Craic, You would be better off paying a grand to play John Key at golf.
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Back in the late sixties I went from a job as a carpenter with a major local milling and building company to The NZ Forest service as a Timber Inspector. I got the job against 26 others so I knew a bit about it. I inspected milling logging and exports up and down the east coast for a few years. This idea that you can create added value and hundreds of jobs by selling already-milled timber from here is a typical Greens pipe dream. The Japanese, the Koreans and the Chinese would laugh at the idea. They buy wood from here only because the log price is competitive. They have several other major suppliers including Russia and the USA. Why would the Chinese bear the costs of say $20 per man-hour added when they can employ their own millers at a fraction of that cost? A very large part of our log exports turn into crates and packaging over there. I still keep my hand in felling trees and milling the odd one with a granberg chain-saw mill, the latest to drop was yesterday morning and each time I promise my wife that it will be the last.
As to playing John Key at Golf - what is golf?
My views are simply that Cunliffe cannot surmount the difficulties that the market has not been able to. If markets would buy timber other than logs, they would be getting exactly that. I can't be bothered going through all the points Cunliffe covered except to say he appears to have received little or no advice on these things. He's way off beam. Go and ask an architect about 4 storey wooden building and you'll soon see. as for Russell Norman wanting to develop new methods for constructing timber buildings - the mind boggles. This is all plain nuts and will contribute to the end of Cunliffe. Amen.
I agree with the above. In the fifties and sixties we were building vast numbers of three or four bedroom wooden bungalows to meet the demand of young families and they were very easy to build, safe and secure against weather and earthquakes and most still to fulfill their purpose. Two story houses were just as easy with heavier members in the ground level but above that number of floors, problems arose. The problem is not with the construction, it's with the collection of regulations and costs and the manner in which local bodies can screw everyone in sight who looks like erecting a humble building. I share an entrance gate with my neighbour. The watermain is in the road outside.He pays close to $3,000 to get a short pipe and an outside tap installed on the edge of his section. I cannot get a pipe in the same trench to my section for under $15,000 even though the extra cost would be a length of pipe, a tap and a meter. I must pay for the watermain to go along the road to the next neighbour even though that person is on a different system. I will continue to enjoy rainwater and not having to pay water rates. I would like to see a government with the balls to say "enough is enough" We will set up plants to build simple entry level wooden bungalows with tin roofs to be transported to sites within council areas where they will be provide with basic power sewerage and water at no installation cost to the renter/buyer. The remainder of the equation can be worked out from there.
70% of our logs are simply exported whole to China (as Craic said, often for packing crates). Maybe we could have planted some harder timbers and waited a bit longer. But if this pine is turned into high value construction materials (steel beams are expensive too), then they'd have a place here, and importing materials like that would cost a lot of freight otherwise. Labour's policy is not expensive, it's worth a go. And the Green idea for a $1mill bonus for a tall wooden building construction is simply a stretch proposal to architects, that could work too. Why not?
http://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farm...e-on-log-trade
There is some confusion about timber usage and terms evident in some posts. Hardwood is defined by the cellular structure of the wood - not by its hardness. Balsa is a hardwood. Durability is not defined by the density of the wood although very hard woods usually last longer untreated than untreated softwoods. Dense hardwoods are not good for construction purposes generally because they are difficult to work with and require specialist techniques. Radiata pine, properly graded and pressure treated with a copper/chrome/ arsenate liquid will have more than adequate strength and durability But theres the rub. Grading has gone to the dogs in recent times. The strict regimes of treatment inspection has been handed back to the industry to police. A large company whom you may or may not know has made millions on "alternative" materials that have, as often as not, failed to deliver on quality,durability and the rest.
Hi Craic, have an interest in one of these special partnerships for pines, and we were not told at the outset that an imaginary line through the middle of the N.I. defines the finished hardness or denseness score of pine, the more southern timber cannot be used for beams etc, but is OK in supporting walls and other jobs. It hasn't been a great money-spinner, when the normal path is to send top quality pruned softwood logs out on a boat to China.
However the partnership is going to mill the timber here, at least some of it, for the building industry. Along with everyone else.
Muldoon had a fairly good hit rate with the Think Big projects, whatever else he did. Was that state intervention, or just smart planning by the only outfit in NZ big enough to carry out those large-scale schemes?
My main beef is that now those power schemes are long paid off, National is selling them down for a bit of pocket money, to save their own backsides and meet a tiny budget surplus target, a target they made harder by not guiding the economy properly over the last few years.