One of the largest consultations ever undertaken for a new national park in NSW has put recreation and conservation at the top of public priorities for the proposed Great Koala National Park, with nearly 4,000 survey responses gathered across more than 70 meetings, forums, and community events. That is according to the What We Heard report, a new report released by the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, which will now inform reserve categories while its creation remains conditional on registering with the Clean Energy Regulator.
The condition ties the park’s future directly to the Senate disallowance vote on 18 August, because the project must register under the very method that motion targets. NSW Nationals Senator Ross Cadell, who lodged the motion, has called the fight one of transparency rather than industry against the environment.
Bushwalking topped the current-use list inside the proposed boundary, alongside camping, sightseeing, wildlife watching, four-wheel driving, swimming, mountain biking, and trail bike riding, with respondents backing stronger protection for koalas and other threatened species while asking to keep the activities they already enjoy. Feedback came from residents of the region and from people across NSW who have never visited but want to, across a 475,000-hectare network stretching from Kempsey to Grafton and inland to Ebor.
“We appreciate the strong community input, and we are listening carefully,” Jihad Dib, Acting Minister for the Environment, said of feedback he claims shows people want the park to deliver recreation and nature-based experiences. At its proposed scale, the park would add 176,000 hectares of state forest, where a temporary moratorium has already paused timber harvesting, to a network of existing reserves in a region whose North East NSW hardwood industry turns over $1.84 billion a year and keeps 5,700 people in full-time equivalent work.
“Local voices are driving this process, and that’s exactly how it should be,” Janelle Saffin, Minister for North Coast, said of a survey that reached locals and people yet to visit the region alike.
It comes as the same report confirms the government is working to register the carbon project under the Improved Native Forest Management method, which Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy Josh Wilson signed off on late last month. Meanwhile, an independent analysis by Carbon Eyes found that the current design creates a scenario in which the states could ‘double dip’ by collecting the credits and policing private forests whose harvesting could erode them.
Similar warnings have also come from Forest and Wood Communities Australia chair Steve Dobbyns, who says any rise in timber production elsewhere becomes a financial threat to the credits, reaching private growers, contractors, and sawmillers well beyond the park boundary. Independent modelling has put the long-run leakage rate for reduced native harvesting at 81.3 per cent, with nearly 90 per cent of that displaced demand historically met by nations carrying elevated risks of illegal harvesting.
