Jobs for Australians

Tens of thousands of Australians have jobs in the forest industry. It's one of Australia's largest resource industries. It's also Australia's second largest manufacturing industry, providing jobs for people involved in making paper, and a variety of wood products and furniture. Many country towns rely on forest industries for their economic survival.

Timber is processed in a sawmill. At the moment, Australia has more than 1000 sawmills which process timber from hardwood trees, and more than 200 softwood sawmills working on timber from softwood trees. We also have more mills which produce pulp and paper products, and wood panel mills.

Even with all these mills, to meet our needs for wood and paper products, we import (bring in from overseas) more than three times the value of forest products than we export (send to other countries).

We import most of the good quality paper we use for magazines and writing paper because Australia doesn't have the capacity to make the quantity of these papers that we use.

By planting more trees, and continuing to develop our forest industries, we can both improve our environment and make money for Australia.

One way this can be done is to develop new timber products to sell to other countries. Products such as flooring, benchtops, staircases, window frames, railings and beams made from Australian hardwood timber are now finding homes in countries such as Japan and the United States. And because these products are actually made in Australia, rather than overseas, the timber industry is able to provide more jobs for Australians.

We use many different kinds of forest products every day:

• timber

• writing and computer paper

• furniture

• wood panels

• tissues

• newspaper.