A promise kept: The risky creation of the Great Koala National Park

The creation of the Great Koala National Park on the state’s North Coast by the Minns government will be greeted with joy and fury.

In announcing the park, a patchwork of 176,000 hectares of state forest stitched together with sections of existing national park into a protected zone sprawling over 476,000 hectares around Coffs Harbour, the government is delivering on a key election promise at significant political risk.

Yarriabini National Park is part of the proposed Great Koala National Park.Credit: Janie Barrett

The park was first conceived of by activists in 2012 as a way of preserving some of the last critical koala habitat in the state, and was backed by Labor as far back as 2015.

In 2020, after the black summer fires killed a third of the already declining NSW koala population, a parliamentary inquiry found that without radical intervention the animal would become extinct in the wild in this state by 2050.

Since Labor was elected 2½ years ago, Environment Minister Penny Sharpe has insisted the park would be created, but only once a full assessment and consultation process had been completed.

The delay has infuriated many environmental advocates, especially as logging intensified within sections of the proposed parks, as Sharpe’s deliberations went on.

Those advocates will be relieved at this announcement, particularly as the park she has announced has not been whittled away to appease the forestry industry, as many had feared.

That industry will be furious.

Last year the industry proposed alternative parks of either 37,000 hectares or 58,000 hectares, which it said would help it to protect logging and milling jobs.

The Australian Forest Products Association has said the creation of the park threatens 5700 jobs in the sector in north-eastern NSW.

The government acknowledges wood supply will be curtailed, but says just six of 25 mills in the region will “be impacted”, costing between 200 and 300 jobs, with workers to be supported with JobKeeper-style payments. It also expects the park to boost local tourism, and is planning to extract value from the protection of the forests via carbon credits under a scheme yet to be approved.

However it plays out, the native forest logging industry was under threat whatever the size of the park.

Logging in native forests in NSW is conducted by a government-owned enterprise, Forestry Corporation, which extracts timber for free from state forests yet still manages to make a loss in doing so.

In the four years to 2024, Forestry Corp lost $70 million in its hardwood operations, all the while racking up convictions for breaking environmental laws in the course of its operations.

The NSW taxpayer ultimately pays for Forestry Corporation’s operations, its prosecutions and its fines.

However hard the coming changes will be for the families that depend on work in the northern forests and mills, opposition to the industry has long been intensifying on both economic and environmental grounds.

It is on those environmental grounds that Minns and Sharpe have their surest argument for the park. Koala numbers across the country are being battered by disease and heat stress, by dog attacks and car strikes, but mostly by habitat destruction.

Once gazetted, the Great Koala National Park will protect much of what remains of that habitat, and fragments of the 40 million-year-old Gondwanaland forests that once sprawled across the continent.

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