Mick Harrington
It’s been a heck of a time to come into the role as executive officer of Forest and Wood Communities Australia (FWCA) but I am thoroughly enjoying continuing the fight for timber communities Australia wide and I thank both Justin Law (former managing director) and Felicia Stevenson (former national membership manager) for their great work done in recent times.
My life and that of my forebears has been inextricably linked with the timber industry with my grandfather (also named Mick) cutting sleepers and firewood in the Red Gum Plains of East Gippsland, my father who ran a red gum firewood business for over a decade and now myself running a firewood supply business in Gippsland.
The timber industry and the products produced by it are traditionally, environmentally, and economically important to communities all over this great land. While the species harvested all over the country are varied it is obvious to even the most inattentive historian that the Ironbark of Queensland, Coastal Blackbutt of New South Wales, Mountain Ash of Tasmania and Victoria and the Jarrah of Western Australia among many other quality native timber species have contributed so much to the early development of our nation and in more recent times, our modern timber manufacturing successes.
From construction of early dwellings, timber used for heating and cooking, operating boilers, and providing shoring materials for the gold rush, wattle bark for tannin production, sleepers for railways and the building of almost all other major infrastructure – was all sourced from native timber. While this allowed for the success of the early settlers it did bring with it a vast impact on the environment as it then was.
In those regions that had particular value for agriculture, especially those on the coastal fringe, land clearing was extensive and in some areas absolute.
While those currently within the industry were not a part of those regrettably unsustainable historical practices those who wage the ideological war on the native timber today seek to paint our modern sustainable industry with the same brush.
In Victoria, the Andrews Labor government has ripped the heart and soul out of rural communities with its recent announcement that the 2030 transition has been scrapped giving industry, communities, and families just over six months to move away from native timber harvesting. For an industry that harvested just 5 in 10,000 trees annually – this just doesn’t add up.
Political expediency, not facts and figures, prevented the simple removal of legislative loopholes – meaning that random groups en-masse have had the ability to tie VicForests up in complex and long-term litigation.
We must call into question the aims of hostile activists and governments when Planet Ark and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are just two of the voices calling for the use of responsibly sourced wood in the fight on climate change.
Planet Ark is suggesting that we should all “do the world some good – build it with wood”. These calls are important as they show the wider community that which we already know; not only does timber support communities spanning the breadth of this country, it is vastly superior in many ways to other building materials.
Many people in society today don’t understand the massive potential that timber has as a carbon storing material and the role it can play in reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Carbon remains locked up for the life span of the wood, even when we use it for building things like homes and furniture. The carbon is only released when the wood is burned or rots. Wood stored even in landfill, under normal conditions, can store that carbon for hundreds of years.
This alongside the low energy requirement needed to produce timber versus many other common building materials gives it significant advantages over its competition for instance aluminium (358 MJ/Kg) uses roughly 14 times the energy of kiln dried hardwood per cubic metre.
These are facts that we must attempt to ingrain in the collective consciousness of our nation if we are to help improve local and international environmental outcomes. The environmental stewardship of our home-grown industry is much better placed to provide a quality resource while observing environmental regulation than countries such as Indonesia, Brazil, and the Solomon Islands where up to 80% of logging is illegal.
In addition to this the continuation of native timber harvesting will preserve and promote the economic and social benefits that our industry has provided communities across Australia for decades.
I believe if we continue to promote our messaging across society, we can illustrate the disingenuous, flawed and factually incorrect thinking of the activist class and dissuade academics that approach the debate with ulterior motives.
Simultaneously we must rail against government decisions that either cave into this vocal minorities thinking or that ally with it directly.
The fight for our communities and our industry is far from finished – with Northern NSW set to be the next battleground against the activist elite. I for one will enter the fray willingly, as I am sure you will too.
Mick Harrington is the Forest and Wood Communities Australia Executive Officer
