Lessons from Tasmania’s forestry debacle

Tasmania’s forest industry is experiencing its worst downturn in a decade, prompting a much-needed restructuring. While analysts focus on factors like exchange rates, the key lesson really has to do with corporate scale.

The larger the company the greater the impact, for good and bad. Given this equation, large companies need to be held to much tougher accountability, transparency and sustainability requirements than they currently are.

These are tough times for the Tasmanian forest industry. Almost everywhere one confronts a sea of red ink, failed investments, lost contracts and redundancies. The losses do not discriminate. The private and public sectors are affected as are large and small companies and cities and rural areas.

For an in depth discussion and academic analysis on the issues facing the Tasmanian forestry industry, take a look at theconversation.edu.au

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