By Pip Hinman
Two of the biggest companies in the woodchipping industry, Boral and Harris-Daishowa (Australia), are pushing for the federal Coalition government to lift 1996 woodchip export quotas. The export volumes for 1996, set by the former Labor administration, were slightly down on the year before.
As a part of this push, the two woodchipping giants have lodged appeals against the licence conditions for this year's woodchip exports in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. According to Peter Wright from the Australian Conservation Foundation, the companies are hoping to make the case that the 1996 quota is "unreasonable", and that this will carry some weight when cabinet reviews the licence conditions in the next week or so.
Sid Walker from the NSW Nature Conservation Council told Green Left Weekly that the ruling handed down by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal is, on its own, unlikely to change the 1996 outcome. However, the whole exercise is designed to increase the pressure on the government to review the process by which decisions on export quotas are made. Already the new minister for primary industries, John Anderson, has announced a review of "anomalies" in the licence conditions.
NAFI (National Association of Forest Industries) spokesperson Robert Bain has said that the reduced quotas will jeopardise Australia's woodchip industry and cause job losses. Boral's 1996 quota for woodchipping was reduced from 500,000 tonnes to 388,000 tonnes. Harris-Daishowa was reduced from 950,000 to 795,000 tonnes. This still allows the industry to harvest more than 5.25 million tonnes this year, more than in 1994.
But both Walker and Wright say that industry's "concern" about jobs rings very hollow. Company bosses have led the push for industry restructuring over the last 40 years — the main cause of job losses in regional centres.
Walker said that, at most, only a few hundred jobs nation-wide would go. The industry, if it wanted to, has the money to retrain and provide employment for the chippers.
The industry's real concern is profits — or the loss of them. Right now, the market for woodchips is "very big" while the market for sawn timber is down, Wright told Green Left. This means that even the small reduction in the 1996 export quota — 0.8 million tonnes (11%) — has been enough to prompt the companies to go on the offensive.
Wright said that most state governments have been allowing woodchip companies to over-cut for years. "NSW State Forests knew that they would have to cut by 30% some years ago and it is only now, with a new state government, that it is being forced to." This shift is also starting to happen in other states, he said.
The ceilings imposed on woodchip export licences, which are supposed to ban the export of woodchips from protected native forests, are there for very concrete reasons, Wright said. "Not only do they force the industry to operate in a more efficient and less wasteful way, they also force the states to push forward on the deferred forest assessment [DFA] process."
Wright, like many other conservationists who have been involved in trying to protect old growth and other environmentally sensitive forests, says that the DFA process had many shortcomings.
Nevertheless, he said that if federal environment minister Robert Hill moves to reconsider the export licences, the DFAs, which together with the licences make up a package under the National Forest Policy, must be reconsidered as well. He doesn't believe that the Coalition government would be too keen, given that the DFAs have tended to favour industry over conservation interests.