The Northland Mill in Kaitāia ran its last shift on Friday, two weeks earlier than the date its Japanese owner had set, ending about 60 jobs at what had been one of the Far North’s biggest private employers.
Juken New Zealand had told staff the veneer mill would keep going until 21 August. Instead the plant wound up on 7 August. The company says workers will still be paid out to the end of the original notice period, so nobody loses a fortnight of wages because of the earlier finish.
About 60 people were employed at the mill when the closure was confirmed in June. In the weeks since, 28 have held on to work with Juken, including 19 who have accepted roles at the Triboard plant next door and nine kept on in jobs with minor changes. The rest have retired or gone looking for something else, according to Farmers Weekly.
Workers First Union organiser Marcus Coverdale said the early finish still caught people out, even though the outcome had been known for months. “It’s a shock, but the workers themselves are a bit relieved,” he said, describing staff who no longer had to keep a plant running that everybody knew was finished.
Juken put its Kaitāia operation on the market earlier this year and ran a tender process that closed without a workable offer. Confirming the closure, company director Yasufumi Tsuchiya said in a statement, “We explored a range of options, including a sale process and other potential business arrangements. Despite those efforts, we were unable to identify a viable pathway forward.”
The company’s stated reasons were the ordinary ones of a squeezed manufacturer. Demand in key export markets for New Zealand sawn timber has fallen, costs have risen, and there was not enough work to keep the mill running sustainably. Tsuchiya has also pointed to power prices among the highest in the country and to competition from Juken’s newer plant at Masterton, which does similar work more cheaply.
Triboard, the larger of the two Kaitāia plants, is still running. It employs roughly 140 people making engineered wood panels and generates much of its own energy from an on site biomass plant, which insulates it from the electricity bills that helped sink its neighbour. Juken says the process to sell Triboard as a going concern is still under way. No buyer has been named.
That matters more than the raw job numbers suggest. Taken together the two mills were the second largest employer in Kaitāia after the district hospital, in a town of about 6,000 people. Wages from the mills flow through the supermarket, the mechanics, the rugby club and the rent rolls, and 60 jobs in a town that size lands with roughly the force that several thousand would in Auckland.
There was a rescue attempt and it did not get there. Northland Regional Council, Far North District Council and the economic development agency Northland NZ asked the Government to back a consortium of investors who wanted to modernise the veneer mill and add a second operation converting waste and low grade wood into biomass fuel. Acting Prime Minister David Seymour declined to put public money in. Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown had confirmed in May that he was weighing a private bid for the sites, in his own capacity rather than the council’s, but no offer proved viable.
Workers First counts this as the seventh wood processing site to close during the current parliamentary term, with something in the order of 570 jobs lost across the sector in two years. Coverdale has argued the Kaitāia closure breaks a working chain, because logs that were cut, peeled and turned into products in one place will now leave the district as raw material.
That is the shape of the wider industry too. More than half of the logs harvested in New Zealand since 2011 have been shipped out as rough logs, with around 44 percent going to domestic processors, according to government forestry data. The harvest itself has been shrinking, from 36.5 million cubic metres in the year to September 2019 to 33.1 million in 2024, and the slice going to New Zealand mills fell faster than the slice going onto ships. Treasury has warned that a lack of domestic value added processing capacity will limit what the country can earn from forestry in the medium term.
Kaitāia is now a small worked example of that national problem. The trees are still in the ground in the Far North and they will still be harvested. What has changed is where the value gets added, and the answer for the Northland Mill’s share of that timber is now somewhere else, most likely offshore.
Juken has said it is offering departing staff redeployment where it can, along with financial advice, wellbeing support and help finding new work, and it has committed to wage increases, backpay and out of notice payments. Its Wairarapa manufacturing operations are unaffected. The company has been in New Zealand since 1990 as a subsidiary of Japan’s WoodOne and manages around 30,000 hectares of certified plantation forest here.
Attention in Kaitāia now shifts to Triboard and whether a buyer emerges for the 140 jobs still on that site. We covered the original closure decision in June in this report, and the RNZ account of Friday’s early finish has more from the workers themselves.
Do you have a view on what should happen to the Kaitāia mills, or on whether New Zealand should be processing more of its own timber at home? Leave a comment below and tell us what you think.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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