The Green Triangle’s Quiet Manufacturing Revolution

When Tony Wright talks about forestry, he reaches for a picture of a submarine. Not because the two industries have anything obvious in common, but because the comparison makes a point that polite industry updates rarely do: the Green Triangle is running one of the most sophisticated advanced manufacturing economies in the country, and it’s doing it in almost complete obscurity. As Wright, Executive General Manager of the Green Triangle Forestry Industry Hub, counts down to retirement, that’s the thing he most wants to change.

When Tony Wright presented to the Green Triangle Local Jobs Workforce Summit recently, he put a picture of a submarine on the screen.

The image wasn’t accidental. In South Australia, submarines carry a particular weight – they represent the promise of high-tech industry, skilled jobs, and a manufacturing future built on something more durable than luck. Wright’s point was blunt: the Green Triangle is already doing that. It’s just that almost nobody outside the region knows it.

“Forestry is no longer an industry of flannos and chainsaws,” he told the room. The line landed because it named something real – a gap between what people assume about the industry and what the industry has quietly become.

Wright, Executive General Manager of the Green Triangle Forestry Industry Hub and counting down to retirement after a career spanning electricity, water and now timber, says that gap is the industry’s most pressing problem. Not regulation, not market access, not even the perennial workforce challenge. The challenge is that forestry has spent decades as a quiet achiever, and quiet achievers don’t always attract the investment, the talent, or the policy attention they deserve.

“It’s an industry where you can feel really good about coming to work,” he says. “But we probably have tended not to blow our own trumpet, and I think we need to do more of that.”

What the industry actually is

The picture most people carry of forestry captures maybe 20 per cent of the story. Roughly 80 per cent of the industry’s jobs sit not in harvesting but in processing, and that processing side looks nothing like the public perception.

The mills operating in the Green Triangle today use multiple scanning systems to read the structural composition of every single log before a cut is made. Machine-based learning optimises each cut pattern individually, in real time, as timber moves quickly through the line. Every finished piece carries a unique fingerprint tracked through the entire system. Workers running harvesting and haulage equipment operate highly sophisticated machinery requiring the kind of precision eye-hand coordination, Wright notes, that you’d associate with people who are good at gaming.

Then there are the drones. The integrated AI camera networks across the state for firefighting capability. The robotics and automated sorting systems sitting inside what are, by any reasonable measure, advanced manufacturing facilities.

Companies like Porta Products and Timberlink have built some of the most advanced wood-panel and engineered timber facilities in the southern hemisphere. Porta Products’ current project will result in one of the most advanced wood panel factories in the country when complete, with no human contact with the fibre from start to finish. Timberlink is already producing cross-laminated timber panels at scale, with trucks reverse-stacked so panels arrive on construction sites in the precise order they’ll be installed.

And then there’s the carbon story that rarely gets told: every cubic metre of softwood that comes out of the region’s plantations, once every part of the supply chain is accounted for, still represents a net 700 kilograms of carbon removed from the atmosphere.

“There’s not many industries that can say that,” Wright says.

The proof nobody talks about

Buried inside the industry’s relative obscurity is a detail that says everything about how well regarded it actually is: the Green Triangle runs one of the world’s leading tree genetics programs. Tree Breeding Australia runs continuous tree breeding trials (including DNA profiles) across hardwood and softwood species, lifting productivity by around one per cent a year. Growers and researchers from Europe and North America now feed their own data through the same systems – not because they had to, but because the program is recognised as among the best of its kind.

“We’re probably recognised more outside Australia than inside it,” Wright says. It’s a line that doubles as a summary of the broader problem.

The cost of a low profile

That gap has real consequences – for who applies for jobs, which young people consider it as a career, and how policymakers think about investing in regional industrial capability.

Social licence offers a useful proxy. Where the processing footprint is strongest, community understanding and support run deepest. In Mount Gambier, around one in five people are directly or indirectly employed in the industry. In parts of western Victoria where less processing occurs locally, it’s closer to one in ten.

“As we capture more of the supply chain and value chain within regional economies, we amplify the value of the industry to those communities,” Wright says. “They see the direct benefits for employment, and that helps to demystify the industry.”

The next 30 years

Global demand for wood fibre is forecast to roughly quadruple over the next 30 years. A feasibility study currently underway is exploring whether the region can begin processing its blue gum hardwood estate locally – currently exported as raw fibre to Japan, India and China – into high-value engineered wood products. Doing so would deepen the region’s already sophisticated manufacturing skill base: robotics, control systems, chemical engineering, machine-based AI. Skills that, Wright notes, are highly transferable across industries. He’s relaxed about that prospect.

“I wouldn’t see it as failure if people from our industry are headhunted elsewhere,” he says. “I’d see it as recognition of how well we develop our people.”

It’s a long view, fitting for an industry built on long timelines. Softwood takes around thirty years from planting to harvest. Some workers nearing retirement now can still remember planting the very stands they’re harvesting today.

Wright himself came to forestry by an unusual route – most of his career spent across electricity and water utilities – before a phone call connected his water background to one of the Green Triangle’s most distinctive features. South Australia operates a forest water licence system, one of only two places in the world to do so, which legally quantifies the groundwater available to large-scale plantations and along with water licences for irrigation and other uses seeks to ensure the water system remains sustainable. For someone who had spent years treating water as a resource to be carefully managed and accounted for, it was familiar territory.

As he prepares to hand over, his message for the industry is the same one the submarine slide was trying to make.

“Forestry sort of loves being a bit of a quiet achiever,” he says. “But I see it, particularly in the Green Triangle, as the dominant driver of advanced job opportunities in this region. The industry is already fantastic in the way it develops its people. We need to be bold, we need to back ourselves, and we need to make sure people know who we actually are.”