The New Zealand Government says it has no plans to legislate against importing illegally sourced wood within the next 18 months. That is in strong contrast with the generally popular pre-election announcement by the Australian Labor Party, confirmingit would swiftly make it a crime to import illegally harvested wood products of any kind. (Not that it helped much at the polls.) New Zealand's agriculture and forestry minister David Carter says his government's preference is for a voluntary labelling scheme that "encourages" timber importers to verify the legality of their products. "If that doesn't work, then one of the options we could look at is whether we ban the importation of these tropical timbers in totality", he says.
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