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  1. #1
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    Default Tasmania Rebuilding the forest industry bill

    Hi All,

    I have been reading recently about abbott government attempting to access the protected forests around Tasmania (and assuming elsewhere also) by squashing a bill that was passed under labor to protect those forests. I just wanted to hear what other peoples opinions were on this and help me understand it better. If they think its a good thing what Abbott has done or bad and why?

    So the greens got the bill passed to have some 400,000 hectares added to the World heritage committee list to protect them is that right? and as a consequence this drives up timber prices and kills off logging industries locally? so its great for the greens the conservation of the forests but bad for the furniture industry and logging as job loss and tasmanias economy? Is that right?

    So now reversing it and delisting those forests enables Abbott to begin loggin within 6 years and creates jobs ? Does this bring down the price fo timber as we have a larger stock pile availbale to furniture makers and broader industry?

    I have only just started reading about it and wondering why it has so much media attention so just wondering who wins and loses with this latest "Forestry (Rebuilding the forest industry) Bill 2014? I couldnt find this discussed elsewhere on the forum so i apologise if im re-igniting an old flames, just want to have a better understanding oh whats happening in Tasmania as far as timber goes

    http://www.examiner.com.au/story/253...ace-deal-dead/


    http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-0...ked-up/5299046

    http://www.parliament.tas.gov.au/bil.../6_of_2014.pdf

    Cheers,
    Nathan




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  3. #2
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    Default

    I'm also keen to know peoples thoughts.

    I'll pull up a chair and get the popcorn.

    My opinions are far too violent on the issue... I'll alienate half of everyone here

  4. #3
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    Quote Originally Posted by Evanism View Post
    My opinions are far too violent on the issue... I'll alienate half of everyone here
    Haha im certainly not wanting to enrage anyone on a sensitive topic if thats the case. Just want to see what the consequences are and whos effected from this new bill coming in? A timber mill guy i spoke with and purchased timber from a while back mention it was really hard to get timber out of Tas around 12 months ago. He said there were beautiful species down there but extremley hard to get a hold of. I wonder if this will change that for him.

  5. #4
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    That flaming T.F.I.G.A (Tasmanian Forest Intergovernmental Agreement) was pretty well the worst thing that has happened here for the timber industry.
    Hundreds of thousands of hectares of our special timbers put off limits in the blink of an eye by ill informed people.
    Tasmania already had a much higher percentage of protected lands with it's massive world heritage areas and national parks than any other state here in Australia if not the world.(Check it out on a map)
    The sad thing about it was that woodworkers had no say in it.
    Sawmillers have been paid by the government to shut down.
    At the same time other businesses have been given huge amounts of allocated money in compensation even though they have nothing to do with the timber industry.
    The whole thing has made me detest the Greens and the latte sipping people from big cities who support them.
    We already had a good balance between conservation and commonsense but the scales have tipped way too far the other way.
    Makes my blood boil.

  6. #5
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    Why do Australian governments continue to hand control of our sovereign territory to outsiders?
    Why do we even have the concept of a national park anymore, aren't we capable of handling our own high conservation value sites without world heritage listing?
    Why does the rest of the world seem to accept that logging - if done in the right way - can co-exist with conservation values but in Australia that thought is ridiculed?

    It's a debate that in this country is controlled by extremists on either side. Somewhere in the middle is a balance that manages to protect those areas of significance that should be protected, while allowing resource extraction from areas of less importance without losing either their economic or conservation values. And that can range from "normal" selective logging practices through to ultra low impact heli-logging type operations. It also has to include areas that are locked up forever to keep the balance right. Other parts of the world seem to get it right, why can't we?

    People need jobs. People need homes. We all get that. But people also need to know that those jobs and homes don't come at an unacceptably high price for the long term health of the forests. Jobs and homes don't have to mean it can't be done sustainably. Personally I'd have shut down the industry in Tasmania too - the emphasis on pulp was a sure sign that the industry wasn't being run with the best sustainable practices in mind. Pulp is about short term profits for a few, and in case people don't realise it theres a hell of a lot of people in the timber industry who recognise that. Pulp - unless its sourced from plantation material - is the forestry equivalent of a purse seiner operating in a fishery - it's a giant vacumm cleaner that sucks up everything with no regard for tomorrow. The health of tomorrows forests should be everyones concern shouldn't it? They need to be healthy to pass on to the next generation, but that does not mean that they can't be healthy and logged... in fact it should mean they are healthy enough to log over and over again.

    I'm a fourth generation timber industry insider from far north Queensland. I know all about the impacts on a community of world heritage listing. I've seen communities destroyed, families torn apart, the whole nine yards. I've seen an entire regional economy destroyed and guess what - 30 years later and it's still in tatters. All because we had the worlds most sustainable forestry: that bloody sustainable that they took it off us and declared the whole lot a no-go zone. If we had of been rougher maybe they might have not done that. 30 years later and the world heritage area is overrun by pest plants and animals with no-one doing anything about it. In that respect we - the people who worked it - were better stewards of the land then the authority who took over.

    I don't support world heritage listing anywhere in Australia. If we can't manage our own backyard properly through national parks then there's something wrong.
    But I don't support any timber industry based on the lowest common denominator either. Pulp should be a minor byproduct, not the staple of an old growth forest industry. Old growth forests should be managed for the future - and today. And that means low impact practices designed to extract maximum value with minimum damage, over and over again with each generation. It can be done.

    (Course that means all you tightass b@$t@rds might have to pay a bit more for heli-logged timber)

  7. #6
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    Well spoken John G. Most old growth myrtle forest only goes about 5% sawlog, a few sassy and blackwood, the rest used to go to pulp. In the late 90's I salvaged enough from what the big mills rejected as 'flawed' timber to start my own small business. Now I salvage from private property, but still 99% of the logs are trees that are already down or have been cut down for a housing estate or something.

    At the landing we had the sawlog pile, my pile and the pulp pile. On several occasions I saw perfectly good massive myrtle sawlogs taken from the sawlog pile and loaded on a pulp truck just to keep the pulp trucks running flat out. At the time the pulp had maximum size of 800mm diameter, so 1.2m myrtle logs were 'quartered' (cracked into four pieces) by the excavator grab and loaded out. It was criminal.

    What most government agencies don't realise is that most people who are in sawmilling are passionate about the forests and their resource, and don't like to see it wasted. Don't get me wrong, Tasmania has many well respected sawmilling families who have selectively and successfully managed their resource for generations. But it is when multi-national corporations came in and clear felled the forests, it gaves everyone who harvested timber a bad name and everyone suffered the effects of the actions taken to reign in the big companies.

    I am not up with what is going on currently, but I hope they find a balance that provides jobs and timber while conservatively managing the resource for future generations.

    Cheers

    James.

  8. #7
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    I agree wholeheartedly with the above. As has been said, it is the extremists that cruel it for everybody. Selective forestry is one of the original sustainable, long-term industries, but Forestry Tasmania has ignored that and promoted big business clear felling for cash. Then they lied about it and tried to hide the damage they had promoted by restricting access and keeping small untouched zones around and to hide the total devastation they support. I am a conservationist and a woodworker. The two are perfectly compatible IMHO. When I lived in Tasmania In the 1990's I saw wondeful cabinet grade logs thrown in the woodchip piles. That is criminal. When you see the devastation of clearfelled Tasmanian forests (or other wondeful old growth forests) with wonderful twisted trees that would have produced fantastically figured timber piled into windrows waiting to be burnt then you can understand why the extreme greenies want it all locked up. If everone used their intelligence then we wouldnt need to do that, but pollies and beaurecrats seem to be short of the necessary.


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  9. #8
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    I was in northern NSW in the seventies when the same thing happened. A big company (Adsteam) bought up all the little sustainable sawmills, sacked the local employees and took their timber allocations to Standard Sawmill in Murwillumbah. They then started a catastrophic clear felling attack on the last large stand of rainforest in NSW. Pretty soon the entire north coast hinterland was up in arms against what they were doing, the NSW government went from jailing the demonstrators to shutting down Standard Sawmills and declaring the Border Ranges national Park.
    I think World Heritage listing is one of the few things that is able to hold back the relentless pressure to develop that is continually being put on changing state governments.
    Case in point...We spent four months around Cairns last winter and there is no doubt in my mind that the reef is under serious pressure and is showing obvious signs of degradation. The water on the coast is like milky tea all the way up to the Daintree and a dredge works full time just keeping the Cairns boat harbour navigable yet the pressure is on for more dredging and now a coal terminal at Abbot Point. It will be a dying mess within ten years and the threat to withdraw world heritage listing is one way to draw attention to the damage being done.

  10. #9
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    Hi Nathan, I just tried to read the bill and I am just stonkered by the convoluted legal language of the document. Whatever happened to 'plain english- accessible to all'. In the past I have had to read some wordy documents but the drafting of this thing is clearly designed to discourage anybody looking at it. To my mind it is just ideological pig-headedness. Just when the whole Tas forest thing had settled down the feds come along and stir it all up again.

  11. #10
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    Hi Delbs, I am sorry that this thread hasn't gone anywhere. Next time a topic like this comes up I will just lurk and not say a word.

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