South Australia’s government has offered a multi-million dollar bailout to Carter Holt Harvey after the company warned of mass retrenchments. Treasurer Jack Snelling confirmed the offer is similar though smaller to the Holden bailout, which was around $50 million. Source: AdelaideNow, Herald Sun, The Australian, ABC News
“Carter Holt Harvey is an incredibly important employer in the southeast, very important to the regional economy,” said Snelling.
“The government is prepared to invest a considerable amount of taxpayers’ money in order to protect those jobs.”
Despite the bailout, the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union said that about 700 employees of Carter Holt Harvey would strike for 24 hours next Tuesday.
A meeting of Carter Holt Harvey employees called on the Government to defer the forward sale process of the state’s timber estate until the issue of log pricing has been resolved. The Opposition and Family First made the same call.
Carter Holt Harvey claims ForestrySA is charging too much for logs, which it processes.
Mr Snelling said he could not direct ForestrySA, a semi-autonomous Government corporation, to change prices.
The CFMEU forestry and furnishing products division official Brad Coates said that relief on log prices was critical, citing factors such as increasing amounts of illegally dumped structural timber from overseas flooding the market, high log costs and the declining housing market.
“If there are 1000 direct jobs that go, the multiplying effect comes out to 5500 full-time equivalent jobs in the region and that’s more than 10 per cent of the population,” Coates said.
“The problem that we’ve got at the moment is that the forward sale is the elephant in the room and people need to understand that these issues are being faced by regional communities throughout Australia – high log prices, the high Australian dollar, competition with cheap overseas imports and a contracting construction market.”
“We’ve long held the view that log prices have been far too high right across the industry, not just with Carter Holt Harvey, not just here in the south-east, but right across Australia,” he said.
“So we believe that there is room to move on the log prices, to secure jobs and make this industry more competitive with the overseas imports.”
