Lack of value adding will apply to other industries; for example we send both iron ore and coking coal to Asia then buy back the steel made from our own ingredients, in the process decimating our domestic industry. Old growth logging seems to be preferred for finer grained timber than plantation wood. Perhaps the users should go back in a time machine some 400 years and plant more seedlings.

Apart from carbon credits we attach little value to the history of old growth forests as living museums. As some German visitors to Tasmania said 'we don't have any four hundred year old trees left to worry about'. We chop down those trees because they are considered to be of low value.

Whilst the raw numbers support the author's argument, drill a little deeper and you'll find there's wood, and there's wood. Wood products are selected for varying qualities and some of those qualities are very difficult to achieve in plantations and where achievable take longer to reach harvest than say pine. As somebody recently mentioned on TV, you can't provide all the worlds wood needs with softwood.

There are a number of techniques used overseas that can reduce the impact of logging in native forest, several of which haven't been permitted in Australia so far. There is no doubt that plantations will eventually cover all the niches of the timber market, but that time remains in the futur

What's all this nonsense about not logging native forests? They've been burnt and regrown over thousands of years, so why shouldn't they be logged and replanted?

Or is it because we think we know better than the aborigines?

There is something deliciously ironic about a Tasmanian student and former forest activist claiming that the wood products sector is failing because it doesn't value add enough.

While his point may contain an element of truth, a certain proposed pulpmill in the Tamar Valley that has seemingly now been shelved largely because of incessant opposition by forest activists and elements of local communities stands as Exhibit A in understanding why this may be the case.

Exhibit B could well be Ta Ann Tasmania, a company making veneers out of sub-sawlog grade logs that were formerly chipped and exported, which continues to be attacked by forest activists, including the sabotage of some of its international markets.

Other opportunities to value add exist, but given the politics attached to Australian forestry, particularly native forests but also increasingly plantations, there is an understandable disincentive for industrial investment. A large part of this revolves around the past refusal of most State Governments to guarantee a native hardwood resource base, and the consequent whittling away of available forests for the politically-expedient purpose of appeasing Green-left voters.

This, plus some genuine conservation needs have combined to drastically reduce the native hardwood resource in most states. For example in Victoria, the area of multiple use State forest being managed for long term timber supply has been reduced by around 70% since 1986.

To say that this has had no impact on the wood products sector is incomprehensible, but is perhaps understandable from forest activists trying to deflect attention from the socio-ecoonic damage they have wrought.

MWPOYNTER seems to know what he/she is talking about in regard to the forest products industry. I would just add the more general point that moaning about lack of value-adding to Australia’s primary products is common amongst politicians and the general population and rife within the left. But investing in value-adding is a commercial decision that ought to have nothing to do with pious sentiment. The industry people who have to make such decisions are often treated like simpletons unable to see the glorious value-adding opportunities that are obvious to the Russell Warmans of the world. Of course that’s nonsense. Those investors are business people who have to assess whether they can get more out of a value-adding activity than they put in (it’s called profit) and the associated risks etc. They are not idiots. They are the ones with ‘skin in the game’, indeed the only folk worth taking any notice of.

Further to my previous post:

As an earlier poster has noted, there are different types of woods, both in size classes and quality (ie. hardwoods and softwoods). It is therefore overly-simplistic to claim that we have all the wood we need based only on total volumes harvested.

In fact, our domestic shortage of high quality hardwood for decorative and durable uses is being overcome by imports of hardwoods from overseas forests, mostly tropical rainforests in developing countries where forest management can be problematic.

We may have plenty of hardwood plantations, but these are being overwhelmingly grown on short rotations under contractual arrangements for the export woodchip market. So they make little contribution to the demand for solid sawn hardwood.

In addition, the small proportion of hardwood plantations being grown for solid wood products are mostly producing little of a similar quality to that obtainable from slow grown native forests, and it may be many decades before they can make a significant contribution.

Finally though, the author's motivation for writing the article seems to be to further an agenda that we produce nothing from our forests. Why? After a century of increasingly regulated harvesting and evolving silviculture, there is nothing wrong with renewably producing wood from a minor portion of forests. The landscape-scale environmental impact is minor, and the economic activity associated with it underpins the capability to protect forests from their greatest threat which is fire. This is responsible environmental management that is far superior to to the management-free land grabs which most ENGOs are campaigning for.