In some ways the industry has brought this problem on itself by continually agreeing to negotiate and compromise in the hope it would end the anti-forestry campaign. That was never going to happen and we now see the proof.

The industry should learn from America's NRA. It never takes a backward step, ever, and is the most effective lobby group in the country. There is nothing about modern forestry that requires compromise. And if more of Tasmania was logged the state would not be such a basket case.

Mark Poynter is back banging on the old drum.
What ever it is that he expects to achieve he will be disappointed.
He and the other dinosaurs of the forest can not grasp that the Tasmanian forest industry as they have known it for decades, is dead.
All the old platitudes about it being the Greenies and others who appose Big Forestry, will not change the fact that the market for the end product has withered away and there is not enough money left to continue bailing out these dubious enterprises.
The Jewel in the crown, Ta Ann even though heavily subsidised by the tax payer is still running at a loss.
Forestry Tasmania is deep in the red and getting deeper all the time.
This is an enterprise that has been given it's stock in trade for free and has still managed to lose multi millions, having to plead incessantly for more bailout money.
The so called "huge " work force has dissolved down to a few hundred and is minute compared to the health industry for one.
Sorry Mark but perhaps you should consider retraining for some other profession instead of begging for more cash to prop up your present one.
Just think. one saving grace of a cessation of large scale forest devastation would be the absence of those nuclear clouds of smoke that are produced at regular intervals to the dismay of all and especially the tourists.

Health "industry" costs money, Forestry helps provide it. Looking at trees or touism can't as planes take evil fossil fuel.
The joke used to be an economy is not just taking in each others washing, the new version is taking out each others tonsills or buying each others Solar, opps there's a cloud (sans silver lining)

Robert Le Page

In many ways your comment exemplifies what the article is saying about the success of ENGO campaigns in manufacturing skewed outrage.

Your opinions on Ta Ann and Forestry Tasmania are good examples - how can they be expected to be vibrant and highly profitable businesses when ENGO campaigns have forced market preferences for particular products to change and then stymied opportunities for new products such as bioenergy. Not that these campaigns are the sole reasons for the forest industries troubles given the financial climate, but they are central to them.

For example, Ta Ann would not have had to reduce its workforce if it hadn't lost international contracts, including to the London Olympic Games, due to deliberate campaigns of misinformation by ENGOs targetting its international customers. This is just one example.

You seem to be looking at results such as this to justify these enterprises as failures, while ignoring that what has led to this situation has to a large degree been beyond their control.

The point of writing the article is to give another perspective to the mainstream coverage of these issues which clearly informs your skewed views. It also sounds a warning to other industries as what they are likely to face when the heat is put on them.

Your delight in the fact that more people are employed in health care in Tasmania is pretty sad given that this is wholly taxpayer funded, whereas resource-use industries generate wealth, employment, and the tax base needed to support health services. The image of Tassie as a mendicant retirement village springs to mind.

Robert LePage writes - "The so called 'huge' work force has dissolved down to a few hundred and is minute compared to the health industry for one".

As McCackie has pointed out, the so-called health "industry" is not an industry at all. No, it's a service. It generates no new resources, material or produce. It creates nothing. It's parasitic.

It's not an asset, it's a liability. A much needed, desired and appreciated liability, but none the less, it's a no-win state of affairs whatever way you look at it.

After centuries of basic economic study and acceptance of fundamental principles, how can people such as Robert LePage (including the ALP) consider that health services are an industry and in what possible way could it be compared to forestry?

Forestry produces. Health consumes. They are not comparable.

It's no wonder that the nation is in debt.

And it's hard to understand how such naive and illogical attitudes can exist in today's so-called advanced, educated society.

This market blackmail campaign by green groups uses misinformation and half truths. Customers are never told of the environmental gains such as Tasmania having 1.5 million hectares or 47% of its forest in conservation reserves where all logging is banned. This remarkable achievement that compares with the Convention of Biological diversity's new target of 17%.

The level of reservation was the result of the 2004 federal election where all Australians were given the choice to add either 500,000 ha and destroy jobs or add a more balanced 160,000 ha of old growth high conservation value forest and to save jobs by transitioning the industry to use more regrowth and plantation timber.

The second option was adopted by the elected majority Federal government that also provided assistance on a $1 in $3 basis for companies willing to invest in the new value adding as outlined in its election policy. Thus Ta Ann Tasmania received $7 million plus an income tax allowance covering the grant, to build their second multi million dollar high tech. factory in Smithton. Machinery purchased can only process a log no more than 80cm in diameter thus excluding the old growth trees as big as light houses. This is now referred to by critics as a subsidy, rather than a co- funding to implement a democratically endorsed Government policy creating a win-win outcome.

It is ironic that the campaign of blackmail and secondary boycots is now designed to reverse the democratic decision and adopt the 500,000 ha claim rejected by the voters.