The Hodgman Liberal Government is rebuilding the forestry industry to drive economic growth and create jobs.
I am extremely pleased today to announce the creation of an industry-led training hub to provide real skills for real jobs in the forestry industry.
This hub will allow us to meet the current and future needs of an expanding forest industry across a range of operations, including harvesting, haulage and the highly technical plantation sector.
The ARBRE Hub will be based at Invermay and brings together Forico, the Km Group, Elphinstone Engineering, Timberland Pacific, IFARM, Forestry Tasmania and Norske Skog to train the next generation of forestry workers.
The facility will utilise existing industry assets including land, buildings and machinery to give real world hands-on training. The model is self-funding, with key industry stakeholders to fund management and the ongoing operation, with operating costs to be funded through industry sponsors and operating income from training.
The Tasmanian Government will contribute a one-off grant of $150,000 to enable the start-up, matched with a dollar for dollar commitment from industry.
The grant will come from remaining funds in the Tasmanian Regional Sawmiller Structural Adjustment Grants Program. Whereas Labor and the Greens were using this program to force sawmillers out of the industry, we changed it to secure jobs and funding which could be used for initiatives such as this training hub. The Federal Government has approved the use of the funding for this grant.
The process will be undertaken through a grant deed to be developed and managed by the Department of State Growth.
We are now seeing green shoots in the forest industry under this Government. We’ve secured sawmilling jobs, put Forestry Tasmania on a sustainable financial path, given workplaces the strongest protection laws in the country and we’ve ended the Labor-Green lock-ups for future production.
The Hodgman Liberal Government has a long term Plan for Tasmania and we need to capitalise on the gains we’ve made to grow the economy and create jobs.
Paul Harriss, Minister for Resources
