The Hodgman Liberal Government is committed to rebuilding Tasmania’s forest industry to sustain and to create new jobs – our number one priority.
In the coming session of Parliament, I will be tabling the Forestry (Unlocking Production Forests) Bill, which is aimed at ensuring the supply of high quality sawlogs to Tasmanian mills.
As I outlined in my Ministerial Statement last year, the previous Labor-Green government’s disastrous Tasmanian Forest Agreement provided insufficient resource for the forest industry.
Without this change, based on the advice of Forestry Tasmania 700 jobs in our forest industry – mostly in regional Tasmania – could be lost.
Our Bill will, if approved by Parliament, convert 356,000 hectares of Future Potential Production Forest Land, located outside of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, to Production Forest Land from 1 July 2018.
The Bill also amends the statutory obligation imposed on Forestry Tasmania to make available 137,000 cubic metres of high quality sawlogs from the Permanent Timber Production Zone Land, with sawlog able to also be sourced from private forests, and from Production Forest Land.
The timber will be made available to the private sector through leases of parcels of land for no longer than ten years – long enough to harvest and regenerate – before management is handed back to Crown Land.
Consistent with existing statutory provisions, the Bill will also provide access to special species timber by partial harvesting from October of this year.
These changes will have no impact of Forestry Tasmania’s FSC bid because Forestry Tasmania won’t manage the land, and won’t harvest the trees.
Private sector harvesting will be required to be conducted in full compliance with the Forest Practices Code, and the contracted forest manager will be required to seek independent third party forest management certification to ensure that issues of sustainable yield and the reasonable social, environmental and economic expectations of the community are met.
While I firmly believe that forestry and tourism can co-exist, consistent with my public comments, forest adjacent to the Three Capes Track has been excluded from the Bill, and won’t be available for harvest.
This legislation is about ensuring we have a sustainable native forest sector now and into the future.
It is about the livelihoods of forest workers and their families, and it is about the regional communities that depend on this industry.