Economy
UPM: We are not engaged in negotiations. Kelty meets Marr. Giddings backs mill ‘to the hilt’
Earlier this week I contacted Finnish pulp and paper company UPM requesting that they confirm speculation about business interests with Gunns Ltd.
The following is their reply:
“UPM is studying opportunities and getting to know local circumstances in different parts of the world on a regular basis. Among many others, UPM has studied the Gunns project. As the company has no specific plans in Tasmania nor is engaged in negotiations with Gunns there is no point in commenting speculative questions.”
With best regards,
UPM. Corporate Communications
This contradicts recent statements in Australian media that attempt to portray this project as interesting and viable.
• The Share Price, Friday, 18, 49.5c
• TAP: Don’t miss it. Politicians to listen to you on the pulp mill!
Public meeting, Rowella Hall 7.30pm, Friday 25 February
Exclusive invitation for residents of Rowella, Sidmouth, Kayena and Deviot
Politicians will be hearing residents’ concerns and answering questions about how the continuing proposal to build a pulp mill is hurting everyone. This meeting is your chance to spotlight and quiz the politicians about your concerns.
In October last year TAP Into A Better Tasmania (TAP) held a public meeting in Rowella Hall for 48 local residents about the impact of the pulp mill proposal. Residents determined to ask politicians to attend a meeting to personally tell them of the ongoing stress and harm to their families and businesses from the proposal. The meeting was planned for last December but only one politician Tim Morris was able to attend then.
TAP has rescheduled the meeting for 7.30pm Friday 25 February. Invitations have been sent, the hall is booked and all residents are invited. Don’t miss your chance to have your say.
TAP Into A Better Tasmania is a non-party political community group fighting Gunns’ proposed pulp mill.
For more information email tapcontact@gmail.com, see www.tapvision.info or come to the next TAP meeting 7.30pm every second Thursday at the Riverside Community Centre behind the Riverside High School, West Tamar Highway. See the website for details.
Kelty seeks allies for forest deal
* Matthew Denholm, Tasmania correspondent
* From: The Australian
* February 19, 2011 12:00AM
FORMER union leader Bill Kelty has turned to a deposed greenie and an ex-Harvard professor to help deliver a lasting peace deal in Tasmania’s forests.
The Weekend Australian can reveal that Mr Kelty, appointed by the Gillard government as independent facilitator to assist negotiations between conservationists and loggers, has enlisted the advice of veteran environmentalist Alec Marr. As well, the former ACTU secretary has sounded out former Harvard professor Jonathan West about drawing up plans for new industries and jobs in timber towns hit by restructuring.
The three had lunch in Hobart’s Salamanca cafe precinct this week to discuss potential collaboration.
Mr Marr was ousted as head of the Wilderness Society last year after internal battles ended a 25-year career as one of the nation’s most successful environmental campaigners.
He told The Weekend Australian he was providing advice on potential barriers to a lasting resolution of the 30-year conflict.
…
He said one potential problem was concern about the future of timber giant Gunns, particularly if it could not clinch financial backing for its proposed $2.3 billion Tamar Valley pulp mill.
“If Gunns don’t continue as a company, it throws a level of chaos into the outcome, something we could all do without.”
Gunns conceded this week its ability to meet its debts depended on the success and timing of further asset sales.
Conservationists and industry players are divided on Gunns’ push for its pulp mill to be the centrepiece of a forest deal that moves the timber industry from native forests to plantations.
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Mr Marr’s involvement has angered some of his former opponents in the Wilderness Society, which is a party to the Kelty …
Read Matthew Denholm’s full story HERE
• Sue Neales, Mercury, Premier backs mill to the hilt:
PREMIER Lara Giddings has given her wholehearted support to the Tamar Valley pulp mill project.
She also flagged yesterday that a solution to the protracted Tasmanian forestry peace talks will be reached within the next two weeks, three months ahead of schedule.
The timeline indicated by Ms Giddings will mean a plan for Tasmania’s future forest sector will be neatly announced at almost the same time as the Federal Government delivers its environmental decision on the Gunns pulp mill.
She admitted both environmental and forest industry groups were likely to be unhappy with any outcome mediated by former union boss Bill Kelty, if it was to be a true compromise.
Mr Kelty has been in Tasmania this week talking to all 10 environmental and industry signatories to last October’s forest peace blueprint and Statement of Principles.
In an interview with the Mercury yesterday, Ms Giddings said a spirit of compromise in any forest deal was essential if a solution to 30 years of forest conflict was to be found.
She said a compromise deal would probably mean environmentalists accepting that in return for protecting Tasmania’s high-conservation native forests from logging, they might have to agree to “a, and possibly the, pulp mill”.
Similarly, she said the forest industry might have to accept its days of logging high-conservation value native forests were over.
Ms Giddings is confident construction of the controversial pulp mill will begin this year, once or if a solution to Tasmania’s forest future is found.
She maintained the $2.5 billion Gunns pulp mill was now more essential to the Tasmanian economy than ever.
…
Ms Giddings said the construction jobs, the building activity, economic growth and state taxes contributed by the Long Reach pulp mill were now all desperately needed in Tasmania.
“Before [the economic crisis] the pulp mill was the icing on the cake, the cream,” Ms Giddings said.
“Now it is the cake.”
• Graham Lloyd, Weekend Australian, Big Timber not quite out of the woods:
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It is a crossroads created by the convergence of a prolonged market downturn in Japan, Australia’s traditional market for woodchips, long-term mismanagement by state government-owned forest managers and a glut of timber from tax-scheme-driven plantations.
It poses a most uncertain outcome for the industry, the state forests and the conservation movement.
The timber industry’s immediate predicament is best illustrated by the financial constraints that have forced industry alpha-male Gunns Ltd to abandon woodchipping in Tasmania’s native forests, close the Deanmill operation in the heart of Western Australia’s jarrah timber country and seek to restructure itself around plantation wood.
The tactics used by conservation groups against Gunns in Tasmania — targeting its financial backers and investors have spread to Victoria where Australian Paper Mills is under siege for its use of native-forest woodchips from East Gippsland to make Reflex paper.
After less than one month of pressure from environment groups led by the Wilderness Society, more than 400 companies have pledged they will not use Reflex.
Leading Reflex sellers Australia Post and Officeworks are being pressured at board level to drop the brand and Australian Paper has suspended the feedback section on its Facebook page after being flooded with angry questions.
The ferocity of the protest is a new and alarming territory for Australian Paper.
But it is very familiar for South East Fibre Exports at Eden, where bulldozers were this week moving a mountain of chipped native forest on to the conveyer belt for export to parent company Nippon in Japan to make paper, none of which will return to the Australian market.
Because of its Japanese ownership and the fact none of the paper product from the mill makes its way back to Australia, the Eden mill so far has been immune from the sort of campaign being mounted against Australian Paper and its Reflex brand.
But with the Nippon group’s recent takeover of the Maryvale paper mill, things are about to change.
“We need $80,000 to go in and make Nippon Paper the bad boy now,” says fashion designer Prue Acton, who has taken a lead role against the continued wood chipping in the forests of southeast NSW and northeast Victoria.
Her main concern is the effect woodchip harvesting has had on the character of native forests and the dramatic decline in the local koala population.
“Nippon Paper [supplies] ‘koala woodchips’,” Acton says of the threat to koala habitat. “Nippon Paper [is] about to supply ‘koala wood pellets’.”
Acton says she is not a member of the Greens and does support a hardwood timber industry based on native forests, but not woodchips.