Economy
Enriching foreign shareholders
MARY (3) Much of the information was found on sites such as this:
http://tinyurl.com/y8zwhc6
As you can see, Gunns are undercutting Radiata pine chips from New Zealand and spruce-pine-fir chips from Canada with eucalyptus softwood chips. Remember, Canada and the US is only about one third of the freight distance from Japan as Victoria and Tasmania, so to undercut their product, Gunns chips must be dirt cheap.
The subsidies gifted to this one company, the world’s biggest woodchip exporter are legendary. How converting a centuries old tree into a pile of woodchips is seen a ‘value adding’, while making metal powder into bearings or fine produce into frozen food, are seen as tasks best left to a third world country, is almost unbelievable.
The fact is, Kevin Rudd has firmly supported free trade, but curiously members of his own party are obsessively imposing their narrow agendas onto the rest of Australia, while they enrich foreign shareholders and destroy our planet.
To me it appears Gunns have manufactured a very polarised debate in Tasmania, seeking to isolate us into two groups, disconnected from their actual world markets.
Interestingly, they have managed to ‘marry’ totally unrelated industries and occupations under the single label of ‘forestry’.
Hence in Tasmania driving a log truck and hand-crafting a musical instrument are seen as almost the same occupation. The research that turned up these subsidy-driven distortions is on an unrelated issue but overlaps Tasmania’s woodchip industry. It may end-up as a report one day.