Gary Dunnett, Chief Executive Officer, NPA NSW

The practicalities of publishing Nature NSW generates a gap of about 2 weeks between final edit and the magazine appearing in inboxes and post boxes.  For this edition that gap neatly covers the period over which we expect the NSW Government to announce the final boundaries of the Great Koala National Park (GKNP).  This means that you, dear reader, should already know whether our aspirations for the new National Park have been met.   

So, what outcomes would be judged, good, bad or indifferent?   

Much has been written and said about the GKNP negotiation process.  It is worth returning to the basics if we want to gauge the quality of the final outcome.  At heart, the GKNP is about protecting the koala habitat and populations of the forests between Bellingen, Coffs Harbour and Dorrigo.  The reason for concentrating on these specific koala populations is that they have the best prospects of long-term survival of any in NSW- provided their habitats were adequately protected.   

Of course, the Gondwanan forests of the GKNP have many conservation values beyond koalas, including large areas of rainforest that acted as refugia during the devastating mega-fires and a host of endemic and/or threatened fauna and flora, not least Greater Gliders.   

Part of the forests were already gazetted as National Park, Nature Reserve or State Conservation Area when the GKNP proposal was first put forward, accounting for around 140,000 ha.  However, most of the region’s forests are State Forests – government owned lands that are available for timber extraction.  These State Forests are predominately native forest but do include areas of plantation.  NPA’s proposal identified around 176,000 ha of State Forest for transfer into the GKNP.  The selected 176,000 ha excluded genuine plantations, and subsequent boundary refinements have followed that principle.   

The vision was for a fully conserved forest estate, the GKNP, extending over at least 315,000 ha.  The new National Park would provide permanent protection for the key koala populations in a well-connected, diverse landscape that stretched from escarpment to sea and across a series of major catchments.  A park large enough to retain ecological integrity in an era of climate change, mega fires, invasive species and fragmentation.   

The GKNP proposal was crafted as a balanced response to the challenges faced by koalas and other forest dependent fauna.  It was not put forward as an artificially inflated ‘bargaining position’, but instead as the minimum required to do the job.  Our sincere belief was that this was the spirit in which NSW Labor pledged support for the GKNP in the lead up to the 2019 and 2023 elections.   

Unfortunately, that belief proved over-optimistic as the incoming government shifted their commitment to ‘a’ GKNP, and launched an assessment process that appeared to treat the 176,000 ha figure as nothing more than a ceiling for negotiations.  That was certainly how the forestry industry responded, offering an alternative vision for the GKNP that would see barely 50,000 ha of State Forest transferred.   

This stance has forced NPA’s focus through the negotiations onto advocating for the transfer of the full 176,000 ha from the original proposal.  That focus has been difficult to maintain.  One reason is that there is a better understanding of the distribution of koalas across the region and their increasing peril.  The presence of koalas in areas classified as plantations has proved particularly problematic.  It generates a real policy dilemma, given that any future transition out of all public native forestry will require a much greater reliance on timber from plantations.  The Government has definitively stated that they will not include any plantations in the GKNP.  NPA’s stance has been more nuanced, rejecting calls to prioritise areas of plantation for inclusion in the 176,000 ha, while agreeing that certain habitat corridors warrant permanent protection beyond the current negotiation process. 

The second impediment has been the truly terrible decision by the NSW Government to allow Forestry Corporation to continue logging in the GKNP while the assessment and negotiation process were underway.  This ridiculous decision had the entirely predictable effect of incentivising Forestry Corporation to accelerate logging within the GKNP.  It’s not clear whether Forestry Corporation’s intent was to reduce the conservation values of the forests to preclude their inclusion in the National Park, or simply to extract as much timber as possible before the park is declared.  Probably both.  The reality is that there has been a fourfold increase in logging since the negotiations began.   

If nothing else, the GKNP process has shown that the first and most important step in any conservation proposal is to suspend whatever activities threaten the future reserve.  In the GKNP case, industrial logging.   

With this background in mind how do we assess success and failure in the GKNP decision? 

NPA’s view is that the only ‘good’ outcome is the transfer of the full 176,000 ha of State Forest into the GKNP.  This should be a great outcome, but the fact that so much damage from recent forestry activities will need to be restored, at huge expense, denies that result.  A commitment to further work by Government to secure corridors across remaining State Forests and, via conservation agreements, across critical freehold lands, might be enough to achieve an upgrade to ‘great’.   

As explained above, the original 176,000 ha wasn’t an ambit claim, it was a measured assessment of the minimum required.  For this reason, an outcome a few thousand hectares below the 176,000 mark would be regarded as an ‘indifferent’, and anything below 170,000 ha would be emphatically bad, a betrayal of local communities and the conservation movement.   

Difficult as it makes typing, my fingers are crossed and I can only hope that you have a smile rather than a frown as you look at the GKNP announcement.