
https://www.treealliance.com.au/
Does anyone remember the Managed Investment Scheme (MIS) disaster of the 1990s?
It was the biggest corporate fraud in Australia’s history.
There was no Royal Commission and no one went to jail.
Billions of investor and taxpayer dollars disappeared, and thousands of Australian lives were ruined.
And the forest industry, which started the MIS schemes, refused to accept any responsibility for their actions!
It was a complete disaster!
And it had its beginnings in much the same way as the Tree Alliance is now starting off.
The forest industry has been very quiet the past 10 years as it has rebuilt from the ashes of the MIS disaster.
The MIS was a near-death experience for the forest industry. A few people made extraordinary wealth, but left the industry a smoking ruin.
Below is a list of those who support the Tree Alliance:
Supporters of the Tree Alliance:
The Tree Alliance aims to bring together a range of organisations to collaborate to achieve the tree planting and communication objectives. Current supporters include:
- Tasmanian Farmers and Graziers Association
- Tasmanian Agricultural Productivity Group
- Tasmanian Timber
- Tasmanian Forests and Forests Product Network
- We Act
- Climate Friendly
- The Centre For Sustainable Architecture With Wood (University of Tasmania)
- CSIRO
- NRM South
Note that the above list contains no sawmillers, wood processors, log merchants, exporters, or retailers. No one in the real forest industry supports the Tree Alliance!
Does that make you suspicious?
It should!!!
I wander through the Tree Alliance website and I see history repeating itself.
I see the forest industry (or at least public servants, scientists, NGOs and politicians) big-talking! Lots of promises and potential, just like the start of the MIS disaster.
BEWARE!
As I tell all my clients and those who make enquiries about growing blackwood:
“No one wants you to grow trees for future wood production!”
The real forest industry (including the marketplace) has not the slightest interest in your tree-growing dreams!
I get phone calls and hear stories of people who are bulldozing their trees they once planted and can now find no markets for!!
The Tree Alliance has all the features, promises and rhetoric of a giant fraud, just like the Managed Investment Scheme disaster.
BEWARE!
I support a real forest industry! New Zealand has a real forest industry; Australia does not!
In New Zealand the forest industry talks about prices, costs, supply, demand, markets, etc.; all those things that farmers understand and deal with every single day.
No one in the forest industry in Australia talks about such matters!
Looking at the Tree Alliance is like watching Dorothy and the Tin Man skipping down the Yellow Brick Road.
BEWARE!
Until the real forest industry (including the wider marketplace) WANTS a future I would steer clear of any hyper-marketing “forest industry” b***shit.
Cheers!
Tasmanian Forest Products Association – a new beginning?
It seems many people are hoping that the new Tasmanian Forest Products Association (TFPA) will offer the forest industry a chance for a new beginning. I have to say after 40 years in the industry that seems unlikely.
But never mind! As someone famous once said “There is always hope!”
Here are a few of my thoughts about what the TFPA is facing and what the challenges are (in no particular order):
It’s not as if the real forest industry has been working hard to create positive media, but they don’t stand a chance whilst the public and marketplace perception is dominated by WELFARE forestry.
Public native forestry is the stinking albatross around the industry’s neck!
You need to get the farming and broader community onboard.
The community is not your enemy!
This means keeping a visible and significant distance from politicians. In Tasmania that will be difficult! Tasmanian politicians are like leeches. They climb up our legs and bleed us.
If the community sees you playing politics, you are dead!
All of the above makes for a very long hard road ahead for the TFPA.
But the only alternative is extinction.
We are in the fight of our lives.
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Posted in Commentary, Tasmanian Forest Products Association