The new owner of Australia’s last newsprint producer says the site must diversify to remain viable. It comes after Norweigan company Norske Skog accepted an AU $27 million offer by Melbourne businessman David Marriner for the mill at Boyer in Tasmania’s Derwent Valley.
As reported by ABC News, the sale is expected to go through in the coming month, with Mr Marriner guaranteeing no job losses as part of the takeover.
It comes at a time of further decline in print media, highlighted by Australian Community Media’s decision to scale back the daily publication of some of its newspapers to once-a-week editions. The company’s managing director said some of its NSW papers would make the change immediately, but it would be on the road map for other papers, including Tasmania’s Examiner and Advocate, in “three, five, seven years down the track”.
Mr Marriner said it showed the need to diversity the products from the Boyer mill: “When you look at a simple thing like copy paper and know that it’s not now manufactured in Australia, and the sort of tonnage that’s being imported into Australia, I think there are options for us to expand.”
“There will always be an opportunity to be creative and get a product that A has made in Australia and B has a point of difference.”
Mr Marriner also owns a concrete manufacturing plant near Bridgewater, producing segments for the under-construction bridge. He has ambitions of producing pre-cast concrete housing for the Derwent Valley and said the Boyer site could play a part in this by creating insulation from plantation timber.
“We’ve been searching and working on various forms of removing petroleum-based insulation, to … timber, fibre or paper mash in a combination of all,” Mr Marriner said.
Tasmania’s Energy Minister Nick Duigan said the government supported the takeover of the Boyer mill, with Mr Duigan confident that the state had enough power for the Boyer mill’s purposes.
“There is certainly enough power to do what’s planned at the Boyer site, I have no doubt about that,” he said. “We’re certainly interested in having those conversations about how we put that site on a more sustainable footing going forward.”
The Boyer mill was the first, and now last, producer of newsprint in Australia, having started in 1941. Derwent Valley Mayor Michelle Dracoulis said she was confident Mr Marriner’s ambitions would be welcomed by the workforce, and the community.
“The new owners are considering how to diversify their work within the paper product realm, and there are certainly plenty of opportunities that will see this site operating for a very long time to come in the paper based industry.”
