Australia’s Shadow Minister Assisting for Fisheries and Forestry, Tony Pasin, will use the House to press the Albanese Government to put the 35 per cent tariff on every product carrying Russian wood, a fortnight after one of Labor’s own senators urged the industry to take the same trade to the Anti-Dumping Commission. That is according to the House notice paper today, which lists the motion at item 16 of today’s private members’ business and gives it seven sitting Mondays, today the first, before it drops off the paper.
As it stands, Australia has imposed a 35 per cent duty on goods from Russia and Belarus since 25 April 2022, and it follows the country-of-origin rule. In practice, Russian logs peeled and glued into laminated veneer lumber arrive as Chinese products and incur no extra duties.
The Australian Forest Products Association estimates that up to 100,000 cubic metres of wood containing Russian material reach Australia each year, enough for 15,000 homes.
In the motion, Pasin asks the Government to “close the loophole for all timber products containing Russian materials being rerouted into Australia”. His June release spelled the fix out as the tariff on every product containing Russian material regardless of where it is imported from, country-of-origin labels, more border checks, and anti-dumping cases where warranted, the four measures AFPA put to Canberra.
“Imports of Russian timber into Kazakhstan increased by more than 1,300 per cent between 2022 and 2023,” Pasin said in that release, with the Liberal member for Barker counting the Green Triangle and Limestone Coast sector in his electorate as worth more than A$860 million a year to South Australia. He gave notice of the motion on 2 July, a week after the Senate’s second hearing on the trade.
“We encourage the industry to consider applying to the Anti-Dumping Commission,” Raff Ciccone wrote with Dorinda Cox and former senator Ellie Whiteaker in additional comments to the Senate’s sanctions report, and the committee’s deputy chair went public on 24 August, four days after signing them, with a warning about “Russian-origin LVL and other engineered wood products flooding our market”. The commission opens a case only when an Australian industry applies for one.
The committee as a whole, Liberal chair and Labor deputy included, backed the same widening of the tariff in the report tabled on 20 August, which calls Australia “a soft target and destination market for Russian timber” and asks the Government to close the routes that carry Russian goods in through third countries. Senators found that one stop in a third country is enough to render Russian wood legally non-Russian at the border.
“It’s looking like there is a positive outcome in that space,” Richard Hyett said last month of the application the Australian Forest Products Association is working up with the commission, and the acting chief executive gave the process 12 to 18 months. Hyett told senators in June that Russian logs reglued into LVL in China clear the substantial transformation test and ship tariff-free, and that the route is legal.
The committee found that checking the origin of every component of every product would need a testing regime it calls robust and expensive, and forensic testing Source Certain ran for the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry found 37 of 74 sampled imported products were not the country, species, or genus their paperwork declared, while every domestic sample came back accurately labelled. Source Certain takes the method, which reads every veneer in an LVL sample, to Beyond the Paperwork, a Wood Central webinar on 30 September.
