Australia risks becoming dependent on imported timber to meet current and future demand, with the growing dependency a matter of national significance. That is according to Steve Dadd, Chair of the Australian Forest Products Association (AFPA), the peak body for the country’s $24 billion forest products value chain, who spoke to Mark Levy on 2GB’s Mornings with Mark Levy from the Sydney Royal Easter Show’s woodchopping arena on Monday.
“Given that we have the sixth largest forest in the world, and on a per capita basis probably more forests than anyone in the world, it’s really quite sad that we are importing a lot of timber from countries with less forests than us and much worse environmental standards,” Dadd told Levy.
Dadd warned that 30 per cent of plantation softwood — the material underpinning Australia’s housing supply chain — is now sourced from overseas. For hardwood the situation is worse still, with “most of our decking, a lot of our furniture-grade timber, really high-value stuff, all coming in from countries like Indonesia, other tropical countries, including the Congo and South America — and yet here in Australia, we run a really sustainable and well-managed forest industry, and less and less of that is available for our construction industry,” he said.
Dadd cited a term drawn from a television report to describe the dynamic: “carbon colonialism” — whereby Australia enforces stringent domestic harvesting standards whilst simultaneously importing timber from jurisdictions with no equivalent obligations. He argued the arrangement was not only economically damaging but also environmentally incoherent.
And the contrast is sharpest when measured against the landmarks that defined the last century of Australian construction. Dadd noted that the interiors of the Sydney Opera House were lined with brush box supplied by the Alan Taylor business — now part of Pentarch, of which Dadd is executive director — and that the deck of the Sydney Harbour Bridge was built from local hardwood in the 1930s, some of which remains intact beneath the railway lines today.
“Those projects are not going to happen any more with local timbers,” he said. “We’ve become an import economy.” Levy separately noted that both the Melbourne Metro and the new Sydney Fish Market — two of the country’s most significant recent public projects — were constructed using overseas timber.
Dadd argued that, in his assessment, “activism rather than good science is now having a much greater influence on government policy than it should,” adding that “government across all layers have just stopped listening to that science.” He cited two bodies of evidence he said were being ignored in Canberra: a United Nations state of the forests report identifying Australia as one of the global hotspots for reforestation, with 4 million hectares of new forest confirmed by Landsat satellite imagery over the past decade, and a CSIRO national koala audit placing the population at close to one million koalas.
“The easiest path is to shut it down. It’s not the right path, but it’s often the easiest path,” he said of the political calculus facing ministers in inner-city electorates under Green influence. He warned the situation was compounding at the regulatory level, with private landowners now required to obtain sign-off from both local council and Local Land Services before harvesting can proceed.
The EPBC Act reforms passed in November 2025 remove the longstanding exemption for Regional Forestry Agreement operations, meaning that from 1 July 2027, RFA forestry operations will be required to comply with the same rules and standards as other industries. Dadd said the change would require a complete renegotiation of approvals frameworks between state and federal governments — piling further compliance costs onto an industry he argued was already over-regulated relative to its overseas competitors.
Dadd’s message to policymakers was pointed, calling on ministers to visit the industry firsthand: “these are passionate conservationists […] people who have spent generations working in this industry. They look after it from a forever perspective. They’re the ones driving the heavy assets when fire threatens communities and forests.” His closing instruction was unambiguous — “listen to experts, not activists,” he said.
