Australia’s most ambitious farm-to-pine conversion has won the backing of the nation’s timber union, which has declared the $142 million Rushy Lagoon project a win for Tasmanian workers. That is according to Danny Murphy, Tasmanian Secretary of the Timber, Furnishing and Textiles Union (TFTU), who set out the position in a statement issued today, as farmers fight to reverse the sale.
“The timber needed to build Tasmania’s future homes must be planted today,” Murphy said, tying resource security directly to job security and warning that Australia cannot solve its housing crisis without long-term investment in plantations, processing, and manufacturing.
Cleared by Treasurer Jim Chalmers this month, the sale hands Tasmania’s largest farm to the Tasmania Natural Asset Trust, run by UK asset manager Gresham House alongside Aviva Investors, with $69 million from the taxpayer-owned Clean Energy Finance Corporation. Planting across the 21,744-hectare estate, a program the trust puts at 12 million radiata pine seedlings, is forecast to generate 3.2 million Australian Carbon Credit Units, 5 million tonnes of timber, and 190 jobs.
It comes as TasFarmers president Nathan Cox this week demanded a parliamentary inquiry into how a foreign carbon-forestry fund outbid Australian farmers, with the lobby joining the state’s Liberal government in asking Prime Minister Anthony Albanese to overturn the Treasurer’s approval. Importantly, farming will continue across parts of the estate, with Murphy arguing the project proves agriculture and productive forestry can coexist when a large property’s country is put to what each does best.
The TFTU’s position lines up with Australia’s Timber Fibre Strategy, Murphy said, citing the industry’s long-term plan handed to the Albanese Government in March 2025 and its support for using Australian Carbon Credit Units to attract plantation investment.
Reaching far beyond the forest, Murphy said the project also matters to Tasmanian workers in aluminium, pulp and paper, iron ore pellet, and cement manufacturing, as well as mining. Credible offsets, he argued, must supplement rather than replace the emissions-reduction plans of heavy industry.
“TNAT is a new model for sustainable land management in Tasmania,” Gresham House associate director Dorian van Raalte said this week, after the trust broke its silence to argue its pine will feed local mills and divert harvesting from native forests.
Wood Central understands that de-stocking has already begun at Rushy Lagoon, with cattle sold interstate and a tree nursery established ahead of planting. Murphy has reduced the fight over Tasmania’s largest farm to one line: anyone who genuinely backs Tasmanian timber and blue-collar jobs, the TFTU says, backs this project and its 12 million pines.
