How the new ALP Government is currently using our taxes to turn it into the Great Koala Memorial Golf Course and Blackbutt Plantation. – by Mark Graham, ecologist.
The proposed Great Koala National Park (GKNP) on the NSW Mid North Coast between Kempsey, Grafton and Armidale is home to 1 in 5 of the wild Koalas in New South Wales.
This world-class 315K + hectare conservation reserve spans all public native forests between the northern floodplains of the Macleay River in Dunghutti Country and the Orara and Nymboida River sub-catchments of the mighty Clarence River and northwards into Yaegl country.
The GKNP covers the entirety of the Gumbaynggirr nation and within it all of the catchments of the Bellinger, Kalang and Nambucca Rivers with spectacular areas of globally significant forest, some of these amongst the most ancient forests on Earth, recognised as having “Outstanding Universal Values” and being inscribed into the World Heritage list as the Gondwana Rainforests of Australia.
The forests of the GKNP provide critical municipal drinking water supply and water security to all coastal cities and towns in the region, including as part of the massive $180 million Coffs-Clarence Regional Water Supply Scheme that provides drinking water to about 130 000 residents in all coastal communities between Sawtell to Yamba.
Other growing coastal towns such as Bellingen, Urunga, Macksville and Nambucca Heads exclusively derive their drinking water supply from those parts of the GKNP in the Bellinger and Nambucca River catchments respectively.
The regional economy is underpinned by the mainstays of tourism (dominantly nature-based), myriad agricultural industries and commercial and recreational fisheries, all of which are profitable and which generate orders of magnitude more jobs than the scant jobs in the increasingly mechanised, highly industrialised and absolutely unprofitable (for taxpayers) public native forest logging industry.
The GKNP spans a large altitudinal gradient (the greatest in NSW outside the Alps) from the coastal plain at Bongil Bongil National Park, between Coffs Harbour and Bellingen and home to the largest remaining coastal Koala colony in NSW (with approaching 500 resident animals) to the (occasionally) snow-capped peaks of the Dorrigo Plateau exceeding 1400m elevation.
The forests in the north of the GKNP are literally the most biodiverse Tall Eucalypt forests across all space and time and warrant serious investigation for World Heritage nomination.
The GKNP was initially proposed over 10 years ago by long-term staunch forest conservation advocate Ashley Love and supported by an alliance of local community conservation groups as the best mechanism for ensuring the future of the 20% of all wild Koalas in NSW known to depend upon this remarkable landscape.
This was recognised at this time as requiring the protection of all the Koala habitat in the public forest estate and the restoration of degraded parts.
Esteemed zoologist and conservation planning expert, Dave Scotts, wrote the foundational report for the GKNP detailing fourteen Koala subpopulations within the GKNP, finding that a number of subpopulations near the coast were in decline because of rampant coastal sprawl and that some on the coastal plain were “functionally extinct”.
Scotts found that the Koala subpopulations at Bongil Bongil and those occupying the massive blocks of forest on the Dorrigo Plateau were stable.
The GKNP was warmly endorsed at the time by former ALP leader Luke Foley and was taken forward by him as an election commitment at this time.
2019 Black Summer bush fires
Fast forward to September 2019 where after three years of record drought conditions in the first week of Black Spring the very first mega-fire of Black Spring and Black Summer, the Bees Nest fire, roared up out of the Guy Fawkes River gorges and onto the Western Dorrigo Plateau, rapidly burning through over 100 000 hectares of native forests.
This fire burned continuously from this time until it morphed into the first mega-mega-fire of Black Summer, the Liberation Trail fire, in November 2019, which rapidly burnt through massive swathes of globally significant forest across the western GKNP causing significant canopy mortality and areas of collapsed forest ecosystems to this present day.
Although most hearteningly last night the persistence and survival of Greater Gliders and Yellow-bellied Gliders, as well as the Powerful Owl that feeds upon them were all confirmed within a block of badly burnt forest that is at imminent risk of destruction by industrial logging, being an area of public native forest recently approved for logging.
These most recent fauna records show that if forests are left alone to recover and regenerate post-fire that they can rebuild their globally significant forest fauna populations.
Those areas that were industrially logged by the Forestry Corporation prior to Black Spring and that are part of the combined Bees Nest and Liberation Trail firegrounds are now the biggest swathes of collapsed forest ecosystem within the GKNP, sadly with some patches of dead forest that are in the order of multiple square kilometres in size.
Irrespective of this, these forests are still part of a landscape forest matrix that contains some of the most magnificent tall old growth Eucalypt forests and spectacular Gondwana Rainforests and all are key components of some of the broadest swathes of forests spanning The Great Escarpment, itself a continental superhighway that enables the movement, persistence, survival and recovery of our globally significant forest biota.
Immediately protecting all these forests within the GKNP will ensure the survival of their dependent fauna species and will allow for population recovery and the sequestration of carbon over time.
Key refuge forests for Koalas
Because of the high elevation and the cooler temperatures of the Dorrigo Plateau and The Great Escarpment these areas have been identified as a key climate refugia for Koalas and other moist forest dependent biota and ancient Gondwanan species.
As the climate warms these landscapes will provide climatic conditions suitable for the survival of this biota, with maintenance of forest cover and broad forested linkages species will be able to move into these refuges.
Maintaining all forest cover in this landscape, supporting recovery of degraded areas of forest and urgently expanding forest cover across priority connecting cleared landscapes will provide the best chances of survival of the astonishing ancient biodiversity that occurs here as well as delivering water security and drawing-down and storing massive volumes of atmospheric carbon in this landscape.
The latter is possible because of the highly fertile soils, temperate climate and high rainfall conditions that create conditions for the establishment of some of the most carbon-dense forested assemblages on Earth.
State-sanctioned industrial-scale logging operations
After the fires eventually went out across the GKNP in January 2020 the Forestry Corporation of NSW (under the caring custodianship and control of John Barilaro) wasted no time in kickstarting the harvesters, jinkers and skidders and rapidly expanding their industrial logging operations into many unburnt forest refuges and thereby destroying many identified globally significant “Koala hubs” (as defined by the NSW Government conservation agency) in places such as Orara East, Lower Bucca, Tamban, Wedding Bells and Wild Cattle Creek State Forests.
The industrial logging continued apace across the GKNP right through the latter parts of 2020 through until the current day (losing tens of millions of taxpayer dollars along the way) and accelerating in what amounted to taxpayer funded Koala extinction operations by the Forestry Corporation whose actions continue to be unregulated or punished by the Environment Protection Agency.
These logging operations badly harmed Koala hubs at Clouds Creek and Ellis State Forests on the Western Dorrigo Plateau through 2022 and mid-way through this year the Forestry Corporation tried to run a massive fraud, but were caught out by the North East Forest Alliance, in alleging that a 68 hectare patch of clear-felled native forest, much of it a Koala hub identified by the NSW Government, was “plantation”.
Tragically this area (all of it a critical part of the Coffs-Clarence Regional Water supply) was then burnt, soaked in a toxic blend of herbicides including really nasty Simazine, bulldozed, ripped and planted to a Blackbutt monoculture.
Unsurprisingly, the regional water supply then became so dirty that the water was unusable and unpotable and the drinking water supply contaminated to such an extent that pumping was stopped and the people of the Clarence Valley went onto Level 4 Water Restrictions in early 2023.
Worryingly, the local authority and various politically aligned agencies and bureaucrats fraudulently alleged that this was all caused by the bushfires from several years previously despite there being substantial and irrefutable evidence of the stabilisation of the soils in the catchment with post-fire regrowth of vegetation cover.
What had changed was the massive expansion of industrial logging across the Nymboida and Blicks River catchments.
The water security of the regional water supply has been so badly compromised that the residents of the region are now on the hook for millions, to potentially over $40 million, for filtration infrastructure to make the water usable.
2023 NSW state election promises Great Koala National Park
Throughout the election campaign for the March 2023 NSW state election the fundamental problems with native forest logging across the GKNP dominated the local media and were aired nationally and internationally.
Many peaceful actions were held in places such as Ellis State Forest and at the Forestry Corporation Head Office in Coffs Harbour to draw attention to the worrying situation across the GKNP where the Koala was being rapidly sent extinct by state-sanctioned logging operations.
Through this campaign the ALP, led by Chris Minns and underpinned, supported and delivered by Legislative Council powerbroker Penny Sharpe, committed to “the establishment of a Great Koala National Park” in their first term and committed a poorly defined and seemingly specifically unallocated $80 million to the initiative.
Then there was the election in March 2023 and the ALP became the Government, with a minority in the lower house and with kingmakers including Member for Sydney, Alex Greenwich, committing to ending native forest logging and strongly supporting the GKNP.
Minns became Premier and Sharpe was sworn into a large portfolio centered on the Environment.
Because of the ongoing demonstrable harm to Koalas across the GKNP there were widespread and united calls for a moratorium on logging across the GKNP, something that Sharpe has to this day publicly refused to do.
This brings us to the current day where industrial logging operations have expanded significantly post-election and where the Forestry Corporation is logging as fast and hard as it can within as many State Forests within the GKNP whilst it still can.
These smash and grab pillaging operations could be viewed as grudge acts and the desperate thrashings of a dying beast; alarmingly they are causing permanent and irreparable harm to the GKNP, are demonstrably this very day wiping out colonies of Endangered Koalas, Greater Gliders and Vulnerable Yellow-bellied Gliders and Glossy Black Cockatoos (all species that have declined massively because of logging and the fires and all of which are now listed on the Commonwealth EPBC Act).
These industrial logging operations are driven by the use of LIDAR data that laser scans the public forest estate, clearly highlighting the biggest and best stands of trees in these public native forests, ensuring that the most important parts of the landscape for fauna are being targeted for industrial logging.
This very day within the GKNP globally significant Koala, Greater Glider and Yellow-bellied Glider colonies are being logged to extinction at Bagawa, Clouds Creek, Moonpar, Orara East, Tamban, Wedding Bells and Wild Cattle Creek State Forests.
Logging imminent within Great Koala National Park
Logging operations are approved and imminent within the GKNP in forests known to have important Koala colonies and Koala hubs at Boambee, Clouds Creek, Collombatti, Conglomerate, Gladstone, Newry, Moonpar, Oakes, Pine Creek, Roses Creek, Scotchman, Tamban and Wild Cattle Creek State Forests.
The repeated promulgation of disinformation by the state logging company that “only 1% of the forests are logged each year” is readily proven wrong within the GKNP where nearly 20% of these globally significant public native forests are on the chopping block in the coming 12 months, if their “PlanPortal” is to be believed.
The Forestry Corporation is not a fit and proper custodian of these extremely valuable and life supporting public assets, it systematically loses money logging our native forests and breaks the few laws that govern its operations in them (this is then all systematically covered up by the regulators in the EPA), it has no social licence and is doing irreparable harm to our water security, driving our astonishing forest fauna rapidly to extinction, vapourising highly economically valuable carbon stores, doing whatever it can to destroy and degrade the GKNP and targeting its industrial logging activities to annihilate Koalas in key Koala hubs within it.
It is long past time for the ALP to bring an end to this state-sanctioned and taxpayer funded ecocide.
C’mon Penny Sharpe, C’mon Chris Minns start today spending that $80 million in paying loggers out and ceasing the logging right now, because on current trajectories these logging operations will bring our globally significant Koala population to extinction much quicker than 2050.
Do you really want that much blood on your hands ALP??
Koala & joey – Photo courtesy: We Animals Media
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