Timber policy outlined

By Kath Gannaway
A LIBERAL state government would provide long-term contracts and bring the timber industry under one government department.
The plan, outlined by State shadow forestry minister John Vogels, is just the sort of thing Yarra Junction saw millers Ron Reid and son Rohan want to hear.
The fourth and fifth generation saw millers say their future is hanging in the balance because of current government policy on timber availability.
Mr Vogels visited the Reid’s sawmill last week with local MPs Christine Fyffe, Evelyn, Edward O’Donohue, Eastern Victoria Region, and Gary Blackwood, Narracan, as part of a tour of four Central Highlands mills.
The Reid’s mill is recognised for implementing environmental best practice management, including investing in a solid fuel kiln which has seen the company’s use LPG gas use drop from 360,000 litres a year to 5000.
The MPs congratulated the Reids on the initiative that has also created an opportunity for Melbourne Water to purchase carbon credits from the timber mill.
Ms Fyffe described the company as innovative, environmentally friendly and carbon neutral.
“Their professional approach to continually seeking ways to value-add and to support the environment is an enormous credit to them,” she said.
But the visit was not just a pat on the back exercise.
Ron and Rohan Reid told the MPs they, like many small mills, were fighting for survival under VicForest’s timber auction system which they say favours the big players in the industry, and government policy which they claim is dictated by extreme Green lobbyists.
Mr Vogels said bureaucrats from Spring Street were strangling the industry.
The native hardwood allocation, he said, had been reduced from about one million cubic metres to 576,000 under Labor’s Our Forests Our Future policy.
“If that’s not bad enough only 450,000 cubic metres was made available last season and this harvest has been slashed even further to 350,000 cubic metres.
“In the last two timber auctions only 15 sawmills were successful in buying timber,” he said.
The Reids say change within the next 12 months is critical.
“We are as efficient as any mill and we can’t always outbid the bigger companies,” Ron Reid said.
Rohan Reid said there was a price war going on and the buoyant market of two or three years ago was no longer there.
“The demand for good quality timber is huge but the auction system with the amount of wood available and the bigger players prepared to pay more and make less over a couple of years, just doesn’t work for a sustainable industry.
“I can see in 10 years time just one or two mills operating successfully and they will be telling VicForests how much they will pay for the wood,” Ron Reid said.
Mr Vogels said a Liberal government’s approach would be to take management of the industry out of the hands of the four different departments that currently manage it and put it under one department.
They would also implement long-term timber allocation.
“With no security of tenure beyond the next three years it is unrealistic to expect the industry to make capital investments and spend millions of dollars upgrading equipment,” Mr Vogels said.
In the meantime, he said their role was to come up with good policy and put pressure on the government.
“We have to continue to put pressure on the people making these decisions so they realise they are not the right decisions,” Ms Fyffe said.
“Timber is the most sustainable industry in the world and we should be able to do it better.”