Gunns capitulates to misinformation and bullying

Australia's forestry sector has a long history of shooting itself in the foot. Inherent competitiveness between industry sub-sectors has rarely served a greater good. Past examples include the self-interested calls of leading figures in the softwood sector for an end to native forest logging to remove product competition; and the aggressive expansion of MIS plantations which, although not without benefits, have partially fractured the forestry sector's traditional rural support base. Gunns' pursuit of its own corporate strategy and the likely collateral damage to the broader forestry sector may in hindsight serve as another unfortunate example of the industry's self-destructive tendencies.

Undoubtedly, Gunns' primary motivation is to build its planned Tasmanian pulp mill which needs both social acceptance and a financial partner. Whether exiting from native forests can help the company achieve this is somewhat problematic given the depth to which ENGO campaigns have poisoned the company's reputation, the reality that plantations and their management are an emerging ‘green' battlefield, and the strength of implacable local opposition to the pulp mill.

In trying to make itself a winner Gunns has risked making everyone a loser given that its exit from native forests has given unwarranted legitimacy to ENGO claims about native forest logging; while its move to being only a plantations producer adds to the false perception that the whole hardwood industry can simply transfer to plantations. In Victoria, the Greens have already signalled their intention to campaign on this platform prior to November's State election.

Even worse is that Gunns have made their move at a time when the Australian Greens have assumed hitherto unprecedented political power on a campaign platform which includes a virtual end to Australia's production of native forest timbers. Now, with no obvious processor for a large slice of the available native sawlog harvest in Tasmania, there is heightened political pressure to re-badge substantial areas of State forest as conservation reserves, with the possibility of further State forest losses in Victoria and WA to appease the Greens' agenda.

This threatens the future of the native hardwood industry with serious flow-on implications for both rural and urban Australia given that, apart from those directly involved in the harvesting and primary processing of native timbers, there are secondary wood processors and timber merchants comprised of a further 10,000 small to medium-sized businesses which employ around 80,000 Australians.

If the current trajectory of Australia's native hardwood sector continues, it won't be long before we will produce nothing from our natural forests.  If this occurs, it will be a sad indictment of the environmental morality of a country which has the world's fifth highest per capita area of forest cover, and is amongst the world's top five per capita consumers of wood and paper products.

Given that timber production is already largely confined to only about half of the just 7% of Australia's native forests which are classed as multiple-use State forests, it will also serve as a damning example of the damage caused by the uncompromising addiction of Australia's ENGO's to maintaining conflict even in the face of diminishing environmental threat.

In the aftermath of Gunns' announced exit from native forests, Victorian forest activist, Jill Redwood, praised the company for making "a moral decision". However, this is hardly an apt description for a forced shift in direction which, by damaging Australia's highly evolved domestic industry, will encourage more importation of tropical timbers from developing countries with weak environmental controls where illegal and unsustainable forest exploitation is rife.