Snowy Valleys mayor Ian Chaffey said Australia had to make a decision on whether it wanted to import its timber, or grow it. Source: Tumut & Adelong Times
Mr Chaffey was addressing last Tuesday’s Upper House inquiry into the long term sustainability of the timber and forest products industry.
The inquiry was told that about a quarter of the timber used in Australia was being imported, equating to about $2 billion of wood products every year.
Softwoods Working Group chairman Peter Crowe said there was no guarantee the country would be able to continue to source logs, with China “scouring the world” for more wood products.
“Just by way of example, my information is that Germany and some of the surrounding companies have been supplying up to 80 million tonnes of logs into China per year, and that is going to shrink down to about five million tonnes,” he said.
“Where are they going to get the other 75 million tonnes from?
“China has been scouring the world for logs and will continue to do so.
“If we think that we have got some sort of automatic right to have wood imported into our country, on our terms, at a reasonable acceptable cost to our building community and the people who want to buy the house, we’ve got another thing coming.”
Cr Chaffey said the country’s leaders had a decision to make.
“I think we have to, as a nation, make up our mind whether we are prepared to plunder the rest of the world for our timber needs or whether we are prepared to grow our own,” he said.
He said it wasn’t enough to replace the pine lost in the 2019-20 fires – the plantation estate had to grow.
As the population grows, so too does the demand for housing, he said.
“Just to give a small example, my wife and I are building a house and we had to wait eight weeks for the framing timber, and it came from Western Australia. That is a sad indication or indictment of the way that we have managed our resource in the past.”
He pointed to the recent 60 per cent buy-in of Hyne Timber by UK-based sawmill James and tones as a pointer to the value of the industry.
“We have probably the most modern sawmill in the southern hemisphere in Hyne, and an organisation from Scotland has just bought a major interest in Hyne,” he said.
“They obviously see a future in it. I am staggered as to why our nation’s leaders do not see a future.”
