Australian Government Forest Policy Commitments

The Australian Government policy is to enhance our sustainable forest management capacity and credentials and to implement measures which limit imports of illegally logged wood products.

After the 2007 election the government made the following commitments to forest policy in Australia:

• declaring ForestWorks as the new Forest and Forest Products Industry Skills Council and providing $1 million for its implementation. This initiative will build the skill base and capacity of the forest industries workforce, provide forest industries with direct input to National Skills Reporting, which informs government and the Vocational Education and Training sector of future skills needs, and will enhance monitoring of the effectiveness of forest and forest product industry training packages
  
  
• addressing the forest community’s need for a comprehensive industry wide database. It will provide $1 million to update the data contained in Forest and Wood Products Industry Workforce and Industry Data Collection research project, expand this database to meet the future needs of both government and industry, and develop world best practice benchmarks for the forest and forest products sectors
  
  
• providing $1 million to work with regional governments and industry to build capacity to prevent illegal harvesting of timber; develop and support certification schemes for timber and timber products sold in Australia; require disclosure at point of sale of species, country of origin and any certification; identify illegally logged timber and restrict its import into Australia; and argue for incentives within emerging global carbon markets for avoiding deforestation and better management of tropical rainforests
  
  
• Investment of $8 million towards addressing major knowledge gaps about the impacts of climate change on forestry and the vulnerability of forest systems;
  
  
• and establishing a $9 million Forest Industries Development Fund to encourage ongoing investment in value adding industries and promoting the development of internationally competitive and ecologically sustainable forest and forest products industries to help boost the export of forest products.

After the 2010 election the government made the following additional commitments to forest policy in Australia – in addition to the ongoing commitment to implement the 2007 election commitments:

• committed to introduce laws to restrict the importation of illegally logged timber, and to make it a criminal offence to import any timber products into Australia which have not been legally harvested
  
  
• committed $20 million to provide exit assistance and ongoing business support for Tasmanian forest contractors. In November 2010, the Australian and Tasmanian governments jointly announced a $22.4 million assistance package.