But when appearing before a Budget Estimates committee at Parliament House on Monday, Ms Sharpe refused to say how soon.

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“I’m not providing you with any more information other than soon. That’s the best I can do,” she told committee chair Sue Higginson MLC.

“The Government is still considering it. I’m not in a position to give you a time frame.”

There are multi-pronged concerns about the Minns Government’s continued delay in announcing the final boundaries of the promised park, which will stretch from west of Kempsey to west of Woolgoolga.

On the one hand, the National Party and timber workers fear the collapse of the industry on the Mid North Coast if the size of the park is not reduced.

On the other side of the debate are the environmentalists who claim logging within the proposed boundaries is increasing and causing irreparable damage.

The proposal is to add approximately 175,000ha of State Forest to the already protected National Park to form a single 315,000ha reserve.

The Labor Government first promised a GKNP in 2015 and began forest assessments after it was re-elected in 2023.

Ms Sharpe said the delay was the result of the assessments and the stakeholder consultation process being “contested”.

“I know people are impatient to get the park created. There has been a lot of different work done.

“There’s an industry panel, there’s an environment science panel and there’s also a First Nations panel.

“They’ve put in a range of different models and thoughts about the way in which the park should be created, how big it should be, what is the assessment area, what we should be counting and what we shouldn’t.

“Some of that remains contested. The one thing that I’ve learnt through this process is that the facts in relation to these matters are not easily agreed on by people.”

Ms Sharpe confirmed that timber jobs would be lost, which is why the process needs to be “robust”.

“There are a lot of positives that come with this. But let’s be very up-front: there will be an impact on timber jobs and we need to work through that.”

NSW Nationals leader Dugald Saunders has been defending Forestry Corporation NSW (FCNSW) and the timber industry in the lead-up to the long overdue announcement.

“There’s no raping and pillaging going on, there are no koalas being killed,” he told News Of The Area during a recent visit to Port Macquarie.

Mr Saunders dismissed the discovery that FCNSW had overstated its native timber yields for three years.

“People will always try to find little slip-ups in data.

“There have been slipups in data with GPSs, there have been volumetric changes, but I don’t think that changes the fact that timber and the timber industry is the most organic regenerative resource we have.

“You cut one tree down selectively, another tree grows.

Members of the North East Forest Alliance (NEFA) and South East Forest Rescue discovered the errors in the Corporation’s annual biomaterials reports.

FCNSW blamed a “data extraction error from the sales database” and corrected the yields, but by then stakeholder consultation had concluded.

“The plans of management are incredibly tight and this industry is one that supports thousands of people,” Mr Saunders said.

“It also supports koalas and it is also completely regenerative.

“It’s something that people in this region in their heart of hearts know is important to continue.

“And, you know, we support the idea that the timber industry has to be at the table, not left off to one side while a Great Koala National Park is forced upon them.”

By Sue STEPHENSON