Forestry

Making Australia self-sufficient in timber

By geographical area, Australia is the sixth-largest country in the world. We have all the land we need to plant forests and be self-sufficient in timber, an essential material for housing and construction.

Yet Australia is not self-sufficient in timber. We have a $2 billion trade deficit in wood products (for example, Australia no longer produces standard office paper), importing raw timber from countries with lower stewardship credentials like Indonesia, Russia and Malaysia with all the biosecurity risks and expense that come with it. This doesn’t make sense, especially when timber prices in Australia have risen more than 200% since before the COVID-19 pandemic. This is having a significant impact on housing supply and construction, slowing it down and making it more expensive at a time when Australia can least afford it. Rising material costs are also a factor in the collapse of building and construction businesses.

Forestry industries contribute about $24 billion to the Australian economy, directly supporting 80,000 jobs and indirectly supporting another 100,000 jobs. Forestry industries are vital employers in many regional areas. These jobs were placed at considerable risk by legislation introduced by the Albanese Labor government in 2024, which would have prevented investors in forestry from realising full returns due to the long period of time required for new plantations to mature. One Nation moved an amendment to the legislation to fix this issue after forestry industries had unsuccessfully approached the major parties, and we convinced a majority of the Senate to back it.

One Nation strongly supports Australian forestry, and strongly supports expanding the plantation forestry estate to make our country self-sufficient in timber. One Nation also supports current levels of native forestry, which represents a small fraction of all forestry: only six out of every 10,000 native trees in Australia are harvested every year. Strict laws require that native forest is regenerated after harvesting, and that ‘old-growth’ forests and environmentally sensitive areas and habitats are left completely alone. One Nation supports this position – we can be self-sufficient in timber without harvesting in these areas and we support.

One Nation doesn’t subscribe to the ideology that human activity is responsible for climate change – humans are responsible for only a fraction of the world’s CO2 emissions, most of which come from natural sources. However in this world of carbon accounting and offsets, it’s also a fact that more plantation forests in Australia will absorb more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – Australian forestry plantations currently store about 258 million tonnes of carbon. Trees are, in fact, the perfect renewable resource and we should be planting more of them.

One Nation will support Australian forestry jobs and promote timber self-sufficiency by:

  • incentivising greater use of Australian timber in construction through a ‘local wood first’ policy in government procurement processes;
  • exempting basic building materials – including timber – from the GST for a period of five years for homes up to a value of $1 million;
  • supporting the industry’s call for a summit to develop policies incentivising adoption of modular and pre-fabricated timber housing;
  • cracking down on illegal timber imports;
  • supporting the introduction of country-of-origin labelling so that consumers can pro-actively choose Australian timber and wood products over foreign imports;
  • supporting the development of a national fire response plan for Australia’s forests;
  • supporting the delivery of forestry tertiary education for workforce sustainability and development;
  • changing National Electricity Market (NEM) rules to favour cheaper coal and gas to reduce electricity costs for timber mills and other wood supply chain businesses by 20%;
  • extending plantation establishment grants to assist the industry’s target of establishing an additional 18,000 hectares of forestry plantations per year; and
  • opposing any moves to lock away more areas of native forest that is available for commercial harvesting.