The koala was officially declared endangered in the Australian state of New South Wales in February 2022. A year later, the Labor Party promised to create a 315,000-hectare (778,000-acre) Great Koala National Park to protect the iconic species in the state from extinction.

Labor went on to win the state election that year over the conservative Liberal/National coalition, the latter half of which opposes the plan. The koala park, however, still hasn’t materialized, and the forests proposed for inclusion in the protected area continue to be logged.

There are already a scattering of national parks in this region of coastal forest that host koalas (Phascolarctos cinereus), most of them isolated from each other by swaths of state forest. The idea behind the Great Koala National Park, or GKNP, is to stitch together the 140,000 hectares (346,000 acres) of national parks and 175,000 hectares (432,000 acres) of state forest into a single, protected mosaic.

Yet two years on, this park still doesn’t exist, despite popular support from ecologists and the local Indigenous Gumbaynggirr people, whose land comprises one of the existing national parks in the region. In a statement to a 2020 parliamentary inquiry into koala populations, Gumbaynggirr community member Michael Donovan said, “The Gumbaynggirr People fully endorse the Great Koala National Park, and we’re working together with all relevant parties to ensure their protection and preservation.”

The forest in the Coffs Coast region slated for the park hosts 150 threatened animal and plant species, including the koala and the greater glider (genus Petauroides), another endangered marsupial. The region’s native hardwood trees, the target of logging operations, are ecologically significant, taking centuries to form, says Grahame Douglas, president of the National Parks Association (NPA), which has a statutory role in the National Parks and Wildlife Council, a state body.

“From an ecological view, native forests are critical for hollows for native species and require approximately 200 years to provide this function,” he said.

Yet the Labor-led NSW government has declined to consider a moratorium on logging of native trees inside the park’s proposed boundaries during the assessment period. While logging stopped six months after the 2023 election in some areas, it’s been allowed to continue in others. Conservationists and forest experts have raised the alarm that it has only intensified since then, degrading koala habitat for the future park.

“The NSW Government promised to protect this precious koala habitat as a national park, yet destruction from logging has only increased,” Sarah Hanson-Young, a federal senator and environment spokesperson for the Greens Party, told Mongabay in an email.

An independent analysis cited by The Guardian Australia, using NSW State Forestry Corporation data, shows logging intensified inside the proposed park boundaries since March 2023. A spokesperson for the state forestry corporation denied this analysis in a response to Mongabay that was identical to a statement issued to The Guardian.

“The total area of native forest harvested each year has not increased and is the same as it was in 2019 and the average monthly volume of timber harvested from March 2023 to November 2024 is 15% lower than the average monthly volume harvested from the same area over the 10 years prior,” they wrote.

Tara Moriarty, the NSW agriculture minister, justified the logging to The Guardian as “getting on with delivering a Great Koala national park while at the same time ensuring a sustainable timber industry.” Moriarty didn’t respond to Mongabay’s request for comment.

To analyze Moriarty’s claims, Mongabay asked David Lindenmayer, a professor at Australian National University and highly cited expert on forest ecology and resource management, about the state’s timber needs and whether it’s ecologically sustainable or necessary to log these native habitats.

“The logging within the proposed GKNP is not ecologically sustainable because of where it is occurring (in areas of high conservation value) and because of logging impacts on many threatened species known to occur in the area of the GKNP,” he wrote.

Like others, he said logging has intensified in the region since the 2023 election.

“Our spatial analysis shows an increased concentration of logging within the proposed GKNP,” Lindenmayer wrote.

Douglas from the parks association echoed Lindenmayer’s assessment, adding that logging in the GKNP area is unnecessary for the state’s timber needs, which rely predominantly on commercially grown pine rather than native hardwoods.

“Native forest harvesting is not (ecologically) sustainable and is leading to habitat loss and the decline of species,” he said. “I presume the Minister means a ‘viable’ industry. The overwhelming majority of timber harvested in NSW is from ‘pine plantations’ which represents about 90% of timber resource. The Softwood Division of Forestry Corporation is subsidising the Hardwood division.”

That raises the question of why the state government would allow logging to continue in a landscape that’s ecologically and culturally irreplaceable. NSW Environment Minister Penny Sharpe didn’t expand on the reasons already publicly stated.

“There has been a comprehensive assessment process which takes into account environmental, economic, social, ecological and cultural issues,” she wrote in an email to Mongabay.

Jobs and the economy are often-cited concerns for the timber industry. However some critics argue there are only 235 people directly employed in the hardwood division of the industry. A paper in the most recent issue of the Australian Quarterly journal, co-authored by Lindenmayer, says these concerns are superficial.

“A transition of State government subsidies away from [native forest logging] to plantation-only industry would likely lead to no overall job losses, since displaced forestry workers have skills to enable them to move quickly into other parts of the economy, including plantation logging,” it says.

Native forest logging is running at a steep loss in NSW, costing the State Forestry Corporation A$29 million ($18 million) in the 2023/24 financial year, and A$70 million ($44 million) over four years, essentially subsidized by taxpayers. Additionally, the entity has been prosecuted and fined A$1.5 million ($950,000) for breaking environmental laws.

Asked for a timeline for when the Great Koala National Park would finally be established, Sharpe didn’t provide one.

“All of the inputs are being finalised to be presented to government to make the final decision. The Great Koala National Park is the [state] government[’s] biggest environmental commitment, it will be delivered,” she wrote.

Where could a delay be coming from? Stephen Long of the Australia Institute, who previously spoke with Mongabay in 2024, said Premier Chris Minns is looking to monetize the carbon in the soil for credits before gazetting the park, despite the fact that none of these credits would be “additional.” The concept of additionally means the credit is directly responsible for preserving forest that would have been lost otherwise. Given that a national park is, in essence, a preserved area for its own sake, it would have been protected anyway, rendering the credit useless as an offset.

Douglas said red tape has weighed down the assessment process.

“The process started late and took longer than anticipated. This is largely an issue of bureaucratic and political inertia,” he wrote.

He said political strategizing has played a role, citing the Labor government’s need “to build political support” with unions and the timber industry, “which is still highly influential in regional areas.” The Australia Workers Union (AWU) reportedly wants the park to be downsized to 36,000-58,000 hectares (about 89,000-143,000 acres).

He added the opposition, mainly the National Party, remains “politically opposed to the GKNP and other attempts to stop native forest logging and sees this as a political winner regionally.”

But for the Gumbaynggirr people, for whom koalas are known as dunggiirr, the issue transcends politics and is central to their laws, customs and core values. Donovan said in his statement to the parliamentary inquiry that the park’s establishment is critical to the region’s ecological integrity and Gumbaynggirr culture.

“If [koalas] are not protected and they go extinct, we, Gumbaynggirr People, will be strictly forbidden to pass on our Dreaming Stories and Knowledge of Dunggiirr to our Children, our Children’s Children, and all future generations of Gumbaynggirr People,” he said. “This is Gumbaynggirr Law.”

Banner image:A koala on Gumbaynggirr land inside the proposed boundaries of the Great Koala National Park. Koala populations are being pushed toward extinction due to habitat loss and fragmentation, inappropriate fire regimes, climate change impacts, disease, and feral dogs and cats. Many of the koala populations in New South Wales and Queensland states are now in decline. Image courtesy of Paul Hilton/Earth Tree Images.

Mike DiGirolamo is a host & associate producer for Mongabay based in Sydney. He co-hosts and edits the Mongabay Newscast. Find him on LinkedIn and Bluesky.

Related reading & listening:

Australian state fails on koala conservation while relying on faulty offset schemes, experts say

Australia’s Global ‘Nature Positive’ Summit features Indigenous voices, but little government action

Citation:

Chapman, B., Lindenmayer, D., & Mitchell, J. (2025). Subsidising destruction: The wasteful logging of native forests in Australia. AQ-Australian Quarterly, 96(1), 17-25. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/27347979