Harvey Norman hits back at forest campaign

Harvey Norman has been accused of being “complicit in the ongoing destruction of Australia’s native forests”, with a timber activist group calling on consumers to lobby the whitegoods, electronics and furniture company to stop sourcing products from native forests.

But Harvey Normman chairman Gerry Harvey hit back, saying he is an environmentalist and is just trying to compete with cheaper businesses overseas.

Activist group NGO Markets for Change says a one-year study tracked timber from native forests in Western Australia, Tasmania, New South Wales and Victoria to China, where it was made into furniture and shipped back to Australia for sale through the company’s stores.

“These forests are being logged, shipped overseas to China, turned into furniture and then returned to Australia to be sold in Harvey Norman stores,” NGO Markets for Change CEO Tim Birch said.

The group’s spokesman Peta Cooper told SmartCompany this morning that lobbying the Government to protect native forests hadn’t been successful so the green group was focusing on retailers instead.

“We’re going right to the retailers and their procurement policies,” Cooper said.

While logging native forests is legal in Australia, NGO Markets for Change says its mission is to “ensure that furniture, DIY, paper retailers, supermarkets and others make the rapid shift from selling products coming from the destruction of our native forests to selling products coming from plantations, thereby protecting our precious native forests.”

Harvey told the ABC this morning that he was trying his best to use recycled timber or timber from plantations and not old forests.

“But every now and again something will slip through and I’ll be caught using timber from old forests, but it well could be timber that the Government in fact has told sawmillers that they can actually take it. They’ve got a certificate to take it,” he says.

“I’m disappointed because we’re trying so hard to change and also to keep an industry going in Australia that’s battling really hard because it’s competing with mostly Asian companies in China and it’s just very difficult for them to survive.

“And without our help they just can’t survive so it’s very important that we support the Australian manufacturing industry.”

Cooper said she understood that TV stations were refusing to play an advertisement it set up with activist group GetUp! that focuses on Harvey Norman’s forestry policies.