Steele Redux.
Saying that sawn timber is a by-product of the woodchipping industry is like saying that steak is a by-product of the cattle offal, bone, and hide industry; or that gold is a by-product of the quartz industry.

It is common-place for the highest quality and most valuable product to form the minority of what is overturned in trying to find it, and it reflects the growth characteristics of eucalypts which are frequently crooked, or full of internal defect due to rot or past fires.

Furthermore, the predominance of woodchip product has grown since sawmills stopped burning the considerable off-cuts that are generated in turning round logs into rectangular boards. For many years now these have also been chipped and sent to a pulp processor or for export.

In terms of the proportion of logs produced in the bush and sent for sawmilling versus pulp, the best coupes still yield between 50:50 and 37:63 in favour of pulp. But, because most of the best forests have been reserved, in places like East Gippsland, the remaining industry has been forced into poor quality coastal forests where the sawlog component can be pretty low. This is largely out of the control of state forestry agencies, and no wonder those in the industry get upset about it.

Dear Mark,

Sorry mate but that really isn't going to wash. The Greater Otway National Park was mostly won by the Otway Ranges Environmental Network clearly showing that the native forest timber industry was primarily driven by woodchips. Producers didn't have to mill it, dry it or dress it before onselling it. It went straight to the quay in Corio and as soon as another full bulk carrier slipped the ropes to Japan the money was in the account.

During the RFA process for Western Victoria the figures were presented by OREN and interrogated by the panel members who ultimately acknowledged the fact of what was occurring.

The native forest workers I spoke to were not happy because what was in their eyes good timber was going to the chipper because of very minor defects. A bit of bushfire black proving too much of a visual (not structural) blemish. Or increases in minimum lengths requiring the rejection of tonnes of timber which in the past would have gone to the saw mills.

The industry repeatedly rejected selective logging, especially by wire extraction claiming it was too unsafe for workers and that clearfelling was the only viable option. After the RFA it suddenly became matter of course.

The native forest timber industry has been pulled up primarily because of greedy operators and deservedly so. A hell of a lot of taxpayer money was foregone to support a plantation industry.

Of course now the figure on export volumes of wood chips have been redacted as of last year. But we do know the hardwood volumes harvested Australia wide in 2015-16, 2016-17, 2017-18 and 2018-19 were at record levels. Hardly indicative of your claim of "diminishing local supply obtainable from our own forests".

And this comment from you is unsupported by any of the literature I have seen: "the decline of the native hardwood industry is widely acknowledged as a significant factor in the increasing incidence of mega-bushfires over the past twenty-years"

Care to back it up?

A mate of mine has a couple of hundred acres near Torballea. It was part of a mining lease when the area was the main source of coal for Queensland rail.

The entire place, along with hundreds of acres in the area, was clear felled for pit prop timbers for the mines. About 20 acres was used for a citrus orchard, & the rest allowed to regrow at natures whim, apart from regular fires to control woody weeds that make bush fires dangerous. He could graze about 1 cow to 20 acres in the thickish timber.

Due to the clear felling, everything grew in the first good season. He now has a couple of hundred acres of telegraph polls. Competition forced saplings grow straight & tall. The coppers log telegraph poll factory wanted his logs, & he let them send in a team. After a couple of acres he found he was getting $8 a log & sent them away.

The sight of his timber proved to me, that in that area at least, clear felling will produce the best replacement growth forest.

Hasbeen- With respect it appears that most of the wood is going overseas not to Australia. That's one of the problems with global resources markets- resources are sold at world prices. The same happened to the meat market in the 90's. Both sides of politics because they are based on Locke Liberal principles believe in a borderless world of free trade, free movement of people, etc.

So poverty can occur done the road from the largest food producers- decoupling local business from local community health.

This is one of the reasons I'm unsure about Ayn Rand's radical free trade- some have called it anarcho-capitalism- but perhaps she didn't envisage global trade in it's modern embodiment in 1957.

As the Conservative Benjamin Franklin said- The health of the people is linked to the health of the nation not for reasons of charity but because businesses need labour in order to produce. The same could be said of a skilled workplace in the computer age. It all sort of echo's the "Invisible Hand" of Adam Smith.

One of the particular issues in Australia is the large percentage of land in Arid and Semi-Arid status. From memory 95% of Australia is Arid- it seems to be reflected by Australia (the driest continent) having a population that is 15x smaller than the USA.

There is a rain line in Australia beyond which cropping isn't sustainable. In the East it's the Great Dividing Range. Some on this forum have raised the interesting possibility of a megaproject to pipe water through the range to green the desert.

Sadly most capacity planning projects are flooded by their completion- suggesting that population is the issue- Malthus raised this issue which is psycho-social and due to exponential breeding- Asimov called it Psycho-History (somewhat contentious).

This is interesting-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Robert_Malthus

There's a chart- Evolution of the six Psychogenic Modes in advanced nations.

Maybe you Hasbeen see something that I don't. I try to read your posts expeditiously to understand the chain of rationality.

It appears Torballea is relatively near Bundaberg a high rainfall area near the coast.

Steele Redux

Yes, I am very familiar with the Otways and the closure of its timber industry which was announced by the Bracks Labor Govt approximately 3 weeks before the October 2002 State Election. The Otway Ranges encompassed around 160,000 hectares of public forests, of which 22% was designated for wood production, with just 250 - 300 hectares being harvested per year. This was supplying 27,000 m3 of sawlog/annum to the local industry which had been just assessed as a sustainable volume

In a later Labor Party review of their election winning performance, a senior Government advisor stated categorically that the announced closure of the Otways NF timber industry to facilitate declaration of a new Great Otways National Park, was a strategy to attract Greens preferences in inner Melbourne electorates.

I'm not saying that their haven't been instances of sawlogs being sent for woodchipping such as you have mentioned, but it is fanciful to suggest that it is of such significance to close an industry either in the Otways or everywhere else around the nation which you seem to be implying. In fact in many cases, closed timber industries had no access to woodchip markets, such as the red gum industry in northern Victoria (which was 80% closed).

I worked in Tasmania for some years for an export woodchipping company, and the state forestry agency used to have an inspector at the weighbridge checking whether sawlogs were amongst the logs arriving to be chipped. Out of 1 million tonnes of pulp logs that went over that weighbridge in one year, I can remember they found just 13 tonnes of sawlog.

That said, I know it was a more significant problem in the Midlands region of Victoria for a time, and I think it was estimated that perhaps 5% of the chipped logs could have gone to a sawmill if more time and effort had been invested in cutting small sawlog quality sections out of larger mostly-pulp logs. But as I said, this was not the reason that the industry was closed.