Yesterday’s Sustainable Timbers Tasmania Annual Report has continued the annual tradition of hiding real losses behind government grants, revaluations and asset sales. The reported $3.2million profit is inflated by over $12 million in government grants, $7.2milliion in asset sales, and $11.5million in the revaluation of ‘biological assets’ (a.k.a trees they haven’t cut at a loss yet).
“Every year we proceed through this farce of Sustainable Timbers Tasmania rolling out losses disguised as profits. They are not sustainable. Not ecologically. Not economically.”
“We are seeing species like the Swift Parrot being driven to extinction by a native forest logging agency that is propped up with money from taxpayers. We are also paying for our precious native forest carbon stores to be chipped and burnt fuelling climate change”.
“This is not just perverse in a climate and biodiversity crisis, but we also have a health and housing crisis. We can’t spend this money on housing the homeless because our government is committing it to destroying the homes of our endangered wildlife. This is irresponsible and it must end”.
“Sustainable Timber Tasmania business is cutting down trees and selling them. It’s pretty simple. And when we delve into the Annual Report we see that it cost $116.1 million to cut down the trees and they only received $94.6 million from selling them. That is not a $3.2million profit, it’s a $21.5million loss”, said Bob Brown Foundation takayna Campaigner Scott Jordan.
Nationally 88% of forest products are derived from plantations. Tasmanian lags behind this at 78%, logging more native forest than Queensland, New South Wales and Western Australia combined.