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The briefing paper said the department had got its estimates wrong and timber volumes would need to be reduced by 20 per cent if the industry was to survive. It said there would be a corresponding impact on employment, which equates to about 900 jobs in sawmilling, logging and forestry.
A spokeswoman for the Conservation and Environment Minister, Sherryl Garbutt, said timber estimates were being reviewed as part of the sawmill licence renewal process. Most mills have 15-year licences which begin expiring next year. She said licences in most forest management areas could be renewed at current levels but the Government would need to take a precautionary approach in some regions because new data was not yet ready.
"This process had some way to go and preempting the outcome with unsubstantiated claims is unhelpful to the timber industry, regional community, working people and people who care about the environment," the spokeswoman said.
But a senior industry spokesman, Bob Humphreys, the managing director of one of East Gippsland's largest sawmilling companies, Hallmark Oaks, welcomed the issue being exposed in The Age yesterday. He said the fact the briefing paper was not prepared by the department "doesn't mean it hasn't got credibility or diminishes the veracity of it".
He said timber unions, bureaucrats and the government had pressured people to keep quiet for a long time, "but the longer this goes on, the bigger the bang ... At the end of the day, I am stuffed. I am sick of treading on eggshells and hoping it will go away. It won't go away, It will just get worse."
The managing director of Daylesford Fine Timbers, Alan Barker, whose family closed its sawmill last December due to the uncertainty about sustainable timber volumes, said a royal commission was needed. "They (the Government) are continuing to deny anything is wrong," he said. "(But) you only have to see what is going on in some of the areas with the better logs going to woodchips. It is an absolute mess."
A former president of the Victorian Association of Forest Industries and a retired sawmiller, Stan Collins, said the department needed to wake up "a little quicker to the amount of timber which is going to pulp and the fact that that means future generations' resources are being depleted quicker than they should be." He said about 200,000 tonnes of the 800,000 tonnes of timber from East Gippsland now being woodchipped could be redirected to sawmills. "The pittance we are getting for it is disgraceful," Mr Collins said.
The VAFI yesterday led a deputation to the federal Forestry Minister, Wilson Tuckey, appealing for more commonwealth funding for industry restructuring and exit packages.
The association's executive director, Graeme Gooding, did not return calls, but Mr Tuckey told The Age the deputation had not "one scrap of evidence" that the department had overestimated timber volumes in the forest agreements.
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