DEAR News Of The Area,

IN reference to Lil Ganly’s letter in the Coffs and Nambucca NOTAs titled “The promise of the GKNP”, I’d suggest she looks back at the actual election commitment by NSW Labor.

Their promise was “to deliver our commitment to establish the Great Koala National Park and a sustainable timber industry for mid and northern NSW” (Moriarty, 2023) during their first term of Government.

“The process to establish the park will involve three key components:

– An independent economic and social assessment which will consider the impacts on local jobs and communities;

– The establishment of industry, community and Aboriginal advisory panels to provide input to the creation of the park; and,

– An expert environmental and cultural heritage assessment to safeguard the unique environmental and cultural heritage of the region and ensure the Great Koala National Park aligns with the highest standards of environmental protection and respect for cultural heritage.” (Sharpe, 2023).

Whilst the assessment process is underway, Forestry Corporation agreed not to conduct timber harvesting in so-called “koala hubs” but “NSW Environment Minister Penny Sharpe has made it clear that there will be no cessation of timber harvesting in the proposed park”.

However, it is worth noting that:

– Within the GKNP assessment area, only 12 percent of the public forests are available for selective harvesting under strict environmental conditions, with the other 88 percent of the public estate already managed purely for conservation.

– The GKNP assessment area also contains over 16,000 hectares of hardwood plantations, which is more than half of the State’s hardwood plantations.

On the one hand, ENGO’s are calling on the Government to end sustainable native timber harvesting and transition the industry (miraculously overnight) to 100 percent plantations but, on the other hand, are now protesting when these plantations in the GKNP are being harvested.

You can’t have it both ways but then, even koalas can’t tell the difference between a 40-year-old plantation and a native forest.

– NPWS drone surveys within the GKNP assessment area “estimates the koala population in the 176,000 ha assessment area is 12,111 koalas, with a 95 percent confidence interval of 10,311 to 14,541 koalas” (Sharpe, 2024) with koalas appearing to prefer coastal State forests, particularly near existing plantations.

This work supports previous work by Dr Brad Law et al whose seven year study, which included the drought and subsequent Black Summer fires, found koala populations stable and a weak positive relationship with increasing extent of medium-intensity harvesting 16-30 years previously.

I’d hope that before Cabinet makes decisions on the GKNP that could cripple NSW’s $2.9B native timber industry and threaten nearly 9000 jobs, the impact of tenure and harvest history on koala abundance be examined before Government makes an expensive decision that will cause severe pain for our rural communities with no gains for koalas.

Kind regards,
Steve DOBBYNS,
Forest and Wood Communities Australia.