Community & Business
5 September, 2024
Knives out for timber industry
THE Queensland timber industry needs long-term commitment and secure tenure over harvesting if it is to remain viable in the north, says Katter’s Australian Party leader Robbie Katter.
Visiting timber mills in the region this month, they said current proposals and practices by both Labor and LNP were causing a lack of confidence in a shrinking industry at a time when there was an affordable housing crisis around the country.
“We want to ensure 20-year licensing for wood supply agreements, not just hardwood but for plantation woods,” Mr Katter said.
“This provides a long-term, secure right to harvest, and mills can invest with confidence. No one is going to back industry with such short-term agreements.”
The comments follow the release in June of the State Government’s Sustainable Timber Industry Framework.
Mr Katter said the framework would lock up state forests from hardwood harvesting in the south-east and would be extended to the north, leaving the industry in limbo.
The document outlines that harvesting permit plans for the eastern hardwoods were to be issued by the end of July 2024 for a further two years, except where a state forest has become a protected area.
Currently, 40% of hardwood comes from state forests. The existing forestry code would also be replaced at the end of 2026.
Mr Katter said turning state forests into national parks was ideologically hypocritical, as they provided an environmentally sustainable, renewable resource.
He said the plan offered no security to mills - not just hardwood but plantation timber mills.
Where once extraction licences were provided over 20-year periods, they had dropped to five-year terms, and now annual extensions.
According to plantation mill owner, David Simms, who owns the Ravenshoe and Mareeba mills, the industry appeared to be going backwards.
He said no new State Government plantations had been established since the 1980s after land was sold off to private industry.
The cost of land in FNQ and the rise in competition for that land with other developing agricultural businesses, was also impacting the local industry’s future.
He said the Far North would eventually have to rely on supplies from the south of the state, or from overseas, with current imports already at 30%.
“We’re the only pine mill north of Maryborough,” Mr Simms said.
“When you start taking in freight costs, fuel prices, you can see the problems.”
KAP’s candidate for Cook Duane Amos said the Brisbane agenda pandered to the environment movement and culled jobs and development from Far Northern communities.
