Mike Bolan
Tasmania is a small island with limited resources. There comes a time (and we’ve probably passed it) when industries that choose to remove resources, such as the logging industry, start to have severe adverse impacts on other industries like agriculture and tourism, that rely on those same resources. The timber industry has had decades of taxpayer funded support, nonetheless many of their contractors are still being pushed to the wall. The likely cause is that their business ideas are not viable in a world with countries like Russia and Brazil saturating markets with low cost wood chips and pulp. It’s time for the timber industry to have a different business idea than clearance. They’ve been clearing for decades, why aren’t they already sustainable? Why do they need to clear new areas and take farms for plantations?
In a time of frightening drought on mainland Australia when food supplies may become scarce and expensive, Tasmania’s answer is … a pulp mill.
The proposal for a pulp mill at the head of the Tamar valley might seem to offer a bright future for the timber industry, unfortunately it is likely to cripple agriculture, tourism, fishing, fine food and wine industries in the North of our State as well as being a body blow to our economy as we lose much more than we gain.
A ‘world scale’ mill on a tiny island like Tasmania generates world scale timber clearance rates, clearing trees at the rate of around 6 to 7 million tonnes per year to both feed a pulp mill and to keep the woodchip industry going — plus hundreds of millions of dollars of tax subsidies and incentives of course.
The overwhelmingly positive messages pouring forth from the Pulp Mill Taskforce only describe the story from one perspective … the proponent’s. Other perspectives are excluded, in part by the Premier’s order and directions to the RPDC that leave matters of wood supply from their consideration, and in part by the government’s refusal to explore or support alternative points of view.
Clearance of even more native forests will wreck our water catchments, more plantations will suck our streams and creeks dry, conversion of active farms to woodlots funded by taxpayers will lose rural jobs and income, stripping the landscape will deter tourists and damage hundreds of tourism businesses, the distribution of biocides onto plantations will further threaten water supplies … all of this is outside consideration by the RPDC.
The so-called ‘economic justification’ for the pulp mill also excludes these impacts, so the ‘economic story’ reads like a child’s book. It’s all good, jobs, money, ‘turbo-charging’ the economy. And without the mill? Tasmania is doomed, a basket case.
Tasmania is a small island with limited resources. There comes a time (and we’ve probably passed it) when industries that choose to remove resources, such as the logging industry, start to have severe adverse impacts on other industries like agriculture and tourism, that rely on those same resources. The timber industry has had decades of taxpayer funded support, nonetheless many of their contractors are still being pushed to the wall. The likely cause is that their business ideas are not viable in a world with countries like Russia and Brazil saturating markets with low cost wood chips and pulp. It’s time for the timber industry to have a different business idea than clearance. They’ve been clearing for decades, why aren’t they already sustainable? Why do they need to clear new areas and take farms for plantations?
What we need is a balance between those industries that rely on common resources, plus a sensible way to achieve it. Neither farmers nor timber workers should have to suffer because of short-sighted government policies and polarised ‘debates’ characterised by abuse and conflict.
There are ways forward but we have to get our priorities right. We need to protect our food and water supplies as a matter of priority. We need to learn to confine timber activities so they do not harm our other industries. We need to ready ourselves and our farms to help mainland Australia to feed itself, and to prepare for biofuel production.
But first we must ready ourselves. Who will lead us in this direction?
That share price:
Latest Stock Market detail: Here
And:
The Choice: woodchips or water
Water for drinking, not woodchipping
We fiddle as the continent turns to dust
