We should all expect our governments to make balanced decisions, particularly where lives and livelihoods are at stake. The announcement by the NSW Government to create a Great Koala National Park is not one of those occasions.
We all want our flora and fauna to flourish – to protect koalas, gliders, and other threatened species, and I appreciate that our individual gut instinct is to believe that increasing the footprint of NSW National Parks and stopping forestry activities will achieve this.
But what we fear isn't always what will do harm.
Locking up 176,000 hectares for this new National Park will not save a koala, a glider or protect our biodiversity. It is not a science-based decision, as Forestry Australia, the nation's peak body for forest scientists, managers, and growers, has said. It is not about conservation. Sadly, it's all about a political headline.
There is currently no publicly available ecological modelling or monitoring framework that shows increasing the National Park estate will improve outcomes for koalas or threatened species.
What is certain is that this decision will kill off jobs and kill off timber industry businesses in harvesting, haulage, milling, and other industry operations that inject hundreds of jobs and hundreds of millions of dollars into our Mid North Coast economy.
The decision places an industry already doing it tough and already operating under strict government regulations and oversight into the death zone.
It will affect the supply of the hardwood timber needed for houses, bridges, power poles, transport pallets, timber for mining, and so many other everyday products.
It will create more native fuel for hot burns due to the loss of proper forest management and put at risk threatened species in other countries that do not have the same harvesting and forest management standards as we do.
I'm incredibly disappointed that yet again, we have a government - another Labor government – effectively banning a productive agricultural primary industry.
I will be working with my state colleagues to urge the government to overturn this decision.
