On May 13 we will finally know just how tight the belt is being pulled around the national waistline. Certainly we must live within our means. Source: Ross Hampton, CEO Australian Forest Products Association
But the real business of Government is far more nuanced than that.
Cutting costs is painful but, in one sense, not the most difficult of the Treasurer’s challenges.
Joe Hockey can ratchet a lever down today and instantly the forward estimates in that area head south. Pull enough levers down and the red disappears from the balance sheet within a few years. Job done, right? Of course not.
We entrust to our politicians the task of running Australia, not just delivering a surplus. Decision making is far more complicated than that.
As well as easing growth trajectories we look to our leaders to do something else.
We want to see the right investment in our shared future. Budgets are intergenerational documents.
Decisions taken now either pay future dividends or leave our children looking regretfully at the chances we were either too squeamish or too unimaginative to take.
It is a laudable and necessary goal to clean up the national books, but if the Government recoils completely from future focused investment, we risk handing our children a pretty balance sheet but lost opportunities.
Certainly every request for new money has to be asked the question: “Is this is the right investment for our children?” and on the Treasurer’s desk is one proposal which answers that question squarely in the affirmative.
Our request is that the Federal Government join with industry and state governments and invests in a new ‘National Institute for Forest Products Innovation’.
For months AFPA has been explaining that our competitor nations, such as Canada and New Zealand, have been stealing a march on us by taking bold steps and fiercely backing forest industry innovation.
Here it has been the opposite. Here we have watched as our national research and development capacity has fallen off a cliff. It was $100 million five years ago and has crashed to about $30 million. Our 730 researchers have shrunk to about 200.
Every State Government has now agreed that the need is great and thrown their weight behind this bid.
Ministers from Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australian have put aside state differences and added their voice to the calls for Treasurer Hockey to take a lead with the coming budget and set us on a growth path in forest industries.
According to workforce modelling there is the potential for such a step change in forest products research and development to add a minimum of 10,000 new jobs over 10 years – mostly in our regional towns.
The forestry and forest products industries of this nation have the potential to surge again as a job creation and wealth-driving machine, especially in country Australia.
The international buyers for sustainably harvested timber and pulp and paper are there and growing in number as a new middle class emerges in Asia.
New markets are emerging almost daily for radical breakthroughs such as cross-laminated timber for high rise buildings, and composites for plastic replacements.
We have the people. We have the sunshine. We have the space. We have the expertise. We have all the natural advantages in spades. The only thing we need is research and innovation capacity to build on these strengths.
We should be claiming pole position in the new world of 21st century wood.
So Treasurer Hockey here’s a final, 11th hour plea. When you have all the States and Industry crying out that we have the chance to re-energise a truly great, nation building, regional job creating, forest and forest products industry, then surely, our collective future growth demands equal time to the present fiscal belt-tightening?
On 13 May we will be holding our collective breath to discover if the Commonwealth will add its weight to this united push for our ‘National Institute for Forest Products Innovation.‘
