Tasmanians were told recently that arrangements had been finalised to use Hobart’s Macquarie Point to export up to 300,000 tonnes of “forestry residue” a year. The “residue” will consist of logs and woodchips. Source: The Mercury
At the same time a deal has also been done to transport “residue” of about 150,000 tonnes from the port at Bell Bay. According to Peter Henning, writer and historian, this would be an amazing revelation anywhere except Tasmania, given that Forestry Tasmania admits having lost $67 million in the last financial year.
The State Government injected more than $60 million into the “industry” in 2015-2016.
Some of the $67 million loss was covered by the sale of assets such as the Tahune Airwalk, sacking workers and selling plantations they cannot afford to manage.
To be as precise as possible, the best way to explain “forestry residue” is to say that it is timber with no added value, a bulk commodity attracting the lowest price of any timber product on the market.
Cheaper than chips or alternatively as cheap as chips, respectively logs or woodchips. Take your pick for most of the product from Tasmanian native forests, a commodity of much less value than firewood. But then, consider this. Under contractual obligations Forestry Tasmania is supposed to supply 137,000 cubic metres of high quality sawlogs annually until at least 2027, as well as 154,000 tonnes of peeler logs.
According to its own estimates it cannot meet these obligations commercially or in volume now and in the future.
Tasmanian taxpayers will be injecting tens of millions of dollars into Forestry Tasmania annually, much like they are now, indefinitely, for the dubious advantages associated with ongoing destruction of water catchments, sterilisation burns to mark the onset of autumn and to get people addicted to smoke inhalation for the benefit of their health, and the useful advice that log trucks won’t bother Hobartians in peak traffic.
The strange thing is that Tasmanians do not seem to be concerned about it. Perhaps they regard Forestry Tasmania as a kind of Easter Island statue that needs to be built again and again.
Don’t take my word for it. According to Resources Minister Guy Barnett, during four years of the last Labor government taxpayers splurged $100 million on Forestry Tasmania. That’s just the tip of the iceberg.
We’ll probably never know now how much public money has been poured into Forestry Tasmania in the first 16 years of the 21st century, let alone the extras provided to feather the way for companies like Gunns and Ta Ann.
Even a well-staffed independent judicial investigation with broad powers would find it difficult to unearth the truth. That’s not likely to happen because both Labor and Liberal governments have been complicit in the way that public funds have been diverted to the forestry industry, and what we are now witnessing is a deliberate charade to hide the truth.
One aspect of the charade is that it glosses the reality that Forestry Tasmania cannot pay its own way when granted open access to the free resource of native forests. It requires public subsidy to exploit a free resource, and it cannot maintain forestry roads nor meet super payments, even though it has reduced its workforce by more than 50% in the past five years or so. This is just part of a train wreck that has been going for years.
If Forestry Tasmania cannot make a profit from a resource it can get for nothing, there’s no way it can make Plantation Isle earn a buck.
The much-touted notion of Plantation Isle, with exotic monocultural plantations as far as the eye can see, is not commercially viable from the perspective of Forestry Tasmania because plantations require management from planting until harvesting, which explains the new strategic direction of jettisoning plantations as soon as possible, preferably before the end of the financial year.
So how does the State Government plan to ensure Forestry Tasmania meets its loss making contractual obligations at least until 2027?
Mr Barnett told us that in 2017 he will legislate to open up 400,000ha of reserved forests, including the Tarkine. Apart from the obvious questions of how Forestry Tasmania entered into long-term unsustainable contracts and who is responsible, one huge question for Tasmanians is where has all the money come from to keep Forestry Tasmania afloat and where will it come from as the losses continue into the future?
There is no way Liberal and Labor politicians will give answers to that question. It is already apparent that they are bunker-building in relation to their involvement in the scandal of public subsidies to forestry, and they deserve some trepidation as we come closer to the 10-year anniversary of the infamous 2007 pulp mill assessment act.
One thing we can say with certainty is that there has been a massive level of funding support for an industry that is causing irreparable damage to Tasmania, and at the same time there has been an atrocious failure to adequately fund essential services, especially health.
The Government is doing its best to blame others for its scandalous behaviour. It is well past time to join a few dots. It would be interesting to know where GST revenue allocated to Tasmania has been allocated over the past decade.
The Royal Hobart Hospital has been stretched to the limit for that time, and now has a dangerous situation of having insufficient inpatient beds.
Even if Tasmanians do not care much about throwing $50 million a year to degrade their water catchments permanently, and are willing to welcome the onset of autumn by breathing in large volumes of smoke from soil sterilisation burns of clear-felled coupes, it would be interesting to know if they would like some transparency around how GST funds are used.
Meanwhile, the Hodgman Government has picked up the superannuation tab for Forestry Tasmania workers, and future governments will have to pick up all the other ongoing costs, not least those associated with destruction of water catchments and other impacts related to clear-felling, and use of hazardous pesticides and herbicides.
Next year Forestry Tasmania will change its name to Sustainable Timber Tasmania. That should change everything, even the meaning of “sustainable”, and cost a few more million, but we do live in a post-truth world.
Peter Henning is a Tasmanian historian and writer.
