DEAR News of the Area

ON winning the election in March this year the NSW Labor Government, instead of establishing the Great Koala National Park, erected the barricades for another four years of koala wars.

This happened without Labor recognising koalas had declined from being a commonly occurring species ten years ago when the party first supported the proposed Great Koala National Park to being an endangered species now.

It apparently forgot also that Labor had recently participated in an all-parties inquiry that had found koalas were at risk of becoming extinct by 2050.

Instead Labor is slowly rolling out the battle plans for four more years of conflict over koalas.

Constrained by the hard reality of “no tree, no me” koalas do not hang around for the drawn out battles of the all-stakeholder negotiation processes the Government is attempting to put in place whilst maintaining for as long as possible business as usual for logging.

Last week some of the scope of the battle plan for more drawn out koala wars was revealed.

It included doing more detailed and lengthy studies of what we have known about koalas for twenty years, then sitting down and talking about it for ages.

Yes, they appear to be completely into process, not outcomes.

At the same time to clearly demonstrate the flaws in this approach the first cracks in the hard line of no logging moratoriums appeared with the protection of 106 koala hubs within the proposed Great Koala National Park
That sounds a big number but, with truth being the first casualty of war, approximately half of those hubs have been intensively logged since Labor first supported the Great Koala National Park and probably retain few if any koalas.

With areas that are already excluded from logging in the remaining hubs the protection measure will apply to a little over one percent of the 170,000 hectares of State Forest within the park proposal.

The data used to map the koala hubs was collected in 2016 or earlier.

Since then there has been a revolution in survey techniques for koalas, including sound recordings, tracker dogs and drones and millions of dollars have been thrown into the survey effort.

Koala hubs are so old hat.

If this announcement was more than a media stunt in the ongoing koala wars the Government would also race out to assess if there are any koalas remaining in the half of the hubs that have been intensively logged and act on what is required to restore the habitats there.

But that is unlikely to happen in this phoney war, instead there will be more collection and shuffling of the information that we already know, and more stakeholder talk fests held.

Unfortunately, it is likely to be left to environment groups to have to drag both the Federal and State Labor governments through the courts to prove the lack of a legal basis underpinning for their phoney koala wars.

They need to look no further than to Victoria and Western Australia to see that the sensible pathway is to raise the white flag and to work on building a better life for our timber workers, our koalas and our native forests.

Regards,
Ashley LOVE,
Coffs Harbour.