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House of Assembly - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2016-07-05 Daily Xml
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Grievance Debate

Northern Forests

Mr VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart) (15:22): I rise today to talk about the ongoing challenges facing the people of the Mid North and the southern Flinders Ranges in regard to the northern forests. The northern forests are the Bundaleer Forest and the Wirrabara Forest near Jamestown and Wirrabara respectively. They are certainly mainstays of a very broad area, and one of the most important things they do is provide employment, not only for government employees who work in the forests but for a wide range of private enterprise contractors, and most importantly in regard to the volume of employment; 50 people are employed at Morgan Sawmill at Jamestown.

In the electorate of Stuart, in this particular part of the electorate, we have had four very serious fires over the last six years. One of them affected the Bundaleer Forest and two of them affected the Wirrabara Forest. Most of the plantation of the Wirrabara Forest has now been burnt out and, of course, that poses a very real problem for the supply of sawlog to the Morgan Sawmill which, as I said before, employs 50-plus people.

The government knows about this. I have raised this in parliament many times. I have written to ministers many times. I have raised it in the media many times to try to get the government's attention that way, but this issue just keeps dragging on. The government has not provided any positive way forward for all the people affected by this issue. It has put forward an expression of interest process, where they ask community members to provide suggestions for what they thought should happen, and they told the community at a public meeting at Wirrabara which I attended, in August last year, that by the end of last calendar year this would all be sorted out and everybody would know exactly what the government intended to do.

After that, the government then said that was not good enough, they then wanted to have a request for proposals process, in which case people, businesses and community organisations would put forward their suggestions for what should happen. The government would then consider those proposals, even though they had apparently already considered the expressions of interest which had previously been put forward.

One of the reasons this is so important is the economic benefits generated. There are many community, social and environmental benefits, but the most pressing for me is the economic impact. It would only cost a few million dollars for the government to replant these forests, and not necessarily all of the log and not necessarily everything that was there before, but enough to retain a viable forestry industry.

Deputy Speaker, let me give you some numbers to explain exactly how important this is. ForestrySA estimates that if they were to replant these forests it would cost them $11.4 million one-off net present value over the next 44 years. However, simultaneously, Regional Development Australia Yorke and Mid North has estimated that the economic benefit to the community is $9.4 million every single year if the forests are replanted. On those numbers alone, it is a very, very easy decision for the government to make, and yet it drags its heels.

There is an important issue that needs to be addressed and that is the issue of interim log. Of course, if the forests were replanted and the timber that is still there were harvested and processed over the next few to several years, we would need interim log to be made available so that the local sawmill would have other timber to process before the replanted wood became available. Morgan Sawmill has made it very clear that they would be very happy to purchase timber from ForestrySA on the open market to meet the price of the market of the day, transport the timber from wherever it comes from, most likely the Adelaide and Mount Lofty Ranges, to their sawmill and process that wood.

Morgan Sawmill has a plan. They have been prepared and made it very clear that they are willing to do whatever is necessary. The community wants this to happen for many reasons. The government is dragging its feet. The government pretends this is a forestry issue alone, but it is not; it is an incredibly important regional development issue as well.

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