The Victorian government’s failure to supply native timber under a collapsed pulpwood deal is to blame for 84 more job losses at Maryvale, the Latrobe Valley mill that made Australia’s Reflex office paper until 2023. That is according to owner Opal, who told workers late on Thursday that the losses span salaried staff and enterprise agreement members alike.
“Substantial losses due to the Victorian Government’s failure to meet its contractual obligations,” the company said, attributing the cuts to the Wood Pulp Agreement that once guaranteed Maryvale its native eucalypt pulp. The review behind them followed the collapse of that supply, which ended white paper at the mill in early 2023 and cost 156 jobs, leaving Opal cutting the site back to kraft and recycled grades.
“The fire crew, the entirety of the safety department,” Denise Campbell-Burns said, listing the roles Opal wants gone from a mill it told staff in June no longer ranks as a major hazard facility. Campbell-Burns, president of the Timber, Furnishing and Textiles Union, added that her members were told of the decision only late on Thursday.
Internal documentation sent to the workforce, and seen by the ABC, lists 19 yard, first aid, and fire roles, 21 positions left unfilled after resignations or expired contracts, and 19 leadership roles across cleaning, safety, building trades, and planning. The 84 folds in previously announced jobs still in consultation, voluntary departures, and redundancies, a review Opal described as sizing the mill to match a much smaller operation.
The agreement behind it, struck with Amcor in 1996 and carried to Opal in 1998, bound the state’s timber agency to at least 350,000 cubic metres of pulpwood a year through 2030. That deal unravelled when a November 2022 tribunal found native harvesting was breaching environmental law by endangering greater glider and yellow-bellied glider habitat, and supply fell to 86,505 cubic metres in 2022 and 2023 from 427,993 the year before, then stopped.
It comes as Opal lodged a $402 million claim in the Victorian Supreme Court in September, after three years of stalled talks with successive premiers, taking the matter to trial over a supply deal the company says the state stopped honouring. Maryvale has anchored the Latrobe Valley through decades; however, its fortunes have thinned following the 2017 closure of the Hazelwood power station, which cost 900 jobs.
