Australia’s hardwood demand did not fall when native harvesting was cut back, but moved offshore into the decking, plywood and furniture that the sawn hardwood import line never counts, even as that line collapsed. That is according to import figures from Tyron Venn, the University of Queensland forest economist, whose leakage modelling produced the orangutan figure now under challenge.
Venn set out the numbers at May’s Primex Forest Industries Dinner in northern NSW, on stage alongside Wood Central publisher Jason Ross in the country that anchors Australia’s hardwood value chain. Whilst the figures predate this week’s analysis and were never meant as a reply to it, they bear directly on the number it turns on.
David Lindenmayer and Chris Taylor, working through two decades of Australian Government trade data, found that sawn hardwood imports from Malaysia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea fell by as much as 94 per cent, whilst Australian production dropped by 70 per cent to 389,000 cubic metres. “This is a trope,” the pair write, arguing that a fall in local hardwood supply would no more lift demand for imported tropical species than an apple shortage would lift demand for meat pies.
Venn accepts the sawn hardwood line is sliding whilst sawn softwoods fluctuate but hold steady, arguing instead that the demand went somewhere the sawn timber figures never look. Merbau decking, the imported staple whose leading substitute lost its FSC certification this week, is not sawn hardwood at all, according to his reading, but builders’ carpentry, the class that captures flooring, decking, mouldings, doors and joinery.
Builders’ carpentry imports ran from 150,000 cubic metres of roundwood equivalent a year in 1996-97 to 650,000 cubic metres by 2022-23, more than a fourfold rise in a category Venn says is mostly hardwood. Engineered wood products climbed harder again, from 371,000 cubic metres to 1,981,000 cubic metres over the same window, growth he ties largely to Asian suppliers built on hardwood feedstocks.
Lindenmayer and Taylor trace that engineered-wood surge in the other direction, to softwood plants in Germany, Lithuania, and Sweden rather than tropical forests. Engineered wood is the fastest-growing part of the import mix, so its origin and its species are where the two accounts split.
China ships more plywood to Australia than any other country, according to Venn’s figures, and 75 per cent of Chinese plywood is hardwood. Indonesia and Malaysia, the next two suppliers of any size in recent years, run theirs at 100 per cent hardwood.
Wooden furniture followed the same pattern, with imports rising from 178,000 cubic metres a year in 1996-97 to 1,101,000 cubic metres in 2022-23, with 92 per cent sourced from China or tropical developing countries. Venn says a long list of references indicates that the overwhelming majority of that timber is hardwood.
That is the chain Venn built at Primex, where his modelling showed that 81.3 per cent of Australia’s reduced native forest sawlog production was leaking straight to imports. Timber at elevated risk of illegal harvesting made up 50 per cent of all imports between 2018-19 and 2022-23, his research found, up from 20 to 26 per cent in the late 1990s.
His numbers place Australia’s annual harvest area at 42,000 hectares in nations carrying a high or medium risk of harvest or trade illegality, 13,300 hectares of it in Indonesia and Malaysia, which ties to the loss of 26 orangutans a year. From 2018 to 2023, on the same figures, Australia consumed twice as much imported elevated-risk timber as it cut from its own native forests.
Now, Venn wants the 5 per cent leakage discount in the Albanese government’s newly approved Improved Native Forest Management carbon method replaced with a factor of 81 per cent, and is working with the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee to test the method’s integrity. The journal article he wrote with Zuhui Huang and Jaanvi Lachhwani, setting out the modelling in full, is due for publication in the months ahead.
