John Hawkins
Prime Minister Hawke, asked him to head the Forest and Timber Enquiry in 1991 and I quote from his biography, Recollections of an Unreasonable Man; “The poor misguided people in the small-towns with their sawmills and their complete blindness to what they are doing to themselves continue to chop down what is finite, and quite clearly will destroy their own livelihood within a generation. Yet you cannot tell them.” The Tasmanian Woodchip industry, a creation to utilize the remnants from sawlogs not used by the sawmillers and collected from the forest floor, has evolved so that 200,000 tonnes of sawlogs from Tasmania’s native forests produce 6 million tonnes of woodchips. As a result, one can only agree with Justice Stewart – ‘You cannot tell them”! There is a living for generations of Tasmanians to come in the selective logging of high value timber taken from our Native Forests. The headlong rush to clearfell and destroy this finite source of wealth for short term financial loss is inexplicable, it can only have been achieved by corruption within the system. The dinosaurs of the forestry industry, Chipman, Edwards, Gordon, Gay, Lennon et al., do nobody a service. They make no money for their respective industries, Forestry Tasmania, makes a loss, and Gunns without subsidies, would be bankrupt. They torture their employees and divide the community, who as a result despise the leadership of the collusive head-in-the-leaf mould politicians. Stewart goes on to say, ” the politicians themselves, or so it seems to me, would not have survived anywhere else in Australia because of their comparative incompetence.”
JUSTICE Donald Stewart, formally, the Chairman of the National Crime Authority, was appointed by the Federal Government to head The Resource Assessment Commission causing him to turn his attention to the environment, conservation and sustainable development in the Forest Industry.
Prime Minister Hawke, asked him to head the Forest and Timber Enquiry in 1991 and I quote from his biography, Recollections of an Unreasonable Man; “The poor misguided people in the small-towns with their sawmills and their complete blindness to what they are doing to themselves continue to chop down what is finite, and quite clearly will destroy their own livelihood within a generation. Yet you cannot tell them.”
The Tasmanian Woodchip industry, a creation to utilize the remnants from sawlogs not used by the sawmillers and collected from the forest floor, has evolved so that 200,000 tonnes of sawlogs from Tasmania’s native forests produce 6 million tonnes of woodchips. As a result, one can only agree with Justice Stewart – ‘You cannot tell them”!
There is a living for generations of Tasmanians to come in the selective logging of high value timber taken from our Native Forests. The headlong rush to clearfell and destroy this finite source of wealth for short term financial loss is inexplicable, it can only have been achieved by corruption within the system.
The dinosaurs of the forestry industry, Chipman, Edwards, Gordon, Gay, Lennon et al., do nobody a service. They make no money for their respective industries, Forestry Tasmania, makes a loss, and Gunns without subsidies, would be bankrupt. They torture their employees and divide the community, who as a result despise the leadership of the collusive head-in-the-leaf mould politicians. Stewart goes on to say, ” the politicians themselves, or so it seems to me, would not have survived anywhere else in Australia because of their comparative incompetence.”
Is it possible to get men or women of any political persuasion, to stand at the next election? They will require both substance, intellect and integrity for the current situation can not be allowed to continue.
Tasmania is too good to be trashed by loss making industries, aided and abetted by inept third-rate politicians, unemployable in the new world of 2009.
