PRIORITY 4: Strong timber industry communities
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A viable and sustainable timber industry provides broad socio-economic benefits to Victoria, including jobs and income for many families, particularly in rural and regional locations. It also provides valuable resources, such as firewood for heating.
A fair licence to operate, and access to appropriately skilled workers are fundamental to the future of Victoria’s timber industry and associated communities.
These conditions are more likely to be met in an environment where forestry activities and timber plantations in particular, are accepted and valued in rural landscapes; where there is sound understanding of timber products as an environmentally sustainable and renewable resource important to everyday life; and where the community has confidence in the environmental sustainability of forest management practices.
Action 12
Build a skilled workforce
12.1 As a recognised Skills Victoria Industry Training Advisory Body, we will work with ForestWorks to improve coordination of training and skills development for the timber industry.
12.2 We will work with Indigenous communities, the timber industry and other stakeholders to improve access to training and employment in Victoria’s timber industry by Indigenous Victorians.
12.3 We will ensure that forest industry training courses adopt best-practice in line with occupational health and safety industry standards.
Action 13
Enhance community understanding of the benefits of Victoria’s forests
13.1 We will explore options for research into forestry and land-use change.
13.2 We will develop a Farm Forestry Plan for Victoria, in close consultation with key farm forestry groups.
13.3 We will work with industry and other key stakeholders, where appropriate, to improve the community’s understanding of Victoria’s productive, competitive and sustainable timber industry.
13.4 We will develop a new Victoria’s Firewood Strategy for Public Land to ensure that firewood from public land remains accessible in the long-term and is sustainable into the future.
Action 12: Build a skilled workforce
The Victorian Government’s statement – Moving Forward: Making Provincial Victoria the Best Place to Live, Work and Invest – outlines a policy to attract skilled workers to regional areas, and make secondary and tertiary students and graduates aware of study, employment and lifestyle opportunities in provincial Victoria.
Like other Victorian primary production and manufacturing sectors, the timber industry faces a skills shortage. Skilled labour shortages are particularly evident in regions such as south-west Victoria, where the imminent blue gum harvest competes with labour demands in and outside the region.
Young people may hold negative perceptions about the timber industry due to remote work locations, the physical nature of the work, and low wage levels. Exacerbating this view is the perception that the industry faces an uncertain future and does not offer long-term career prospects.
In fact, career opportunities within the industry continue to strengthen, with many jobs located in rural and regional areas where employment prospects are often otherwise limited.
Despite perceptions that work within the industry is physically demanding, changing industry practices require increasingly technical skills. Industry technology is advancing rapidly to provide increased rates of production and more value-added products. Activities such as mechanised harvesting, kiln drying and wood machining all require specific technical skills. Continuous industry development requires an ongoing supply of specialist skills.
In many cases, these skills are needed urgently. In the Green Triangle region alone it is projected that harvested woodchip volumes will increase to around 3.5-4 million tonnes per year between 2011 and 2015. This compares with around 500,000 tonnes in 2008. This will result in significant demand for skilled workers in harvesting and haulage, requiring an increase from 47 machine operators to more than 200 over this period.
The task of providing skilled people to drive the performance of the timber industry is complex. People need to be aware of the training and skills development opportunities, and how to access these opportunities. Training providers need to respond to market demand and meet the requirements of individuals and businesses. Businesses require access to appropriately skilled individuals and to training programs to develop the skills of their existing workforce.
The Victorian Government’s skills statement Securing Jobs for Your Future – Skills for Victoria (2008) provides $316 million for the creation of over 170,000 new training places, upgrades to TAFE facilities and more flexibility for individuals, employers and training providers. These initiatives develop a workforce with skills in the right areas and at the right levels to meet changing industry needs and business demands. The government’s skills statement provides significant opportunities for Victoria’s timber industry.
What the Victorian Government will do
12.1
As a recognised Skills Victoria Industry Training Advisory Body, we will work with ForestWorks to improve coordination of training and skills development for the timber industry.
Coordination and focus are essential for the timber industry to capitalise on training and skills development opportunities offered by existing government programs.
Relevant Victorian Government agencies, including research and development providers, will collaborate with the Industry Training Advisory Body for the timber industry, ForestWorks. This will enable ForestWorks to coordinate individuals, employers and training providers in relation to Victoria’s existing employment and skills development programs. The aim is to identify opportunities to rapidly fill skills gaps, encourage participation, and ensure that training and development meets industry requirements.
As a result, the timber industry will be able to realise new opportunities under the Victorian Government’s skills statement. ForestWorks’ activities will also complement work being done under the Victorian Government’s Future Farming strategy to develop a Primary Industries Workforce Development Plan. This plan identifies specific medium to long-term skills and training needs in agriculture and associated primary industries.
12.2 We will work with Indigenous communities, the timber industry and other stakeholders to improve access to training and employment in Victoria’s timber industry by Indigenous Victorians.
Victorian Government priorities for the state’s Indigenous people include improved wealth creation and economic sustainability for individuals, families and communities2. Nationally, governments acknowledge that more Indigenous people should be employed in industries, such as the timber industry; and that government has a role in supporting this participation3.
The Victorian Government has endorsed the National Indigenous Forestry Strategy, which promotes cooperation by all levels of government, the timber industry, Indigenous communities, and the broader community to increase Indigenous participation in the forest and wood products sector in Australia.
We recognise that Indigenous Victorians can face barriers to participating in the workforce. That is why we will examine a range of initiatives to improve access to training and employment, and explore opportunities to support enterprise development for Indigenous Victorians seeking to participate in the timber industry.
Enhancing Indigenous participation in the timber industry, including in businesses that service the industry, could provide long-term career opportunities that allow participants to stay connected with their communities and lead to improved social and economic outcomes. The Victorian timber industry will also benefit through increased access to skilled, locally-based workers.
Indigenous employment opportunities have historically occurred in the native forest industry. However, the timber plantation industry now represents a further potential opportunity, particularly in Gippsland and in the state’s south-west. Some Indigenous community organisations, such as Winda Mara Aboriginal Corporation in south-west Victoria, are already involved in these opportunities.
The Victorian Government is also committed to increasing Indigenous employment in the public sector. The government will drive this increase through appropriate policy, including public sector procurement.
We will ensure that improved participation opportunities for Indigenous Victorians in the timber industry will be part of the broader employment and training needs audits undertaken by ForestWorks, consistent with Action 12.1.
Actively encouraging young Indigenous people to look to the industry for their careers will see mutual benefits for both Indigenous communities and the timber industry.
12.3 We will ensure that forest industry training courses adopt best-practice in line with industry occupational health and safety standards.
Consistent with Action 11, occupational health and safety will be a critical aspect in all training provided by VicForests.
In order to improve occupational health and safety compliance and outcomes, training courses will reflect industry-specific occupational health and safety requirements.
We will work with industry training providers to ensure training courses reflect best-practice in occupational health and safety.
Action 13: Enhance community understanding of the benefits of Victoria’s forests
This Timber Industry Strategy contains a range of actions designed to assist Victoria’s timber industry to operate in a future environment of opportunities, challenges and uncertainties.
One factor that may weaken the desired effect of these actions is poor understanding within the wider community of the sustainable practices and benefits of the industry, leading to potential loss of ‘social licence’ to operate. Social licence to operate broadly relates to the level of community acceptance for an activity. In relation to the timber industry, it can mean an unwritten social contract between the timber industry, broader society and timber production communities, for the industry to operate in line with community needs and expectations.
In the context of competition from imported timber that may be illegally logged, the validity of the Australian forest industries’ current social licence to operate should be enhanced.
The policy challenge for government is to ensure that the community’s need for timber and forest products is met from a competitive, sustainably managed, domestic source – Australian plantation and native forests – rather than having to rely on imported products. As with other natural resources, global timber supplies are also under increasing pressure from a growing population. Not all can be verified as having been sourced legally, or in a sustainable manner.
This Timber Industry Strategy addresses these issues to reveal the valuable economic, environmental and social benefits that the forestry and timber sector provides to Victoria.
The alignment between industry and community values is often closer than might be perceived. Maintaining social licence to operate is a role that the industry needs to embrace, through building understanding of its practices and demonstrating more transparently that it is operating in a sustainable and safe way.
While this is one of the key roles of the newly created industry body, Forest and Wood Products Australia, government also has a role in promoting a sustainable and productive forestry and timber sector in Victoria.
What the Victorian Government will do
13.1 We will explore options for research into forestry and land-use change.
The role that forestry and timber might play in future carbon markets means that increasing levels of investment could flow into plantation development. While timber plantations are a legitimate land-use, we also recognise that land-use change has impacts on rural communities.
The Department of Primary Industries has been an active partner in the ‘Socio-economic impacts of land-use change in the Green Triangle and Central Victoria’ project. This project has documented residents’ perceptions about the nature of land-use change, how it has affected their lives and the communities they live in.
In line with Action 10.1, we will set priorities for research into socio-economic impacts of land-use change associated with forestry, so that the impacts of such change are understood and managed.
13.2 We will develop a Farm Forestry Plan for Victoria, in close consultation with key farm forestry groups.
While this Timber Industry Strategy primarily focuses on industrial-scale plantation forestry, farm forestry has its own functions and benefits.
The government recognises that Victoria’s farm forestry sector could expand to:
- provide a supply of sawlog and other roundwood to industry
- provide a range of environmental benefits, including improved habitat and water quality, and salinity mitigation
- supply biomass from timber thinnings and harvest residue, and timber industry by-products, to become feedstock for bioenergy and biofuel
- assist rural employment and regional value-adding
- provide an additional farm enterprise that complements existing farming activities.
In Victoria, private native forests may also be able to provide a potentially significant resource of high quality sawlog timber that could meet a portion of future industry needs, or other community needs, such as a supplementary source of firewood. This could provide an additional source of income for farmers and landowners.
Under a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, farm forestry may also be an important tool that farmers can use to offset carbon emissions from other areas of their farm. In any case, we know that in many instances farmers do not necessarily manage trees for a single outcome, and that their priorities can be different for different areas of their property, and can change over time.
Consequently, the government realises the benefits of increasing the adoption of best-practice farm forestry as a widely accepted part of farming in Victoria.
While being focused on timber production, the farm forestry resource is not currently of a scale, location and uniformity to make it commercially viable on its own. The other on-farm and community benefits, including livestock shelter, biodiversity, environmental and amenity applications will combine with timber production values to influence the degree and nature of farm forestry investment.
Even so, it can assist the industrial plantation sector and address potential market shortfalls for hardwood sawlogs. Involving landholders in productive forestry can improve understanding of the timber industry and reduce community concerns about the impact of plantation development. Landholders can assist by exploring the viability of alternative timber species and management options that can reduce risk and uncertainty for corporate growers. They may also be able to produce timber products not readily available from industrial scale plantation companies.
In recognition of the various benefits afforded by farm forestry, we will develop a Farm Forestry Plan for Victoria in close consultation with key farm forestry groups, with a focus on forestry practices that best meet individual and community needs.
The Farm Forestry Plan will be developed in line with the Farm Forestry National Action Statement (2005). It will consider:
- community support and partnerships
- best-practice growing technology
- sustainable private native forest utilization
- informed and efficient product utilization
- efficient government processes and businesses
13.3 We will work with industry and other key stakeholders to improve the community’s understanding of Victoria’s productive, competitive and sustainable timber industry.
Forest and Wood Products Australia is required under its charter to undertake comprehensive marketing and public awareness campaigns about the production and use of timber. These campaigns are largely focused on generating commercial benefits through increased awareness and use of timber. They also provide accurate and reliable information on how forests are managed sustainably for the benefit of current and future generations. There is a clear role for government in gathering and providing such information.
An example of where the government provides such information is through the development and publication of a State of the Forests report every five years.
This document, which is a legislative requirement under the Sustainable Forests (Timber) Act 2004, also provides the basis for Victoria’s contribution to the national State of the Forests report, which is produced by the Australian Government.
The government will assist industry and other stakeholder groups to provide relevant, accurate and up-to-date information about Victoria’s timber industry.
13.4 We will develop a new Victoria’s Firewood Strategy for Public Land to ensure that firewood from public land remains accessible in the long-term and is sustainable into the future.
Firewood is an important source of affordable heating and energy for many people in Victoria, especially those not connected to reticulated gas. The collection of firewood is an activity that can connect the community to forests and forest products. It is a seasonal, social activity that provides an opportunity for individuals and families to spend quality time interacting with the natural environment.
The government is committed to the continued supply of firewood from public land as a primary energy source to homes in Victoria where there is no viable alternative.
We will develop Victoria’s Firewood Strategy for Public Land consistent with the Sustainability Charter for Victoria’s State forests.
We will base the strategy on the following general principles:
- firewood production is a legitimate use of public land
- firewood will continue to be supplied from public land within sustainable limits where it is required as a primary energy source for domestic purposes
- firewood collection from public land should achieve positive social, economic and environmental outcomes.
Summary of Actions
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PRIORITY 1: A productive, competitive and sustainable timber industry |
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Action 1: Provide greater certainty of access to public native forest timber resources |
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1.1 We will continue to maintain and enhance Victoria’s world-class sustainable forest management framework so that it meets the highest possible environmental standards. |
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1.2 We will clearly and transparently identify and map the areas of State forest in eastern Victoria available for timber production. These areas will be designated as Working Forest Areas. |
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1.3 We will develop 40-year Working Forest Plans that clearly define how Working Forest Areas will be managed. |
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1.4 We will enable VicForests to maximise the long-term economic returns to Victoria from the harvesting of timber in Working Forest Areas in a socially and environmentally sustainable manner. |
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1.5 We will provide VicForests with a secure basis to harvest and sell timber for periods of up to 20 years at auction, to allow industry to realise a competitive return on investments, support capital upgrades, and drive innovation. |
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1.6 We will strengthen industry confidence by ensuring that changes in Victorian Government policy that affect timber supply are not unduly afforded force majeure status. |
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Action 2: Improve estimation and communication of sustainable harvest levels from public native forests |
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2.1 VicForests will implement improvements to the methodology used to estimate sustainable harvest levels from public native forests in eastern Victoria, and hold annual ‘Resource Outlook’ briefings. |
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2.2 Each year, VicForests will provide industry with details on the amount, type and location of timber that is to be available for sale in the coming years. |
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Action 3: Improve the sales system for native hardwood logs from public native forests |
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3.1 We will continuously improve the VicForests Price Allocation Model. |
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3.2 We will seek national consistency in the adoption of market-based mechanisms for log sales, governance and cost recovery for timber from public native forests. |
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Action 4: Sustainably develop timber plantations |
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4.1 We will continue to recognise timber plantations as an ‘as of right’ crop-raising activity in the farming and rural activity zones. |
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4.2 |
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4.3 |
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4.4 We will offer broad support for Australian Government taxation arrangements that support the comparative neutrality of timber plantations irrespective |
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Action 5: Assist the timber industry to adapt to climate change |
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5.1 We will implement agreed outcomes arising from Action 2.20 of Securing Our Water Future Together regarding the impact of land-use change, including timber plantations, on the water resource (quality and yield). |
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5.2 We will implement agreed outcomes arising from Action 2.21 of Securing Our Water Future Together regarding timber harvesting in Melbourne’s water catchments. |
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5.3 |
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5.4 We will continue to implement fire prevention strategies, and review these strategies in light of the outcomes of the Royal Commission into the 2009 bushfires. |
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PRIORITY 2: Develop and support efficient timber markets |
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Action 6: Improve freight infrastructure and logistics to support the timber supply chain |
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6.1 We will work with the Australian Government to develop new infrastructure at a national and regional level that supports sustainable development of the timber industry. |
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6.2 We will work with Victoria’s local councils to help them access Australian Government funding for strategic local road upgrades to support key industries and communities. |
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Action 7: Support the commercial development of new and emerging markets for timber and timber-related products |
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7.1 We will continue to work with the Australian Government to improve the understanding of the implications of a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme for Victoria’s timber industry. |
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7.2 We will continue to advocate to the Australian Government to include carbon stored in timber products in the international climate change framework. |
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7.3 We will support a national approach to using native forest wood waste for energy production, consistent with the Australian Government’s expanded national Renewable Energy Target scheme. |
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7.4 We will prioritise research to explore the potential use of wood for biofuel production. |
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Action 8: Support market access and improve biosecurity for sustainable timber production |
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8.1 We will only endorse procurement and sustainability policies and guides that recognise international third-party certification as demonstrating a high standard of sustainable forest management. |
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8.2 We will develop a forests and timber biosecurity framework. |
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Action 9: Strengthen governance arrangements for forests and timber production |
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9.1 We will improve the administration of VicForests. |
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9.2 The Minister for Agriculture will be the ‘relevant’ minister for VicForests. |
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PRIORITY 3: Innovative forestry science, technology, and practice change |
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Action 10: Encourage industry innovation and research and development |
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10.1 We will prioritise existing and future research and development efforts in the areas of:
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10.2 We will consider providing co-funding with industry towards national programs that are consistent with our research and development priorities. |
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Action 11: Improve industry occupational health and safety |
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11.1 We will encourage improved levels of occupational health and safety compliance through adoption of best-practice, consistent with WorkSafe Victoria’s industry standards. |
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11.2 We will ensure the Forestry Industry Council continues to reflect best-practice occupational health and safety standards in contract arrangements under the Owner Drivers and Forestry Contractors Act 2005. |
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PRIORITY 4: Strong timber industry communities |
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Action 12: Build a skilled workforce |
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12.1 As a recognised Skills Victoria Industry Training Advisory Body, we will work with ForestWorks to improve coordination of training and skills development for the timber industry. |
|
12.2 We will work with Indigenous communities, the timber industry and other stakeholders to improve access to training and employment in Victoria’s timber industry by Indigenous Victorians. |
|
12.3 We will ensure that forest industry training courses adopt best-practice in line with industry occupational health and safety standards. |
|
Action 13: Enhance community understanding of the benefits of Victoria’s forests |
|
13.1 We will explore options for research into forestry and land-use change. |
|
13.2 We will develop a Farm Forestry Plan for Victoria, in close consultation with key farm forestry groups. |
|
13.3 We will work with industry and other key stakeholders, where appropriate, to improve the community’s understanding of Victoria’s productive, competitive and sustainable timber industry. |
|
13.4 We will develop a new Victoria’s Firewood Strategy for Public Land to ensure that firewood from public land remains accessible in the long-term and is sustainable into the future. |
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