Sawmill owners in western New South Wales fear they are destroying the Pilliga forest in order to meet their timber contracts. Source: ABC News
They say they are being forced to harvest increasingly younger trees — including saplings of the bare minimum size — which they say will ultimately devastate the forest.
The Baradine Sawmill signed wood supply agreements 10 years ago with the New South Wales Forestry Corporation.
The Forestry Corporation allocates areas to be logged based on its estimates of the timber in the forests, but it is up to the sawmills and their logging contractors to find and harvest what is out there.
This year the Baradine Sawmill was given a quota of 20,000 cubic metres of logs. The sawmill claims there is not enough decent quality timber in the areas it has been assigned to meet the quota.
Baradine Sawmill co-owner Michael Paul said something needed to be done “as a matter of urgency”.
“There’s smaller and smaller patches available and you have to move equipment about 20 times a year which is very costly and you’re getting a smaller and smaller resource which is potentially taking away the future of the forest floor in the Pilliga,” he said.
“For country towns, country areas you’ve got farming forestry and fishing and the main drivers of those economies so you need to keep it going.”
The Baradine Sawmill employs 17 people and its owners believe they will run out of suitable logs by Christmas.
“It’s a tough ask and the employees are very on edge about what’s been happening to date,” mill co-owner Paddy Paul said.
“[They’re] very concerned … [they’ve got] families, they’ve got mouths to feed, people to school.”
The Paul family knows what happens when things go wrong. They said their Gunnedah sawmill ran out of quality timber and shut its doors in September last year, making 20 workers redundant.
Gunnedah Timbers and Forestry Corporation of NSW are currently engaged in a contractual dispute over that sawmill.
The sawmill’s owners have turned to strange bedfellows for help — the Greens.
“When you talk to the operators [and] you talk to the mill owners, they’re every bit as much a victim of this as the forest,” Greens MP David Shoebridge said.
“Forests that shouldn’t be logged any more than every 40 to 110 years are being logged every 10 or 15 years and there’s nothing left.
“They know that this has destroyed the future, the financial future of their industry and they’re quite desperate — they want someone to stand up and make sure that our forests have a future.”
Paddy Paul said he considered himself a conservationist.
“We’re more green than the Greens because we want to continually cut the forest and keep it healthy and thriving and keep it there continuously,” he said.
The Greens and the sawmill’s owners would like to see the Government buy out the wood supply agreement or alternatively, the Pauls would like to see Conservation Areas and National Parks opened up to logging.
The sawmill’s owners met Minister for Primary Industries Niall Blair in June. He offered an updated review of the timber in the Pilliga, which was rejected by the Paul family.
“Nevertheless the offer remains,” a spokeswoman for the minister said in a statement.
“Harvesting in western NSW forests is sustainable.
“The NSW Government has approvals in place to ensure the environment is protected and the forest is harvested in a way that promotes regeneration.”
Michael Paul said there was not enough time to get a review done before the mill ran out of suitable timber.
“There’s been a lot of reviews already conducted,” he said. “The last one basically said that National Parks and Conservation Areas would have to be opened up as matter of urgency.
“That was a [State] Government commissioned report.
“We’ve had our own private reports done — I don’t know how many reports you have to keep getting done.”
The Natural Resources Commission released a report in December 2014 warning that “business-as-usual management” was “unlikely to deliver the best conservation outcomes” for western NSW forests.
It recommended parts be opened up to ecological thinning — selectively removing trees or dense vegetation to help the area ultimately grow.
While not explicitly recommending commercial harvesting, the report said thinning “may generate residues with a secondary commercial value”.
The minister’s spokeswoman said the timber resources were reviewed in 2010 and “current advice to the Government is that Forestry Corporation continues to sustainably meet its contractual obligations”.
