Koalas and taxpayers betrayed by NSW old-growth forest destruction

We found her next to the house, a young female koala trying to struggle to her feet but falling back exhausted in the grass, unable to reach her food trees.

The 1500 young trees that I planted just over three years earlier to provide habitat stood nearby, ready to sustain her. But even as I urgently called the Friends of the Koala Hospital in Lismore, I feared she would never make it back to feed on them.

The koala is an endangered species in NSW, Queensland and the ACT.Credit: Wayne Tindall

It was agonising, waiting for the rescuer to come, not being able to ease her distress. It appeared that she was suffering from chlamydia, flies buzzing around her in the hot sun, as she tried to summon the strength to haul herself upright and wave them away.

Even if she had a chance of survival, the infection would probably render her barren. Stress had been the cause of this tragic scene – cars, dogs, and basically the overwhelming loss of habitat. She would die the next day, one of an estimated 15,000 koalas left in NSW.

As she lay there suffering by our home at the foot of the Nightcap Ranges in the hinterland of Byron, Forestry Corp was busy down the coast, logging the proposed Great Koala National Park. Forestry Corp is owned by the NSW government, therefore, by you and me.

The park, supposed to connect rich coastal koala habitat to large sections of state forests, was promised by Premier Chris Minns to help him win the 2023 election. Yet, based on Forestry Corporation’s own maps as of last June, operations from the Hunter to the Queensland border show more than half of the active logging operations were in the footprint of the proposed Great Koala National Park.

Connectivity across the forests for all native creatures is being broken by the logging. Koalas, particularly, need corridors to find their food trees. They have few primary food species of eucalypt and must rely on secondary species. They also need medicine trees and shelter trees.

Koala habitat was rare and precious even before the devastation of Black Summer, when more than 60,000 koalas died or were harmed, and since the floods and cyclones, koala rescue centres have been inundated with injured, mud-caked, diseased and malnourished koalas.

Once more our beloved icon is diminished, and it faces even greater challenges from extreme weather events. Yet the so-called Great Koala National Park, more than two years after its conception, lacks set boundaries – and thus is unprotected from continuous logging.

While the government drags its destructive heels by saying it is close to completing the assessment process for the park, Australian National University professor David Lindenmayer, a world leader in forest ecology, says the government’s progress on establishing boundaries for the park has been “glacial … if that”.

Minns says the government is committed to a “sustainable” timber industry, yet every day, far from our sight and earshot, irreplaceable huge native trees come crashing down. Perhaps the Minns government is allowing continuous felling so that soon it can turn around and say there isn’t enough koala habitat worth protecting.

Meanwhile, these old-growth forests, home to 37 threatened native species and our endangered koalas, are being degraded and destroyed, mainly for pulp.

More than 90 per cent of native NSW forest logged is pulped and sent overseas to be used in wood chip and cardboard. If this isn’t nightmare enough, the irony is that Forestry Corporation runs at a huge loss in the native hardwood division.

In 2024, the loss was $29 million, and over the past four years the loss has totalled $73 million. This means we are paying our taxes to bulldoze our heritage.

Recently, Forestry Corp has been criticised strongly by respected scientist, former NSW magistrate and dean of law at Southern Cross University, Professor David Heilpern. “If they were a bikie group, they would be a criminal organisation,” he said.

Heilpern calls for a disbandment of Forestry Corporation, given it is a repeat offender – convicted of more than a dozen environmental breaches and criminal assaults by its contractors and employees.

In one instance last year, it was fined $360,000 by the NSW Land and Environment Court for failing to map two environmentally significant areas of state forest.

As for the cry of “jobs”, there are about 600 jobs held. Sustainable plantation timber is the only long-term solution for long-term jobs.

A 2021 study conducted by the NSW government itself concluded that “koala populations are fragmented across much of NSW and are in danger of population decline, towards extinction”. Extinction.

Urgently, we must tell Minns to give our koalas a fighting chance; inform him that there is more than one “housing crisis” in his state. Minns needs to keep his promise. By 2050, all the wild koalas could be gone. Then all we will have left are our tears.

Darleen Bungey is a multi award-winning author.

Get to the heart of what’s happening with climate change and the environment. Sign up for our fortnightly Environment newsletter.