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Tasmanian Blackwood Growers

World Heritage Area logging: Boatbuilders need access to Tasmania’s protected forests due to lack of speciality timber, Government says

rainforest

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-16/new-analysis-shows-world-heritage-logging-necessary-for-demand/6780134

http://www.premier.tas.gov.au/releases/new_advice_proves_special_species_dudded_under_tfa

Here we go again continuing with the wasteful, divisive, political forestry wars.

“New analysis strengthens the argument that selective logging of speciality timber in Tasmania’s World Heritage Area is necessary to meet the demand from craft industries, including boat builders, the State Government says”.

As usual it’s not about profitable tree growing; it’s about tree growing as a community service.

It’s Centrelink Timbers!

How can Tasmanian blackwood have a profitable commercial future with Government policy like this?

Never mind the Tasmanian Forestry Agreement (TFA). It’s history! Using the TFA as an excuse to vilify your opponents and justify logging the World Heritage Area is complete nonsense.

Of course if you give away trees there will be a demand. But what would happen if the Government decided it was actually running a business and had to make a profit instead, like private tree growers, like Tasmanian farmers?

There is no discussion here about costs, prices or profits; and supply and demand are discussed as political not commercial objectives. Any relationship between cost, price, supply and demand is completely ignored. It’s a sad pathetic joke!

It’s the same with Forestry Tasmania as with the special timbers industry; the whole lot is run as a community service. Wasteful political nonsense.

As Vica Bailey of the Wilderness Society says “the specialty timber sector has traditionally been a by-product of clear-felling and woodchipping of vast areas of old-growth and rainforest, a model that glutted the market with heavily subsidised wood, there was never any expectation that historical levels of supply could, would or should continue“.

The public native forest special timbers industry has never been sustainable nor profitable.

The last 30 years have clearly demonstrated there is no such this as sensible when it comes to logging public native forests. Logging the World Heritage Area would be yet another forest industry disaster.

Resources Minister Paul Harriss said he would present the new analysis to the World Heritage committee delegation during its visit in November in a bid to reverse opposition to logging inside forests added to Tasmania’s World Heritage Wilderness Area in 2013.

Will Minister Harriss present the same analysis to the Tasmanian community for broader scrutiny?

The interesting thing in this news report is that blackwood is included in the discussion. World Heritage Area is now also about saving the blackwood industry. For the first time the Government admits the public native forest blackwood resource is not sustainable, only 12 months after the last blackwood resource review declared the resource sound and sustainable.

https://blackwoodgrowers.com.au/2014/06/23/the-incomplete-history-of-unsustainable-blackwood-mismanagement/

Forestry Tasmania’s own data clearly shows they have been overcutting the public blackwood resource for at least the past 25 years. And now as a consequence they want to try and justify logging the World Heritage Area. It’s just sickening!!

UNESCO must get the clear message from the Tasmanian community that logging the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area is not acceptable.

When will Tasmania get a fully commercial, profitable forest industry?

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