Economy
Gunns pulp mill ‘Disneyland’, lash for Shelton, Lara on the Dilston bypass …
Gunns works very hard demolishing its own credibility.
The company says it can sell a tonne of woodchips for $190, and claim it could sell a tonne of pulp for $820.
But don’t you need 4 tonnes of woodchips to make a tonne of pulp?
That means Gunns want to make $760 worth of woodchips into 1 tonne of pulp, a mark-up of only $60.
But they want to produce 1.1 million tonnes of pulp a year at full production don’t they? Yes, but that’s only a difference of $66 million a year above just selling woodchips.
To achieve this they want to go into debt to the tune of $2.5 to $3 billion. Just to make another $66 million a year from pulp!
They claim they can supply 90 MW of dirty power from burning wood. Unbelievably, they want to do this next door to a modern 345 MW natural gas fired power station. They claim they will use another 90 MW themselves. So they want to use as much dirty power to run their mill as Tasmania’s second largest city uses every year? Just to make an extra $66 million more than exporting woodchips?
That sounds like ‘economic dementia’.
For years, Gunns claimed their pulp mill would make every household in Tasmania better off by $870 per year. With 181,000 households in 2006, Gunns would have to produce $157 million worth of pulp a year just to make them all better off. All from a mill that is only making an extra $66 million more profit than simply selling woodchips?
This is less than the financial cost to the Tamar Valley wines, speciality foods and orchards.
Then there is the hit the health care system will take from all their pollution.
What about land locked-up in tree plantations for decades at a time? It’s hard to imagine an industry with less jobs and more negative impacts than tree farming.
Greg L’Estrange must admit Gunns has got it seriously wrong.
The world’s third biggest pulp mill must go where the world’s biggest plantations are.
That is not Tasmania. FSC compliant plantations in Brazil are almost the size of Tasmania.
Instead of obediently subsidising Gunns, the federal and state governments should be investigating them for fraud.
This systematic dishonest and misleading behaviour is not tolerated in other industries.
Why do they let Gunns get away with it?
Its time Gunns got out of their ‘Pulp Mill DisneyLand’ and into the real world.
Meanwhile …
GREENS JOIN CONTRACTORS IN CALLING ON THE LIBERALS TO PUT ASIDE EMOTIONAL BAGGAGE OF THE PAST
Kim Booth MP
Greens Forests spokesperson
The Tasmanian Greens today called on the Liberal Party and Liberal Forestry spokesperson Mark Shelton On TT: The Dinosaur, HERE to cease trying to sabotage the current negotiations over the future of the timber industry, and to heed the call from the Tasmanian Forest Contractors Association (TFCA) to “put aside the emotional baggage of the past to arrive at a viable and sustainable plan for the future”.
Greens Forests spokesperson Kim Booth MP said the TFCA has accused Mr Shelton of making “speculative” and “unhelpful” comments about the current negotiations, and Mr Booth urged Mr Shelton and his Liberal Party to remove their heads from the sand and look forward, not backwards.
“The Liberal Party are stuck in the past over forestry and I am urging them to heed the call from the TFCA to ‘put aside the emotional baggage of the past to arrive at a viable and sustainable plan for the future’,” said Mr Booth.
“The Liberals should stop cynically using forest contractors as a vile political wedge and become part of the solution instead of being a big part of the problem.”
“Mr Shelton and his Liberal Party obviously have no idea about the current state of this industry, or the way forward, and they need to back off and allow these negotiations to proceed unhindered.”
“The Greens are joining the call from the TFCA for the Liberal Party and its forestry spokesperson Mark Shelton to stop making unhelpful comments, to put aside the emotional baggage of the past, and focus their efforts on the creation of a viable plan for the future instead of grimly clinging onto a past that no longer exists,” said Mr Booth.
Below: “Liberal comments on timber talks unhelpful,” Ed Vincent, Tasmanian Forest Contractors Association, 15 September 2010.
“The present critical position of the industry calls for level heads to arrive at a viable plan for the future”
Media Release from the Tasmanian Forest Contractors Association (TFCA) from Wednesday, September 15th 2010.
Tasmanian Forest Contractors Association CEO Ed Vincent said today that comments by state Liberal, Mark Shelton, about the process towards achieving a revitalised forest industry were unhelpful.
“There are a number of forest stakeholder organisations meeting to discuss very complex issues. Many of those organisations, including TFCA, are Tasmanian. Given the sensitive position of those discussions, and the critical situation of the Tasmanian industry, speculative comment is unhelpful.”
TFCA has for several years encouraged a strategic review of the industry and a fair and agreed restructure, to better position Tasmanian businesses, employees and the community for the inevitable changes the future brings. The current discussions, while private, are hardly secret. Once an agreed position is reached by the stakeholder representatives, that position will need to be ratified by their constituents, prior to being presented to government.
“An underlying principal, as far as TFCA is concerned, is that contractors and their communities are better off, than they would otherwise be. With the geographically diverse nature of forest contractors, that community is all Tasmania.”
“The present critical position of the whole hardwood forest industry calls for level heads to put aside the emotional baggage of the past to arrive at a viable and sustainable plan for the future.”
“We need to be focused on the windscreen looking forward, not the mirrors looking back.”
Ed Vincent CAHRI
Chief Executive Officer
TASMANIAN FOREST CONTRACTORS ASSOCIATION
And,
What Lara Giddings told The Florentine Protection Society about the Dilston bypass, in response to this questioning by FPS President, Elizabeth Perey On TT: An abysmal lack of responsibility, HERE
What Jo McCrae of the Florentine Protection Society says in response to the Giddings’ letter:
Giddings’ response is a poor attempt at a bandaid over the issue of the Dilston land purchase and sudden grant of the land to Gunns. It glosses over the continuing government support for the project, if not as overt as it once was. But her use of the word “utility” just reaffirms the argument that the ties between government and Gunns are too close, as a utility is usually an essential government service, to provide power, water or sewage, not infrastructure for a private company’s project.
Huon Environment Centre:
Media Release
“Documents from a logging area in Tasmania’s southern forests reveal that Gunns Ltd continues to source woodchips from critical high conservation value forests for its Triabunna woodchip mill,” Huon Valley Environment Centre’s Jenny Weber said.
“Conservationists have today set up a tree sit on the access road to a logging area, in Tasmania’s Picton Valley. Logging is occurring in old growth forest that was previously in the Hartz Mountains National Park,” Huon Valley Environment Centre’s Jenny Weber said.
“Today’s protest in the Picton Valley highlights Gunns Ltd’s continued logging of ancient forests with high conservation values. Despite Gunns’ claims they will end logging of native forests by the end of October, these forests of critical wildlife habitat continue to be lost,” Jenny Weber said.
“The ongoing loss of ancient forest ecosystems continues in Tasmania’s southern forests, and wood chipping is still the primary reason for logging. The large scale clear felling of high conservation value forests, such as this area in the Picton valley, is a style of logging that continues to rapidly destroy wildlife habitat, tarnish Tasmania’s international image, and further entrench the forest industry crisis,” Jenny Weber said.
Document available here:
http://bit.ly/dulhW9