One of the Far North’s oldest and largest employers is set to shut its doors, with Japanese-owned Juken New Zealand moving to close its Northland Mill in Kaitāia after a months-long search for a buyer turned up nothing viable. Around 60 people stand to lose their jobs.
The company put both its Kaitāia sites, the Northland sawmill and the neighbouring Triboard plant, up for sale earlier this year and ran a tender process through to late May. When that failed to deliver a workable offer for the sawmill, Juken told staff on the morning of 24 June that it was opening a formal consultation on closure. That consultation runs until 8 July, after which the company is expected to confirm a final decision.
Juken director Yasufumi Tsuchiya pointed to a familiar set of pressures. The proposal reflected “challenging market conditions, including falling demand in key markets, rising costs and insufficient work” to keep the mill running sustainably, he said. The company had made “an extensive effort to identify a buyer or alternative pathway that would allow the site to continue operating, but this has not resulted in a viable option at this time”, he added, as 1News reported.
The Triboard plant, which makes an engineered wood panel used in construction, is not part of the closure proposal. Juken says it is still exploring a sale of that site, so its future is unresolved rather than settled.
Electricity is a big part of the squeeze. Power prices in the Far North are among the highest in the country, and a timber mill is an energy-hungry operation. Add a soft building market at home and weaker demand from the export markets that take New Zealand sawn timber, and the economics of running a remote mill have become very hard to make work.
For Kaitāia, the second-largest town in the Far North, the loss lands heavily. The mill has been a fixture of the local economy for decades, the kind of employer that anchors household budgets, sports clubs and small businesses around it. Workers First Union organiser Marcus Coverdale said staff were told at 6.30am that no buyer had been found, and he was blunt about where he wanted the search for a solution to go next, calling on central government to step up and push for an answer.
Acting Far North Mayor Chicky Rudkin said the closure would hit hard in a district already carrying heavy cost-of-living pressures, and committed to backing affected workers while pushing for new economic opportunities in the region. Far North Mayor Moko Tepania, speaking earlier in the process when the mills first went up for sale, described the operation as “a very important employer for our second largest town” and said the council wanted to work alongside the company, in comments to RNZ.
The politics of the closure have been pointed. Regional Development Minister Shane Jones, himself a Northlander, made clear the company had not come to the Crown for help. “They’ve been a feature of the Far North economy for a very long time, but they’ve never once reached out to me as the Regional Development Minister, seeking a rescue package or wanting to maintain the ongoing functioning of the business, with some sort of package from the Crown,” Jones said. He called the decision “enormously disappointing” and said he had “a great deal of sympathy” for the workers, while noting that this was a foreign company making a commercial call, as the NZ Herald reported.
There may yet be a twist. Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown has indicated he is part of a group considering a purchase of both the Northland and Triboard sites, which raises the prospect of a last-minute rescue before the consultation closes. Nothing is settled, and the union has cautioned that any buyer would need to keep the existing workforce for a deal to mean much for the town.
The Kaitāia proposal does not stand alone. It is the latest in a run of mill and plant closures that have rolled through the New Zealand wood and manufacturing sector over the past year or so, including the Kinleith pulp and paper mill near Tokoroa, which cut around 230 jobs, the Eves Valley sawmill in Tasman with about 140 jobs, and the Karioi pulp mill and Tangiwai sawmill in the central North Island with roughly 200 between them. The common threads are high energy costs, soft demand and ageing plant that is expensive to keep competitive.
The timing also sits uncomfortably alongside the wider mood of the workforce. The latest Westpac-McDermott Miller Employment Confidence Index fell to its lowest level since the survey began in 2004, with a net 60 percent of people saying it is hard to find a job right now. In a town the size of Kaitāia, 60 jobs is not an abstraction. It is a meaningful share of the local labour market, and the workers being consulted know that finding something comparable nearby will not be easy.
For now the mill keeps running while the clock ticks toward 8 July. Whether a buyer steps in at the eleventh hour, or the gates close for good, the next fortnight will decide a great deal for the families who depend on the place and for a district that can ill afford to lose one of its biggest employers.
What do you make of the Kaitāia mill closure and the state of New Zealand’s wood sector? Should the government do more to keep regional mills open, or is this simply the market at work? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
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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