SE Fibre Exports (SEFE) is a company with an uncertain future. They export wood chips but for the last two years they have run at a loss. Source: ABC Rural
Now the sector is under attack from the Greens Party that says not only are timber companies losing money but allowing wood chipping is actually costing the tax payers close to $500 a hectare.
Peter Mitchell is SEFE’s general manger. He defends the industry and said the mill is providing a renewable income that helps to pay for the cost of managing native forests.
“The income that we give to Forestry NSW helps them to manage those forests and protects from fire and to puts in roads that people use.
“The whole concept of destroying a forest is totally foreign to a forester, which I am, because we log those forests but they regenerate.”
He said the Greens are misleading and hold extreme views.
“They’re basically enviro-Nazis. You have to bend to their way of thinking. They want total exclusion of native forests from virtually any activity.”
The Forestry Corporation of NSW said the Greens’ claim that logging in native growth forests is costing tax payers close to $500 a hectare is wrong.
The Forestry Corporation’s first annual report reveals that while the area of native growth forests cut down increased by about 8000 hectares, the native forest operations ran at a $15 million loss.
The general manager of hardwood forests, Dean Anderson, said that the Greens have misrepresented the facts.
“The way that they’ve presented the figures doesn’t give the full story. We need to manage the full two million hectares, so if you take that $14 to $15 million dollar loss and divide it by the two million hectares, it costs $7 a hectare … if you bring it back to a house block, we’re talking it’s 50 cents per annum, per house block.
“For that full two million hectares, we provide more than just the logging operation. There’s fire management, pest and weeds (control), recreation, in fact three of our recreation sites won state awards this year.”
NSW Greens MP and forestry spokesperson, David Shoebridge, stands by his claims.
“That’s the kind of maths that the Forestry Corporation would like you to do, but (they) spent almost zero dollars managing the forests that are not being logged.
“We know that across the entire two million hectares of state forests they only spent something in the order of $166,000 in total in weed management. They only spent a fraction over $500,000 across those entire two million hectares on managing wild dogs and feral animals,” Shoebridge said.
The state forest manager’s annual report also revealed that the amount of native growth forest cut down in NSW increased by almost 40% but revenue from native forests fell by $11 million dollars.
Anderson also said that a change in the way Forestry Corporation counts and reports the area of native forest logged has changed in the past year, so they are distorted.
“In previous annual reports we would show just the blocks that were fully completed, in this report what we’re showing is our progress through the area, so as you’d imagine in wet whether you’d have one block open so that you can go into and you would go somewhere else when it was dry weather.
“Previously, those areas wouldn’t have brought to account until they had both been completed, so with the new reporting we’re showing progress throughout the blocks,” Anderson said.
However, the senior Forestry Corporation bureaucrat conceded that they should have provided more explanation of this change in counting methods in the annual report.
