Tasmania’s speciality timbers sector has delivered its first public verdict on the Forest Congress deal to end old-growth harvesting, with one of its longest-serving makers dismissing the accord as grandstanding by people with little or no skin in the game. That is according to George Harris, the furniture designer and maker who has worked with the state’s specialty timbers since 1981, speaking on Thursday’s ABC Mornings Hobart with Leon Compton.
“I think the whole thing’s a bit of a joke,” Harris said, likening the Congress to the “bread and circuses” of the Roman emperors and arguing the deal shuts out a whole swathe of the industry whose voices should be heard.
The most significant of those is the speciality timber sector, Harris argued, with modern operations such as the Neville Smith mill ideally placed to process plantation-grown hardwood and small-diameter regrowth, while the shift stays neither possible nor realistic for the several thousand people whose work never appears in the timber industry’s official headcount.
And beyond the Congress itself, Harris reserved his hardest claim for the banks, saying market campaigns by green groups have convinced mainland head offices to withdraw finance from the timber industry altogether. Operators, he said, have been called by their bank and told that it is now policy to close their accounts and send them elsewhere, and that the agreement risks wiping out culturally significant aspects of Tasmanian craft that good management could otherwise sustain.
Neville Smith draws the old growth line in the forest
Neville Smith Group defended the accord on the same program, with CEO Andrew Walker confirming that it had formally written to Sustainable Timber Tasmania to stop receiving old-growth logs, material accounting for less than 3 per cent of its supply.
“We hope it’s a huge step forward,” Walker said of a three-year Congress process that sat the company alongside First Nations leaders, environment groups, and rival sawmillers, singling out the leadership shown by Palawa participants and naming fellow signatory Matthew Torenius as active in the process.
Asked to name the material his mills will now refuse, Walker described old growth as forest that has not previously been harvested or disturbed, and confirmed the group still accepts 50-year age classes. That distinction matters at the company’s southern sawmill at Southwood, where much of the surrounding regrowth dates from the 1967 bushfires.
Behind the pledge sits a four-year transition toward plantation, with 80 per cent of the group’s supply drawn from the private estate and 80 per cent of intake now plantation hardwood. Its mills were built to process very young regrowth logs of 20 to 25 centimetres, and a checking process is now in place to keep non-regrowth logs out of the business.
How far the position spreads across the industry stays open, with Walker declining to speak for sawmillers whose operations across regional Tasmania are set up for different log types and sizes. Compton told listeners he hopes Sustainable Timber Tasmania’s chief executive will join the program in the days ahead, with new sawlog supply contracts under negotiation.
It comes as the accord faces its first pushback from within the industry, following more than 30 signatories backing the Palawa-led shared vision last week, with Kirsha Kaechele’s open letter listing guaranteed specialty timber supply for craftspeople and furniture makers among the details still to be settled.
