Letter to the Editor: Outlook for timber industry not good

DEAR News Of The Area,

THE timber industry has been a major part of the mid-north coast’s history and economy for the last 170 years.

Todd Lynch, along with many of us, is extremely concerned for the future of the industry and its participants.

He believes that urgent government action should be taken to reverse the decision to “close sustainable forestry operations”.

Unfortunately, re-opening of State Forests to logging would only delay the closure of timber mills, such as Herons Creek, for a brief period because, along with private-land sources of millable timber, they have been largely logged out.

This situation has not suddenly occurred.

From the mid-1960s on there was massive competition between coastal and Dividing Range mills for the reduced sources of logs.

Species such as Brush Box, Tallowwood and Turpentine, used on bridge construction and repair, started to become very scarce in the early 1970s.

The depletion of the most common species; Blackbutt and Grey Gum, has gradually progressed since the late 1970s to the present dire situation.

There is still a massive number of young trees in the mid-north coast hinterland that, because they are growing so tightly packed, and the increased frequency and severity of drought, will not reach maturity perhaps for forty years. Action taken forty years ago to plant seedlings in open country, and the current government allowing a short period of logging in native forests, would have resulted in mills such as Herons Creek staying open into the foreseeable future.

It is a tragedy that when the 1980s Hawke/Keating government was planning to do just that with its Eighty Billion Trees system, where two billion native hardwood seedlings would be grown in nurseries all around Australia every year for forty years and offered free to farmers to grow around their boundary and internal fences and in unproductive areas such as gullies and creek banks, that the Opposition ran a “whispering campaign” telling them that “no government should be able to tell you what to do with your land”.
It worked.

The outlook for the timber industry is not good.

It is hoped that current government action to ensure future employment and the wellbeing of displaced workers and their families is successful.

Regards,
Mike DIBBS,
Port Macquarie.