7 May 2008
One of Queensland’s most popular timber personalities Frank Straker has died on the Sunshine Coast aged 95.
An industry pioneer who worked with his father to pull the giant stringybark, tallowwood and blackbutt hardwoods from the tableland forests around Cooroy in the 1930s, Frank Straker was the first to use crawler tractor to snig logs (“the bullocks were too slow).
Frank’s father, Fred Straker, started the family firm at Cooran in the North Burnett shire in 1918 as Straker and Co and at one time also owned a sawmill at Eumundi.
The Great Depression brought about the demise, or semi-demise, of most of the industry and in the early 1930s F.C. Straker senior restarted the sawmill at Cooran together with his three sons Ken, Frank and Arthur and it began to prosper.
The sawmill at Cooroy was acquired in 1941 and in 1945 Frank joined with good friend Eric Crooke to establish Allies Creek sawmill in 1945 and another mill at Eidsvold in 1959.
Technology developed by this far-sighted partnership included the first Canadian sizing carriage for a medium volume operation commissioned outside Maryborough and the first CCA vacuum pressure plant in Queensland.
Frank went on to establish a sawmill at Moura and finally built and managed a large hardwood complex at Cooroy.
An interesting adjunct to all this was a hardwood and later plantation pine sawmill in Gympie (S&S Timbers) owned by the family and run by nephew Ian Straker until its closure last year.
Frank was president of the Queensland Timber Industry Stabilisation Board from 1958-1961 and one of the highlights during his term was the 1960 AusTIS conference at Kuranda.
“In those days, there was a fair bit of suspicion between the North Queensland and southern Queensland sections of the industry,” Frank remembered in a recent interview. “That conference went a long way towards changing that.”
Frank, whose wife Molly died in 2000, is survived by son Rodney and daughters Desley, Syliva and Christine, nine grandchildren and four great grandchildren.
Government ‘tardiness’ on quarantine measures questioned
7 May 2008
The Australian quarantine system is too focused on imported commodities (primarily sawn timber) and not sufficiently focused on packing materials (often made of low grade wood) and cargo containers, which are likely to represent a much higher risk from forest pests.
This is the opinion of Neil Fisher, chief executive of the Australian Plantation Products and Paper Industry Council (A3P), who this week met with the federal Government’s Quarantine and Biosecurity Review Panel.
Mr Fisher said A3P acknowledged the progress that had been made in the implementation of International Standards for Phytosanitary Measures No. 15: Guidelines for regulating wood packaging material in international trade (ISPM 15). However, A3P remained concerned that packaging timber originating in other countries and moving throughout the world represented significant risk to Australia’s plantation estate.
A3P believes there is concern that, partly as a result of the large number of organisations with an interest in pest trapping surveillance work (AQIS, Biosecurity Australia, DAFF, state agencies etc), there has not been sufficient information available to relevant industries on research, developments or findings concerning intercepted pest and diseases, new trapping methodologies, or location of trapping systems.
Mr Fisher says there are also generic concerns with Biosecurity Australia and AQIS operations that include tardiness in making decisions, lack of scientific justification for some decisions, inefficiency in inspection and export clearance processes, lack of understanding of exports and importers’ operations and potential inconsistency between quarantine restrictions that are applied between states and those which are applied to trade between Australia and other countries.
Mr Fisher said the review panel should reconsider a recommendation from the 1996 Nairn Review of Quarantine that a new statutory organisation be formed by merging AQIS and Biosecurity Australia into a new entity.
Changes to Kyoto Scheme ‘Last Straw’ for Forest Owners
7 May 2008
Recent changes to the New Zealand Government’s emission trading scheme mean forestry will be the only sector in the economy meeting its Kyoto obligations until 2011.
“Owners of forests planted before 1990 are already facing grossly unfair Kyoto taxes of $40,000 a hectare, or more if they change land use,” says NZ Forest Owners Association climate change spokesman Peter Clark.
“To be told that other sectors are to have further delays to their entry into the scheme is the final straw for many of them,” Clark said.
“New Zealand needs to plant a lot more trees now if it wants to meet its obligations in Kyoto commitment period 2. But there is no way that’s going to happen under government policies as they stand.”
Clark points to Treasury advice to the government that forestry and farming should have been brought into an emission trading scheme that was already operating. He says that’s the policy in Europe, where emission trading started with industry and has yet to include forestry.
“You need to have buyers and sellers of emission units if a trading scheme is to work,” Clark said. “You also need farming and forestry to come into the scheme at the same time, so that those planting trees to offset emissions can compete fairly for land with those industries which generate those emissions.”
Clark says the government claimed to have based its Kyoto policies on least cost, equity between sectors and environmental integrity.
“The policies that have been rolled out to date make a mockery of those principles.
“The main emitting industries do not have to reduce their emissions for periods which are constantly being extended. Meanwhile, new planting for forestry – the one positive thing that can be done now – has been effectively shut down by punitive and inflexible policies that lack all environmental integrity.”
Clark says logic and equity suggest that pre-1990 forest owners should be properly compensated for not being able to convert land to other uses and be allowed to offset. In other words, they should be allowed to replant trees following harvest in a different location.
At the same time, owners of post-1989 forests must be able to claim for carbon sequestered through all five years of Kyoto's first commitment period (2008 to 2012). To do this, they need to be able to register qualifying afforestation projects this year and be entitled to sell into international carbon markets as per the current ETS timetable and design.
The income they derive from this will help encourage the afforestation needed to ensure sustainable land use.
100 Certificates: Milestone for FSC in Australia
7 May 2008
The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) has reached an important milestone in Australia with 100 active certificates making it clearly the most widely used system for verifying wood, paper and wood products from responsibly managed forests and tree plantations.
Australia’s 100th certificate was issued to Yarra Timbers in Melbourne. Rob Horner started the business working with firewood and recycled timber and now offers quality sawn timber from his mill in Lismore Western Victoria.
FSC Australia manager Michael Spencer said about 90 Australian companies were now participating in the system, offering customers the widest ever range of products from sawn wood to veneers, plywood, MDF, structural softwoods, laminated wood, paper and garden furniture.
“FSC offers the best strategy to avoid buying illegal and unsustainably harvested wood,” Spencer said. “The FSC system is clearly working the way it was intended with customer preferences for wood and wood products from responsibly managed forests being communicated through buying decisions and along the supply chain to forest managers.”
The number and range of FSC certified companies has been growing at a rate of three to four new certificates every month over the past two years. The list includes many of the major players in the wood, paper and printing industries.
Australian certified businesses join more than 8000 around the world that have been audited for compliance with FSC standards. More than 100 million hectares of forests and tree plantations have been certified internationally with more than half a million hectares certified in Australia.
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