Today, 17 environment groups & individuals have written to Premier Chris Minns urging the NSW Government to include all 176,000 of State Forest in the Great Koala National Park.
You can download the full letter here or read on below.
Dear Premier,
Protection of 100% of the proposed Great Koala National Park is the minimum required, not the maximum.
We write to urge you to keep the Labor Party’s promise to create the Great Koala National Park (GKNP) as proposed by Labor in 2015. Anything less than immediate protection of the entire proposed area will constitute a failure to halt the decline of the koala in NSW.
Koalas are listed as Endangered both in NSW and nationally. By definition, that simple fact means that this species is likely to become extinct without radical action. Protection of 100% of the species’ core habitat will not be enough to save this species by itself, but it is unarguably the most important and minimum first step that is required.
For this reason, the full area of the GKNP, proposed by your government, must be protected. 100% protection of the GKNP is the minimum action that is required, not the maximum.
The key areas required for an ecologically credible and viable GKNP are well known and documented.
We are dismayed that instead of moving immediately to protect the 176,000 hectares required for the GKNP your Government has logged, roaded and degraded approximately 15,000 hectares in the 23 months since you were elected.
The scale of your Government's destruction within the boundaries of the GKNP was documented in the Wilderness Australia & NPA NSW report ‘Intensification of logging in the Great Koala National Park October 2024’.
Critical habitat is being destroyed every day because of your Government's failure to implement its own legislation, e.g. Biodiversity Conservation Act and keep its election promises.
Your Government's ongoing destruction of critical habitat within the GKNP and ignoring the intent of its own biodiversity protection laws, combined with the use of police and anti-protest legislation to protect loggers during operations which routinely breach the Government's own regulations, has left the Government‘s environmental credibility as tattered as many of the forests the Government promised to protect.
We urge you to immediately gazette 176,000 hectares of state forests as the GKNP. Partial protection combined with a moratorium would be a dangerous and unacceptable outcome.
We also urge you to declare an immediate moratorium on logging of all areas of identified endangered species habitat, as a first step to ending all logging of native forests before the next State election.
The Labor Governments in Western Australia and Victoria have ended native forest logging because they realise it is an environmental, financial and social disaster, we urge you to follow in their footsteps.
Sincerely,
Gary Dunnett
National Parks Association of NSW
Bob Brown
Environmentalist
Doro Babeck & Jenny Weber
Bob Brown Foundation
Andrew Wong
Wilderness Australia
Leanne Minshull
The Australia Institute
Scott Daines
South East Forest Rescue
De Marko
Forest Ecology Alliance
Suzanne Arnold
Australians For Animals
Susan Harwood
Friends of Pine Creek
Clarence Environment Centre
Dr Jason John
Forestry Advocacy Ministry
Gumbaynggirr Conservation Group
Meredith Stanton
Blicks River Guardians
Sustainable Earth Projects
Cath Eaglesham
Bellingen Environment Centre Inc
Harriett Swift
SERCA
Francis Pike
Australian Forest and Climate Alliance