It is a tribute to the impenetrability of the Tasmanian mind that the TCA is seen as anything but what it is - a bogus grass-roots organisation, dubbed an Astro-Turf group, in the US where the ploy was pioneered. The tobacco industry, for example, set up such groups as ostensibly formed to protect civil rights, but prominently including the right to smoke in public places.

Their annual reports show TCA’s funding comes overwhelmingly from the National Association of Forest Industries (NAFI), the forestry employers’ body. The same reports reveal that most of the claimed membership appear to pay little or nothing in the way of membership subscriptions.

Observers should have noticed that the TCA and its predecessor, the Forest Protection Society, has had nothing to say about the steep fall in workplace forestry incomes and the severe job losses, except exhortations to stoicism, that have come with the dominance of woodchipping and a virtual monopoly employer.

The State Government has been totally complicit in the crude manipulation, officially recognizing the FPS/TCA as representing the public in respect to the Community Forest Agreement and on various committees.

Ther has been some holes made by incontravertible facts in the facade of the TCA: they now sometimes admit they are a lobby group and that their “secretariat”, meaning the likes of Chipman, are paid by the industry rather than workers. They no longer claim, as Chipman did some years ago, that clearfelling no longer occurs. But they are still out there, billowing smoke on behalf of the Big End of Tasmania.

John Hayward

Gee baz, you’re a bit harsh on those poor old “timber folk”.

Have you ever thought about federal politics? I could see you as the next minister for employment. You seem to have what it takes.

A most telling article and some fearless reporting from the Mercury!

Will this article finally settle the question as to whether Timber Communities Australia, the state CFMEU, F.I.A.T and the Labor Party really do “represent the timber folk”, or are they simply a cosy collection of clever shopfronts and mouthpieces for the Big End of Town?

As logging families go to the wall, so-called “logger’s representatives” have slunk off in cur-like silence, or have either mouthed simpering platitudes like “we’re doing all we can”, or spat out callous insults like “it identifies good operators…there are good and bad operators”.

It seems timber workers have finally woken up and identified who their real friends and enemies are.

It is Gunns management that has exposed the company to this downturn by fixating on the lowest value line of business in the timber world - chips.

While Gunns was profiting from taxpayer subsidised inputs, they could have been developing high-value industries that helped them to diversify into new markets. Instead they distributed all of the money, buying short-term share price growth.

Gunns chose not to diversify, nor to protect their own contractors from the results of their self-imposed limitations. As oil prices climb, so too must costs and low value products such as chips (or pulp) are going to be too expensive to produce and transport.

Companies that cannot respond to the increases in value demanded by global markets cannot expect to survive although Gunns will doubtless be at the State government’s door, cap in hand, again. After sll they don’t seem to have any other strategies.

The management should be handing back their paypackets…if they couldn’t predict this ‘downturn’ and organise their business to be viable in the face of it, they shouldn’t be there. It’s time they started to take personal responsibility for this situation instead of blaming the ‘markets’.

This and many other recent comments on the down turn in our forestry industry seem to imply the taxpayers owes a financial duty to compensate the now impoverished logging contractors. I am not so sure that this is true. I would suggest that Gunns Ltd, certain union officials and individual members of our State and Federal Labor and Liberal Parties do, as these entities and persons have created and funded the propaganda machine that led to this debacle.

However, as a taxpayer, I am happy to have my money used to retrain forestry workers and to restructure the industry out of any dependence on further native forest harvesting. Would our forestry workers now agree to such a solution?

How did a large group of workers in Tasmania come to believe that a corporate lobby group was their representative?

Does it say something about the role the media played in Tasmania?

In 2004 The Advocate newspaper referred to Barry Chipman as the ‘spokesperson’ for the Preolenna community. [This happened at the time Barry Chipman DECLINED to talk at the Senate Inquiry into the Plantation 2020 Vision in Launceston in late 2004 as rep for the TCA]. The Advocate reported that HE was denied an opportunity to speak.  I raised these matters with the Advocate and asked the newspaper to retract these false statements but to no avail.

Another interesting incident occurred when some residents of Preolenna objected to the Waratah-Wynyard Council leased the Preolenna hall to Timber Communities Australia (16th August 2003). The notice placed by the Waratah-Wynyard Council in The Advocate newspaper failed to let the public know that the acronym ‘TCA’ stood for ‘Timber Communities Australia’ and who this group represented.  I asked the Council to readvertise and provide the necessary information, to no avail.

I raised other issues with the Council about TCA members’ activities in that community:

i. Their selective issuance of the community newsletter to the exclusion of people who have a history of objection to the establishment of the woodchipping/monoculture tree industry;

ii. Failure to ensure all community families were invited to crucial meetings.  That is, individuals (again, who publicy objected to the tree plantation industry) were excluded from participation in decision-making processes by being kept in ignorance of the meetings in which these decisions were to be made;

iii. When individuals requested more information from the Preolenna TCA in order to form an appropriate decision on matters affecting the community they were denied access to it.  Further, the actions of those individuals (who requested that information) had their actions misrepresented in critical documents sent to the Waratah-Wynyard Council;
iv. The Preolenna branch of Timber Communities Australia were involved in the public isrepresentation of the Preolenna community’s situation at the 2004 Senate Hearings on the Federal Government’s 2020 Plantation Vision. 

v.Individuals with financial links in the plantation industry originally gave a commitment to families in the Preolenna community that joining Timber Communities Australia was merely a means of obtaining public liability insurance for the community hall.  They made assurances that this would not result in political lobbying and similar actions. Since that time the commitment they made has been broken
and political lobbying has been the order of the day….

As usual, all to no avail.

When I first heard that Gunns had dramatically reduced some of its supply contracts because of a downturn in woodchip demand, I thought the reaction by some industry representatives would be interesting, and in the case of Mr Chipman’s little outburst, so it has been. 

If things are so black and white to Mr Chipman and his ilk, I have to ask: is Gunns Ltd a good operator or a bad operator?  Is trying to be everything to everyone a good idea or a bad idea?  Is shooting your mouth off to a journalist and then using a flimsy ‘I was taken out of context’ protest a good look or a bad look?

Maybe I can just begin to understand Mr Chipman’s problem here: the industry, the market, is not supposed to be the enemy, is it? The hand that feeds you isn’t supposed to let you starve.  I’m sure this tight little gaggle of ‘forester’s friends’, of whom Mr Chipman is chief hand-holder, all want this to blow away so they can go back to sticking the boot into the Wilderness Society, or making lamingtons, or whatever they do in their spare time. 

This is all just too hard, this grim economic reality, isn’t it Barry?

Well Barry clearly isn’t in the largest of Gunns’ pockets… he was very firmly down the back of the plane this evening travelling to Canberra. :)

- M.

In the 1980’s I worked in a small electrical business in Grafton in Northern NSW. At that time the Forest Protection Society was being set up. Our Boss came to the workers one lunch time and said there is a meeting down at the Saraton Theatre tonight to form the Forest Protection Society , “Be there and join; your job depends on it” .

I asked the others that I worked with whether they would comply and all stated they would, I did not. So they all (about 10) went and dutifully joined the group, never to do anything else except attend rallies when told to. Me well I was a contractor and too valuable to sack so I escaped the wrath of the boss.

Yep definitely grassroots.