been frustrating and sometimes felt like “banging your head against a brick wall”.

TWFF’s aims are “to promote forest management practices that will guarantee an ongoing supply of high quality Tasmanian timber into the future, resulting in many more meaningful employment opportunities in perpetuity.”

TWFF considers that Government policy aims to satisfy the demand from the high volume/low value adding sector while paying scant regard to the requirements of those sectors of the timber industry that create high value products and sustainable employment while using far less timber.

For many years now hundreds of thousands of cubic metres of round, unprocessed hardwood and softwood have been exported to South East Asia, where they are value added into products that we then re-import.

We still see high quality hardwood logs and split parts of big old logs — that could be processed in local sawmills for use in building or furniture — heading off to the chip mill to satisfy export demand. Huge quantities of virtually irreplaceable slow growing and unique timber are harvested undersized or immature or even burnt, in the rush to extract large volumes of Eucalypt with poor log grading practices and consequently low return to the forest owners for sawmilling and chipping.

Unsustainable and wasteful

Mixed species forests are being destroyed and replaced with monoculture plantations or Eucalypt dominated regrowth forest that will again be clearfelled within decades. In the meantime, as a result of unsustainable over cutting and round log export and the lack of proper silvicultural practices, (thinning and pruning) the local softwood value adding industry cannot even get a long term guarantee of supply from current plantations.

TWFF believes that Forestry Tasmania’s current practices will eliminate almost all harvestable ‘minor species’ timber from existing production areas except for that remaining in STMUs, (Special Timber Management Units) the area of which has been halved with the signing of the recent Community Forest Agreement.

The forest industry, as currently structured, is unsustainable and wasteful. Most of the profits that are generated are not remaining in Tasmania but being exported along with the resource.

This is above party politics. It’s time for a change and perhaps Minority Government is what is needed to introduce transparency and bring about genuine, honest, non-partisan debate on this important and urgent issue.

Frank Strie Professional in Forest Management and On-Site Sawmilling.
President of Timber Workers for Forests (TWFF) http://www.twff.com.au
Brady’s Lookout Rd.
Rosevears