The land of milk and honey

By Mark

Timber Communities of Tasmania and the Tasmanian state government have often used the fear of economic decline quoting WA regional towns as examples. It is a myth. Towns like Pemberton have various small businesses in apparent good health including timber. I would back the longevity of Pemberton over Geeveston on current performance. Real estate values are outperforming Tasmania by far and this is an indicator of average income.

TASMANIANS should be asking their political leaders to realistically draw a view of the future prospects in Tasmanian regional towns. How will education and employment be practically delivered to increase retention rates, provide access to tertiary institutions and encourage job migration from dying employment providers such as forestry.

These questions and more have arisen as I drove from Albany to Pemberton in Western Australia’s southwest timber country. The parallels have been astounding from the woodchip pile at Albany’s wharf to miles and miles of plantation estates to the quaintly named Weld River in Mount Frankland National Park.

The differences have also been stark. The Giant Trees drive and Airwalk actually reside within national parks. The Shannon River National Park has been logged and is based on a river catchment. It is mostly regrowth but also contains significant quantities of giant Jarrah, Marri and Karri eucalypts (admittedly not as big as the eucalypts in the Styx and Weld valleys but close). The main difference is that the WA government has committed to being self-sufficient from plantations and not the last remnants of old growth forests.

Timber Communities of Tasmania and the Tasmanian state government have often used the fear of economic decline quoting WA regional towns as examples. It is a myth. Towns like Pemberton have various small businesses in apparent good health including timber. I would back the longevity of Pemberton over Geeveston on current performance. Real estate values are outperforming Tasmania by far and this is an indicator of average income.

Another observation has been the type of land under conversion to plantation forestry. In the same manner as Tasmania and, probably, Victoria it is high rainfall and not, as claimed by government and the forest industry, “marginal.” It is mostly dairy farms.

This observation created the question of the political and industry deals during the dairy industry reforms of the nineties. This was the same period as the regional forest agreement. It smacks of government compensation to allow dairy farmers to leave the industry and the proverbial “killing two birds with one stone.”

I remain curious as to what we did with all the, apparently, excess dairy products prior to the nineties but this would require further investigation into national and international trade trends and agreements.

There is an irony in the current political debate concerning drought conditions in truly marginal land, for example the sheep and wheat mallee country. Are our tax dollars being best spent on supporting the conversion of high yielding dairy land to timber production against other competing agricultural pressures? This debate has not been undertaken or even raised.

Amongst all this there is a shared problem for regional towns and industries with the continued need for regulatory controls on environmental and social impacts such as employment, aerial spraying, water management and burn-offs.

My final observation was the new efficiencies demonstrated by a plantation being harvested by one log skidder, one log loader (pictured) and an unattached set of B-double trays. There do not appear to be too many career opportunities in this brave new world.

Can our Tasmanian industry and government spokespersons now please estimate the future employment opportunities in our brave new world? Western Australia has been clever in preserving its last remnants of old growth for a burgeoning tourism industry where Tasmanians have been stupid, insular and naïve in the destruction of theirs. It is a question of balance.