The roosting chickens (2)

THOSE PROPHETIC WORDS …

The Sunday Tasmanian, 7th February, 1988

Woodchip industry ‘gone in 20 years’

By Brandt Teale

TASMANIA has been warned that it could lose its multi-million-dollar woodchip industry to South America within 20 years.

A report by an eminent Tasmanian botanist says the tree farms of Brazil and other South American countries will yield 14 times the timber of Tasmania’s forests.

Ironically, one of the trees used extensively in South America is the Tasmanian blue gum (E. globulus).

The report says that when harvesting finally begins, it could put hundreds of Tasmanian timber workers out of jobs and leave the industry in tatters.

Prof William Jackson, the former head of the Department of Botany at the University of Tasmania, published his report more than two years ago and it now has been submitted to the Helsham inquiry.

The Northern Tasmanian campaign director of the Wilderness Society, Mr Greg Sargent, said yesterday: “The woodchip companies talk of forestry management but they can’t see past the next 20 years.

“Tasmania’s biggest customer for woodchips, the Jujo Paper Co of Japan, has a large plantation in Brazil and most likely won’t even be bothered with Tasmania once the other plantations are ready.

“In the meanwhile, they’re taking what they can get while it’s going cheap.”

According to Prof Jackson’s report, which was sent to the then Federal Minister for the Environment, Mr Barry Cohen, in 1985, the overseas plantations will have a minimum woodchip yield of 20 cubic metres a hectare a year compared with Tasmania’s current average of 2.4 cubic metres.

He wrote then: “With the shockingly low [Tasmanian] yields presently being attained, one can only be convinced that the companies are making such large relative profits compared with outlay that they are not interested in changing to more efficient methods which would greatly lessen the environmental impact”.

The report also said that there were major errors in recent environmental impact statements which would lead to economic difficulties and which would increase demand for subsidies from Tasmanian and Commonwealth taxpayers.

The Brazil plantation with more than 14 million trees was 400 kilometres north of Rio de Janeiro and was started in 1967.

Christine Milne, Tasmanian Parliament, Forest Reform Bill 1991:

“North Broken Hill wants those forests to woodchip them while there is still a market for old-growth woodchips overseas. That market will have run out by the year 2000 because other countries around the world have had the foresight to get out of their native forests and to get their planations in and growing at a rate so they will be coming on stream.

The future for the forest industry in Tasmania is plantation based: in the pulpwood area it is in eucalypt plantations; in the softwood area it is in pine plantations for sawmilling. If we go on entrenching the forest industries in the native forests, not only is it an environmental disaster for Tasmania but it is an economic disaster because we will have missed the jump, we will have missed the opportunity to get into the future growth areas in the forest industries, which are those plantations.

“….There are no job guarantees. I have said time and time again in this House, and I will say it again: North Broken Hill intends to shed from 1,300 jobs down to 750 jobs at least at its Burnie pulpmill. There has been deafening silence — not one attempt from that company to deny that fact and yet it runs around saying, ‘We need this legislation for the security of existing jobs’. When resource security was first mooted it was mooted as being the panacea for unemployment: ‘This will provide jobs in Tasmania’. Then there was a slight change of focus: Mark Addis came out and told us it was to protect existing jobs, and now we have Robert Bain saying it will not even protect existing jobs.

“…It is not possible in an age of technological advance, to protect jobs in manufacturing industry and that is why the future for Tasmania must be in the high-value, low-volume area. We cannot compete on mass commodity markets with the rest of the developing world coming on stream and the sooner we face up to the economic reality that Tasmania is in, the better.”
Hansard, 31 October 1991, pp 4659-60-61-62

And the final word from Wayne Crawford, Saturday Mercury columnist:

Fast forward to 2004 and Tasmanian Labor Premier Paul Lennon was promising repeatedly that in Tasmania’s sacred forestry industry, “not one job will be lost” on his watch.

To be fair, he was giving the guarantee in response to suggestions coming from groups and individuals as diverse as the Greens, and his own Federal leader and aspiring prime minister Mark Latham, that the industry needed a shake up — a complete restructuring, both to stop logging in Tasmania’s high conservation old-growth forests and, with Latham’s promise of $800 million in federal assistance, to overhaul the industry and upgrade forestry practices, skills and technology.

But all the same, the protective, supportive attitude by both the Federal and State governments, pampering forestry contractors during the hype and fury of the 2004 Federal election campaign, contrasts with the dismissive approach now that the industry’s contractors really are finding themselves in deep trouble as timber giant Gunns Ltd unilaterally cuts back their contracts.

Now, the forestry workers and log truck owner-drivers are being told it’s nothing to do with the governments — it’s all because of the international market forces beyond their control, and the contractors will just have to endure the pain because woodchip orders are down.

The promised $800 million — which, if you recall, the forestry contractors rallied and railed against in Launceston, back slapping and handshaking Prime Minister John Howard for his alternative, more modest proposals under which he also promised that “not one Tasmanian timber job would be lost” — must now seem like a mightily attractive dream. (And the union leaders’ enthusiastic support for John Howard on that fateful day in Launceston must seem like a nightmare on reflection, now that the same Howard Government has introduced its new union-busting industrial relations reforms.)

And,

“Your jobs are not negotiable,” Lennon declared in a message read to the same Launceston rally that greeted John Howard as an industry messiah. “While I am Premier of Tasmania you can count on the leadership of the State government to protect your jobs,” Lennon’s message said.

It’s a different story now. “The cyclical downturn has nothing to do with government decisions,” bleated Economic Development and Resources Minister Bryan Green this week, trying to explain why the Government really couldn’t do much to help contractors who were seeing forestry jobs disappearing before their very eyes, as Gunns sought to cut or end their contracts for supply of logs. He held out the prospect of the pulp mill as the most promising development for “contractors who can ride out the rough times” — although it was not explained how things would be better if there were cyclical downturns in demand for pulp.

It was much the same line being pushed the by Federal Forestry Minister Eric Abetz — lots of sympathy and regrets about contractors who’d had their timber harvesting contracts cancelled or cut, but it’s “market forces” so don’t expect any help from the Government.

The forest contractors didn’t get much encouragement either from the industry lobby group Timber Communities Australia which claimed there was no long-term structural problem and that critics within the industry — contractors whose long-term contracts had been cut in half or allowed to expire — were over-reacting.

And,

Greens forestry spokesman Kim Booth — himself an ex-sawmiller — repeated a pledge he had made during the election campaign this year to introduce “fair contract” legislation in State Parliament and attempt to legislate for a levy on woodchips to fund an industry buy-out of “contractors who have been screwed into financial ruin as a result of oppressive contracts and falling global demand for native forest woodchips.”

The Government expressed its scepticism of environmentalists’ “new-found concern” for forest contractors — but to be fair, the Greens have long argued that the contractors were being screwed by the corporate end of the industry which was posting record profits at the expense of small operators. The Greens are now in a position to say “we told you so” — which is exactly what Kim Booth has been saying.

waynecrawford@msn.com.au