Dr Frank Nicklason
Sue Neales (Mercury, 15/5, excerpts and link below)) likens the latest attempt to resolve the socially divisive conflict over forestry in Tasmania to the Middle East peace process.
The analogy fits, and on many levels.
One of the features of the reportage of the Middle Eastern conflict is that relatively little attention is paid to the voices of those who desperately want peace, whether they be Israeli or Palestinian. The media are much more focused on the militant hardliners in opposing camps, and the sickening consequences of their activities, rather than the wishes, and actions, of mainstream communities. It can be argued that this has, to a considerable extent, been a feature of the reporting of the Tasmanian forestry debate, the voices from the community have tended to be underrepresented.
The Mercury article suggests that the soon-to-be-established Round table group, which will try and chart the way forward for the forest industry, will be comprised of industry and environmental voices, as if that was sufficient to properly represent the concerns of all Tasmanian people.
It will not be sufficient.
The forestry industry implosion is not just occurring in the setting of global economic factors and the collapse of Managed Investment Schemes. It is occurring within the reality of Global Climate Change and Peak Oil.
That is the “perfect storm”.
The implications of these factors is appreciated by the informed mainstream community who understand that food, water, and fire security are key issues which our policy makers and bureaucrats must address with urgency. The forest industry has the potential to impact on each of these three issues, either negatively or positively.
The Tasmanian rural and regional community is particularly acutely aware that broadacre clearfelling of biodiverse native forest in water catchments and conversion of large swathes productive farmland to single species, chemical dependent pulpwood plantations is not part of a sustainable forestry solution.
Nor will it assist us in the struggle to deal with climatic instability and natural resource depletion.
Who would I like on the Roundtable?
I propose master forester Frank Strie, proponent of sustainable agriculture Bob Loone, geohydrologist Dr David Leaman, community heath expert and advocate Dr Alison Bleaney, and representatives for aquaculture, viticulture and nature based tourism and heritage.
Dr Frank Nicklason
Sue Neales, Mercury
YESTERDAY it all sounded as if Tasmania’s own version of Middle East peace talks were about to start.
There was no mention of Camp David summits, Oslo treaties or symbolic handshakes on lush golf greens across the globe.
But, judging from Premier David Bartlett’s grave tone, there was almost as much at stake in the latest attempt to move Tasmania’s forestry, logging and timber industries into a new era as in any delicate Israeli-Palestinian discussions.
The hyperbole was all about the desperate necessity for “brainstorming”, “fresh ideas” and “new ways of thinking” by the soon-to-be-established Roundtable group, so as to propel a viable forestry industry in Tasmania into the future.
…
Interestingly, the same jobs-creation angle of the “unique opportunity” in this “really divisive debate” was also the first card to be played by Greens leader Nick McKim, one day before Mr Bartlett emphasised the identical point.
“I think we can achieve a meaningful outcome here — more jobs in the timber industry — that’s the goal,” said Mr McKim, now also a senior minister in the Labor Cabinet.
Pressed about whether the Greens would support an “evergreen” 30-year extension to the current Regional Forests Agreement governing logging in native forests — supported by both the Labor Government and the Liberal Opposition — Mr McKim was unusually tentative.
“I’m not going to make any demands of this [negotiating] process,” he said.
“We all need to acknowledge the stress the timber industry, workers and their families are under — we need to understand the pain these people are in.
“[But as to a long-term aim], part of that is an end to high-conservation logging in state forests.”
Another negotiating start-point subtlety established yesterday by Mr Bartlett to pacify “stakeholders” such as the Forest Industries Association of Tasmania was to apportion some of the blame for falling demand for Tasmanian woodchips in Japan — 70 per cent of old markets — to the deliberate “undermining” of the export industry by the environmental movement.
The Premier said the view that “environmental groups had adversely affected woodchip markets” was a “reasonable conclusion” to draw — while in the next breath he exhorted all parties not to waste time during talks “pointing the finger”.
But in laying the blame on green groups who have protested in Japanese corporate boardrooms about the non-sustainability of logging in Tasmania’s cool-climate rainforests, Mr Bartlett also avoided some questions which must still be asked of the state’s timber companies and Forestry Tasmania.
Why did the local industry ignore the clear signals apparent more than five years ago that international demand for native-forest woodchips was on the wane?
Why, when the last forest contractor and woodchip crisis of 2006 hit Tasmania, were industry leaders such as Barry Chipman from Timber Communities Australia and government resources ministers in Bryan Green and David Llewellyn so ready to blame “a few bad operators” from within their own ranks and “greenies” rather than look hard at the industry’s real future?
Why did the industry not move more quickly into reliance on plantation woodchips during the mid-2000s when it was obvious that a woodchip export pile comprising mixed tree species of variable ages logged from Tasmanian native forests would never be as cheap or productive to process into pulp as single-species, uniform-age eucalypt plantations maturing across vast tracts of South America and South Africa?
Why, too, did Forestry Tasmania almost stubbornly insist on ignoring the rapid global consumer acceptance of the Forest Stewardship Council “tick of approval” and instead try to blaze its own way with Australian Forestry Standard certification, which has never achieved the same level of recognition?
Among all the guarded optimism yesterday about environmental organisations and forestry players reaching a common “coalescing point” about the imperative of change, other issues also remained outstanding and unanswered.
How expensive will it be to Australian taxpayers — for it will require federal funding — to now pay for a restructuring package to allow at least one-third of all forest contractors to exit the industry with dignity and without bankruptcy?
What has happened to all the tens of millions of federal dollars awarded to Tasmanian timber companies since 2005 to help them retool, adjust and move to a new, more sustainable future under the Community Forest Agreement, when the sector is now so clearly in trouble and in need of real change?
What, too, will be the role of Forestry Tasmania in the future if the logging of native forests and the sale of timber from public forests — its raison d’etre — is ended or scaled dramatically back?
How, too, will environmental groups cope with rifts within their own ranks, particularly over the benefits or otherwise of the likely expansion of plantations across rural Tasmania if native forest logging is discontinued?
And what about the future or “social licence” of the Tamar Valley pulp mill, a project so adamantly loathed by so many Tasmanians, yet backed again yesterday by Mr Bartlett as an essential value-adding component of a new and more resilient forestry industry of the future?
Matthew Denholm, The Australian:
But why is the industry — so hostile to the green movement for so long — suddenly willing to talk about a “final outcome”, as FIAT’s chief executive Terry Edwards puts it?
Often it takes one side in a conflict to be reduced to its knees before a peace deal is struck and this is where the forest industry in Tasmania finds itself.
The past two years have seen a sharp downturn, described by some of the industry’s most seasoned participants as the worst experienced. Edwards sums up the industry’s position as dire.
Hundreds of jobs have been clear-felled. PaperlinX shut its paper and pulp mills in Burnie and Wesley Vale, in the state’s northwest; Forest Enterprises Australia, which has a timber mill and wood-fibre processing plant at Bell Bay, in the north, has gone into receivership; and forest plantation companies based on managed investment schemes, favourable tax treatment, have failed.
The biggest player, Gunns Ltd, has suffered a significant profit and share price slump, prompting institutional shareholders to demand the removal of chairman John Gay and fellow old-style forest warrior, ex-Liberal premier Robin Gray.
Gunns’ three woodchip mills are closed for up to three weeks, the latest in a long line of temporary closures, while its $2.5 billion Tamar Valley pulp mill — long held out as the industry’s saviour — has stalled, unable to secure finance and a joint venture partner.
Logging contractors have given up waiting for the project and are clamouring louder than ever for a government-funded “exit package” to allow up to 60 per cent of their number to leave the industry with dignity, not as bankrupts.
The financial crisis and strong Australian dollar have hit demand for woodchips. At the same time, Gunns’ key customers, Japanese paper-makers, have cancelled orders and are demanding that woodchips be certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. This certification means obtaining a “social licence”, and to do that the industry must engage with local community and green groups.
And these, the industry’s longstanding enemies, are demanding real gains in return for their FSC blessing. “To some extent we are over a bit of a barrel,” Edwards tells Inquirer.
The Japanese have adopted FSC after lobbying by the Wilderness Society and other groups, who see it as a tool to force the industry out of old growth and high conservation value forests.
As well as mill workers, logging and log truck contractors, often small family businesses that have invested heavily in expensive equipment have been hit hard.
“No one has seen a prolonged downturn like this,” logging contractor Colin McCulloch says. “It is a perfect storm that rains down hard on the whole industry but even more so on people who have invested millions under contractual arrangements.”
McCulloch is well placed to make such assessments: his father was a forest contractor in Tasmania in 1963, at the birth of the woodchip industry.
The downturn has seen his business shed 15 workers and relocate another four workers and their families to Victoria. During the past two years of decline in Tasmania, the business has gradually shifted to Victoria, where McCulloch has worked under certification for almost 10 years.
“There is nothing to fear from logging under FSC,” he says, arguing that the only problem with obtaining certification in Tasmania is gaining the “tick” of community and green groups because of the level of hostility to the industry.
Like Edwards, he believes the time has come to tick that box.
“To go forward, the industry leaders and the industry protagonists really need to get together . . . to say: ‘Well, what sort of industry do you want; what is acceptable?’ ” he says.
“There is a genuine intent within the industry and within the green groups [for an agreement].”
The new peace push has another thing going for it: a dramatically altered political landscape.
State Labor, previously influenced by the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, which has fiercely opposed any further “forest lock-ups”, is in a different place these days. That place is close to the Greens, with whom it shares a cabinet and on whom it depends for survival.
The past two Greens-supported minority governments in Tasmania have fallen because of spats over forestry. Peace in the forests would remove the most likely source of a marriage break-up in the new alliance.
Labor Premier David Bartlett, who yesterday held crisis talks with industry chiefs, is clearly considering seismic change to shift forestry out of bulk commodities towards greater value-adding and top-end accreditation.
