Australia’s 11 Regional Forestry Hubs have been refused the additional funding they actively sought, with the federal forestry minister telling their chairs the answer now rests with the design of the $300 million Forestry Growth Fund. That is according to a letter from Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry Minister Julie Collins, seen by Wood Central and addressed to chairs across the nationwide network.
“I am unable to offer you funding at this time,” Collins wrote in the reply, one month after the chairs jointly requested additional funding to bring their 11 regions up to speed on the Timber Fibre Strategy’s rollout. Her letter instead promised to bear the proposal in mind as the parameters of the Forestry Growth Fund are finalised, leaving a door ajar without committing new money.
Wood Central understands that hub chairs wrote to the minister on 13 April seeking the extra money, nine months after the government released the 128-action strategy developed by the Strategic Forest and Renewable Materials Partnership and delivered to Collins in March 2025. And whilst the department published the strategy as advice to the government from the forestry industry rather than government policy itself, Collins has credited the hubs’ work on regional issues and opportunities for supporting its development.
Half of that $300 million is already moving, following the National Reconstruction Fund’s April opening of $150 million in concessional finance for wood processors. The other half has no rules attached yet, covering everything from workforce and safety through to engineered wood innovation, and Collins wrote that advice from industry, including the Strategic Partnership, will decide how it is spent.
Money the hubs already hold has an end date, with the 11 sharing $8.6 million in Commonwealth funding across the three years to June 2027, a top-up delivered in the 2022-23 Budget to extend and expand a network first established under the 2018 National Forestry Industry Plan. Each hub is run by a steering committee of industry players, feeding the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, the planning and technical work behind growing its region’s forest industries.
The refusal reached the chairs eight weeks before the full hub network gathered at Newcastle’s Fort Scratchley, where managers from Tasmania to the Northern Territory heard research showing Australia now consumes twice as much elevated-risk imported timber as wood from its own native forests.
“We’re showcasing the work we’ve been doing over the last three or four years,” Nick Cameron, manager of the North East NSW Forestry Hub, told ABC’s NSW Country Hour from the forum floor, crediting the Commonwealth as its sponsor. “I invited the ABC to come and hear all the good things happening,” he said of comments that carried the network’s case to a statewide rural audience, an invitation issued after former Treasury secretary Ken Henry’s advocacy for the Great Koala National Park in the same region.
Managers boarded a bus the next morning for a tour of the Hunter’s working supply chain, running from Marshall’s Timbers in Cardiff through a harvesting operation in Watagan State Forest to Weathertex’s Heatherbrae factory. It was a day that put the hubs’ extension work on show, from sawmill floor to hardboard line, while the chairs’ request sat parked in Canberra.
The Forestry Growth Fund builds on nearly $300 million in existing federal forestry programs, which take in more than $100 million for research through Australian Forest and Wood Innovations, another $100 million-plus for the Accelerate Adoption of Wood Processing Innovation program, more than $73 million for the Support Plantation Establishment program, and $10 million for workforce training. In the letter, the minister repeated that the Albanese Government remains committed to increasing wood supply and adding value to Australia’s forest products.
