Cheap Russian timber is still reaching Australian building sites three years after Canberra hit it with a 35 per cent tariff, rerouted and relabelled through third countries to dodge the duty. That is according to a submission filed with the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee yesterday by Australian Forest Products Association Acting Chief Executive Richard Hyett, who has urged the federal government to extend that tariff to every product carrying Russian material, no matter which country it ships from.
At the centre of the submission sits a blunt verdict on a policy now three years old, namely that the sanctions introduced in the weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine have not done the job. Wood Central understands the submission states the sanctions “appear to have been inadequate,” with Russian products “rerouted in both raw and processed form through third countries to avoid Australian sanctions.”
The complaint turns on two engineered products above all: laminated veneer lumber and plywood, in which Chinese manufacturers convert cheap Russian timber into finished goods that clear the substantial transformation test and so escape the duty altogether. Hyett describes the result as a shadow trade running through Chinese supply chains, a pattern that has also seen Russian birch processed in Vietnamese and Indonesian mills before shipping on to Western markets.
The submission documents what it calls a commensurate shift, with imports from China and Lithuania rising as Russian volumes fell away after the April 2022 tariff. AFPA says the pattern has raised serious concerns about the authenticity of the origin claims from those countries.
The shift has only hardened over the past year, with declared LVL imports reaching 205,343 cubic metres in the 12 months to October 2025, a 63 per cent jump on the year before. China supplied 69 per cent of that total, and the price of Chinese products fell by 63.2 per cent over the same period.
A price collapse on that scale cannot be explained by ordinary market softness, the submission argues, and points instead to dumping or to relabelled Russian stock working its way down the chain. That argument is backed by a timber testing report commissioned by the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, which found that Chinese LVL contained Russian wood and that half of the samples examined could not have their origin verified.
Those findings raise hard questions about FSC certification issued in China, given that the scheme banned Russian and Belarusian material after the invasion, yet apparently certified products keep turning up on Australian shelves. Australia, the submission notes, operates no independent origin-testing programme of its own and relies almost entirely on certification for assurance, even though Source ID technology is already capable of confirming where a log was cut.
For Australian mills, the toll is already visible: yards backed up with unsold stock, shifts trimmed, and demand for locally grown timber draining away as cheap imports take up shelf space. The submission states that the impact on domestic producers “has been and continues to be devastating.”
AFPA has presented three remedies to the committee, none of which is modest. Hyett wants the 35 per cent tariff extended to all products containing Russian materials, anti-dumping action opened against those products, and proactive border compliance checks to catch rerouted stock before it clears customs.
The submission holds up the European Union and the United States as the template Australia has so far declined to follow. From November 2025, every Chinese hardwood plywood shipment into the EU has carried an 86.8 per cent duty — bar a single cooperating exporter on 43.2 per cent — while Brussels has issued a sanctions alert flagging birch plywood routed through China with trade links to Russia or Belarus.
Australia, by contrast, has taken none of those steps, and AFPA argues that the inaction has quietly turned the country into a preferred destination for the trade the West is now shutting out.
The AFPA submission is one of 29 already lodged through the committee’s portal, an inquiry the Senate referred on 5 November 2025. Public submissions close on 12 June, and a final report is due back by 20 August, with at least 26 entries already on the public register, among them Australian National University legal scholar Anton Moiseienko, financial integrity firm KordaMentha, the Minderoo Foundation, Transparency International Australia and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Most of the submissions so far on the public register focus on the so-called “blood oil” loophole, with Australia named as the single biggest buyer of petroleum products refined from Russian crude in third countries. The energy and Ukrainian-community submitters include the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, the Australian Institute of Petroleum, Senator Fatima Payman, the Australia-Ukraine Chamber of Commerce, B4Ukraine and the Australian Federation of Ukrainian Organisations.
Wood Central understands the timber supply chain is among the sectors now active before the inquiry, with further submissions expected in the days ahead, and the Albanese government is under mounting pressure to bring Australia’s regime into line with the European Union and other Western nations. Russian timber sits among the Kremlin’s highest-value transborder trades, and INTERPOL ranks illegal logging as the third most lucrative transnational crime on earth — behind only counterfeiting and drug trafficking.
