Giving trees away
Forestry Corporation has been giving away trees to the woodchipping industry, with royalty costs for pulp logs a fraction of their real price at the start of current Wood Supply Agreements.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
At the start of Regional Forest Agreements (RFAs) almost 20 years ago, pulp log royalties in the Southern Region were more than three times what they are now, in inflation adjusted terms.
For the Eden Region the inflation adjusted royalty price for pulp logs was almost double the current price.
Royalties are the prices paid by the Eden Chipmill to the Forestry Corporation for native forest pulp logs.
The information was revealed in an answer to a Question on Notice by Greens MP Dawn Walker, who is Greens spokesperson on forestry.
NSW taxpayers have every right to be very annoyed by this. It is further evidence of just how much the taxpayers of NSW are subsidising this destructive industry.
Year after year, the Forestry Corporation has used profits from its plantations to prop up marginal or loss making native forest woodchipping.
Other subsidies such as local government rates exemptions and direct grants to the industry add to the burden on the taxpayer.
The sooner the industry makes a full transition to plantation sourced wood the better.
Harriett Swift, Chipstop convener
What have we become?
Your story detailing the challenges attached to Dr Annie Warner’s employment should have every Australian wondering what kind of country we have become (Magnet, 13/9).
Rightly or wrongly, there was a time not so long ago when casual employment was the province of the unskilled and poorly educated.
The more skilled and educated could be more certain of permanent work, while those who did not want to work full-time, could usually find permanent part-time work where they still received the same benefits as full-time workers, albeit on a pro-rata basis.
While it is often said that our casual workforce has only grown from 20 per cent to 25 per cent over the past 20 years, this ignores the fact that the workforce itself has grown by almost three million (33 per cent) in the same period.
This means that the number of casual employees has grown by 1.2 million to just over 3 million, with that increase representing more than 40 per cent of the total increase in employment numbers.
The simple truth is that the numbers are often used to conceal the fact that the casualisation of our workforce has spread to the professional ranks, including highly educated and skilled people like Dr Warner involved in education, health care and teaching, and with a large number of those employees being women.
While it is often argued that many Australians appreciate the flexibility that casual employment supposedly offers, it is nevertheless a luxury that doubtless most would prefer to do without.
And while Dr Warner naturally worries about whether she will benefit from another short-term contract at the University of Wollongong next term, there are now school teachers and many other professionals across a variety of disciplines who are surviving on casual employment on a day-to-day basis.
This disempowerment of a significant percentage of our workforce is surely just more evidence of the growth of inequality in our society.
Perhaps the challenges of inequality would be solved if all employees, including executives and management, were exposed to the same insecure conditions of employment as our casual workforce?
We could then return to the task of trying to improve everyone’s lot.