Labor promised to create the Great Koala National Park. Critics fear government loggers are destroying it before they are locked out.
Professor Helge Bruelheide, professor of botany at the University of Helle in Germany, was stunned by what he has seen exploring the forests in and around the promised Great Koala National Park on the state’s North Coast this week.
“I mean, I knew that from the books but touching it and seeing these wonderful trees is something different. We were completely shocked that this was being logged for paper pulp and timber. Particularly this type of forest, we really couldn’t understand that.” “Their minds were blown by what is happening here,” says Mark Graham, an ecologist, former National Parks officer and forest activist who led the group as director of his company, Bellingen Nature Tours.Graham is among a group of activists, ecologists and environmental groups who believe that having promised to deliver a Great Koala National Park the new Labor government is overseeing a massive ramp up of logging within its boundaries before it is created.
Graham is one of many activists who want to see an immediate moratorium on logging within the boundaries of the proposed park, and a plan to end native forest logging in NSW, bringing the state into line with Western Australia and Victoria.Not surprisingly Andrew Hurford, a third-generation timber miller whose family business owns four mills in the north of the state, disagrees.
“There’s a clear risk here that Forestry Corp has an economic incentive to flatten those koala forests which are most likely to be protected. Forestry Corp knows this national park is coming, and we’re concerned it is ramping up operations within the park boundaries to extract as much timber from it as possible.”
“The NSW government committed to protecting koalas by creating the Great Koala National Park, but Forestry Corp’s plans to log nearly 20 per cent of the park completely undermine this good intention. It’s nonsensical to trash the forest before it’s protected.” Asked if logging was increasing inside the boundaries of the proposed park, Environment Minister Penny Sharpe said, “Saving koalas from extinction with the creation of the Great Koala National Park is Labor’s largest single environmental election commitment.Credit:“I understand some people are very concerned about the impact of current harvesting operations. The government is working to address those concerns and get the park established as soon as possible.
“I have had a long experience of the forestry agency, and it has never been a happy one. I believe they see their role as to extract as much timber as they possibly can, and they are more indifferent to other values altogether. Forestry Corp said in a statement on Friday: “There has been no increase in Forestry Corporation’s timber harvesting operations on the north coast. An annual plan of operations is published on our website. Some operations on the plan have been brought forward because others have been suspended before completion; however, this has not changed the area and volume to be harvested.
Under pressure from activists and after fires obliterated much of the state’s timber, the Victorian government brought forward an end to native forest logging in that state to December this year, following a similar decision by Western Australia. Hurford says most Crown forests are protected from logging, and of the 12 per cent that is only 0.3 per cent is logged each year.
He adds that without logging the government would have to pay to care for state forests without forestry income.
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