More than 13,000 Australians have signed a petition against paying road tax on fuel that is never used on roads, and the Australian Forest Products Association has now put forestry’s name to the campaign behind it. That is according to the Fuel Tax Credit Alliance, the eighteen-member coalition behind Hands Off Our Fuel, which last month launched a new campaign against calls to cap or cut the credit, an attack on regional jobs, communities, and industries.
“You can’t keep piling on more taxes,” Tania Constable, Chief Executive of the Minerals Council of Australia, said, launching a campaign that calls the credit a refund rather than a subsidy and traces the cost of removing it through food prices, freight rates, and regional employment.”We only apply the credit to off-road uses, such as harvesting and fighting bushfires,” Dominic Lane, Acting Deputy Chief Executive of the Australian Forest Products Association, said in confirming forestry’s place in the alliance last week.
The credit covers the harvesters, forwarders, loaders, generators, and firefighting units working the forest estate, none of which touch a public road. Forestry is defending it through the worst diesel shock the sector has recorded, with regional bowsers reaching $3.39 a litre in April and Sydney’s terminal gate price sitting 153.5 cents above pre-conflict levels.
Wholesale diesel sat at 165.5 cents a litre when the conflict with Iran began, then broke sharply higher as crude supply through the Strait of Hormuz tightened, reaching 319.0 cents a litre in Sydney by the first week of April. At the time, Forest and Wood Communities Australia (FWCA) had pressed Canberra for relief beyond the three-month package that halved the excise and set the 32.4-cent road user charge to zero. “It cost me $2.90 per litre, which is obscene,” Bulahdelah harvest and haulage contractor Anthony Dorney said of the bulk diesel filling his loaders, one operator among the many the alliance now says it speaks for.
“They need to find it now, not just claim it back at BAS time,” FWCA Chair Steve Dobbyns said of operators absorbing the gap, arguing that relief recouped months after an invoice is paid does little for a harvesting contractor settling diesel accounts weekly.
That mechanism is the same one the Alliance now defends, with fuel tax credits claimed through the Business Activity Statement rather than taken at the bowser. Forestry, therefore, holds two positions at once: that the credit must survive and that the way it pays is too slow to matter when diesel moves this fast.
The push the alliance formed to counter now has a name, with the Labor Environmental Action Network proposing a $50 million annual cap on credits claimed by major mining companies. Critics count the cap as affecting 18 very large claimants and no farmers, in a scheme that returns more than $10 billion a year, with nearly half of it flowing to mining.
Departmental documents released under freedom of information record that the Minerals Council coordinated an earlier iteration of the alliance, ran a media campaign, and commissioned research from economist Chris Richardson, prepared solely for the council’s use. Those papers also show independent members of parliament advocating an unwinding of the credit for mining in November 2024, before Infrastructure Minister Catherine King assured the industry the following January that the government would not reform it.
It comes as Labor’s National Conference in Adelaide rejected the push to cap or cut the credit last week, adopting broader language on taxation and decarbonisation instead, a decision the Alliance claimed as a victory for the regional industries behind the campaign.
Canberra settled the on-road question in May, with the 2026-27 budget retaining fuel tax credits for heavy vehicles and sparing log trucks from a Productivity Commission plan to phase out that credit over 10 years. Master Builders Australia joined on 10 July, adding builders to a membership that counts the National Farmers Federation, Canegrowers, and Australian Grape and Wine, two weeks before forestry followed.
