Initially billed as low-risk investments, failed timber and agri-business schemes around the country have now cost thousands of Australian investors their life savings.
“Pests and diseases, bushfires — these things were anything but safe and the fact that you didn’t get a cash-flow for 15 to 20 years suggests that they always were going to be very high risk,” Senator Peter Whish-Wilson said.
Senator Whish-Wilson is part of a Senate committee examining managed investment schemes in forestry — and why so many have failed.
It has been six years since two of the largest agri-business schemes, Timbercorp and Great Southern, collapsed in spectacular fashion with combined losses of more than $1 billion.
Thousands of investors lost their life savings and were forced to fend off banks who moved to take their homes.
“We’ve really seen people who have lost their livelihoods, who just aren’t coping because they trusted people to put them into these schemes,” Senator Whish-Wilson said.
The number of failed schemes continues to grow with a Western Australia plantation of paulownia trees recently put into voluntary administration, leaving hundreds of growers like Warren Carter paying for trees that are undersize and unable to be sold.
“Nobody is going to get anything, it’s worthless, they might as well put a match through it,” he said.
“They promised us up to $700,000 for the allotments I had.
“Nobody can really tell us where all the money has been disappearing to.”
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Lorraine Stander was also caught up in the scheme run by Paulownia Farm Management.
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• SMH: Hazard-reduction burning has limited benefits in curbing bushfires: researchers … New research, however, indicates such controlled burning is likely to have “leverage” in reducing the area burnt by later fires in only four of 30 regions examined across the ACT, NSW, Victoria and South Australia. …
• Cassy O’Connor: Another day … another handout to Forestry
• Paul Harriss: Hardship assistance for forest contractors
• John Hawkins in Comments HERE: Harriss: The taxpayer has paid the Tasmanian Forestry Industry billions of dollars to trash our forests all to the benefit of your mates at Gunns and Ta Ann. The public arm of forestry in this state the GBE Forestry Tasmania has been a blight on and expense to the Tasmanian economy for the last 30 years. How do you arrive at a figure of 4343 people losing their jobs? I suggest that this figure is a blatant invention, a misrepresentation of the facts, a spoof. You should be relieved of your portfolio as soon as feasibly possible for you always back the wrong horse at enormous public expense. This island cannot afford to subsidise you and your mates any longer. Do us all a favour and resign.
• Download …
http://www.molluscsoftasmania.net/Portfolio/Grove_2012_Let%20science%20prevail%20in%20conservation%20and%20forestry%20A%20submission%20to%20the%20Legislative%20Council%20Select%20Committee%20on%20the%20Tasmanian%20Forests%20Agreement%20Bill%2020.pdf
• Steve in Comments HERE This is disgusting. Leaving aside the forestry angle, I am simply horrified at the bias shown here. I know of so many hard working, honest businesses that have been left in a mess, or have simply folded, because some other business, further up the ladder has gone into receivership. These are people with excellent, vibrant businesses, doing everything right, who simply get shafted because that $100k progress payment suddenly doesn’t appear, even though they’ve done the $100k’s worth of work and are $80k into the next month. Where’s the Government sympathy for them? Of course, a family business is only worth a handful of votes, whereas Green bashing can win a State.
• Treeger in Comments HERE A decent water system for The Russell River would cost $1million you say. I note that the state government has found that exact amount to pay out Forestry Contractors due to the downturn in the Forestry Industry (an industry the same government has said is growing)!?
• John Hawkins in Comments: The Old Forests as led by their chief promoter and protector “2 million tree Erich”, have left a terrible legacy still being played out through the Australian courts. Abetz on this score alone should resign his Senate seat as a matter of principle, for in the immortal words of Lady Caroline Lamb describing Lord Byron “He is, mad, bad and dangerous to know”
