DEAR News Of The Area,

THE $56.4 million proposed to be spent building massive new infrastructure in the Dorrigo Gondwana World Heritage Area would buy-out all the wood supply contracts that are causing the extinction of our koalas via the landscape-scale industrial logging by Forestry Corporation (FCNSW) of our public native forests within the proposed Great Koala National Park (e.g. Wedding Bells SF) and the massive logging destruction of the Kalang Headwaters within the proposed Headwaters Nature Reserve.

It’s a cynical political diversionary tactic designed to distract from the reality that the Government is sending our koalas to extinction and failing to benefit our economy by stopping native forest logging.

The Government has failed to implement the simplest and most cost-effective solution for achieving their mirage pipedream of doubling the koala population in NSW; that is, the Coalition has failed to stop industrial logging of known koala habitat within the Great Koala National Park.

FCNSW is a total rogue agency that wilfully, intentionally and frequently unlawfully logs koala habitats in our forests. This is evidenced by their recent prosecution and financial penalty of nearly $300,000 for destroying Koala habitat at Wild Cattle Creek State Forest in 2018.

Things have gotten worse since that year, with catastrophic fires and ongoing unfettered industrial clear-felling within our regional water supply catchment across the Nymboida headwaters.

Time for FCNSW to stop logging our native forests, or our taxes will continue to be poured into the black hole of native forest logging, our rivers will turn putrid and stop flowing, future wildfires will become substantially more dangerous and our globally significant forest fauna will be extinct.

Not logging our public native forests saves taxpayers money and means that we have clean and abundant baseflow in our rivers; something we surely need in the face of a warming and drying future.

Regards,
Mark GRAHAM,
Bellingen Nature Company.