A small town called Walcha, near Armidale decided to stand up and fight the decision by building products giant Boral to close down their local saw mill. The saw mill was the major employer in town and the decision to close it completely gratuitous.
In response, the Mayor of Walcha has announced a "community blockade" of the mill, stopping Boral from accessing the site and removing timber already milled and any other assets. The people of Walcha have decided that they will fight the mill closure in a militant and collective fashion. They say they will stay put until the company reverses its decision.
Rest assured the CFMEU Forestry Division is heavily involved on the ground at Walcha. CFMEU Forestry are famous across regional Australia for doing whatever it takes to defend their timber communities and Walcha will be no exception.
If the people of Walcha prevail, they will have earned the thanks of the entire timber industry around Australia, because the implications of Boral's bastardry are massive.
Boral have a 20 year log supply agreement attached to the Walcha mill. It is an agreement that the mill will be provided timber from publicly owned state forests, ironically to provide economic certainty and job security.
What Boral are proposing is to transfer the Walcha log supply agreement to another mill, and freight the Walcha state forest logs elsewhere for processing. If they are allowed to get away with this then other Boral mills on the NSW south and north coasts are vulnerable to closure.
What Boral has done is against the spirit of the Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) process and indeed they threaten the very future of Regional Forestry Agreements.
Time for the state and federal governments to tell Boral to back off and reopen Walcha, before the entire forestry industry in this country is thrown into disarray.
It is well within the Governments power to do exactly this. The NSW Government however is fairly notorious for not doing much at all unless provided with a compelling imperative.
The people of Walcha may just have provided that imperative.
John Sutton
13 August 2008
