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The Data is Wrong — Why Penny Sharpe’s Koala Park is Flawed!

Exclusive: Transcripts from the Great Koala National Park process reveal that outdated modelling is being used to establish the park.


Wed 29 Jan 25

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The Great Koala National Park should be put on hold until an independent review is carried out. That is according to Peter Rutherford, secretary of the South East Timber Association, who has new evidence that data is being withheld from the decision-makers all because it does not suit the agenda of Penny Sharpe, NSW’s powerful environmental minister.

“The South East Timber Association is deeply concerned that deliberate manipulation of the process and relying on outdated koala population estimates has corrupted the Great Koala National Park process, which has enormous implications for communities up and down the coast of NSW”.

“We all understand the saying of garbage in –garbage out, and that sums up the process to date with Environment Minister Penny Sharpe being asked to make decisions based on old and incomplete data.”

Peter Rutherford, secretary of the South East Timber Association, who has evidence that the NSW government is using the wrong data to make a decision on the Great Koala National Park.

Speaking to Wood Central, Mr Rutherford said much of the Great Koala National Park process has been opaque, “but the Forestry Panel’s meeting with the Independent Koala Expert Panel exposed the secrecy surrounding the management of koala-related data by NSW environment bureaucrats.”

Armed with damning transcripts of meetings between the Forestry Panel and the Independent Koala Expert Panel, Mr Rutherford said Dr Darren Saunders, chair of the Independent Koala Expert Panel, identified that the lack of public accessibility and timeliness of data makes it extremely difficult to present accurate advice to Minister Sharpe.

“Dr Saunders noted that the fragmented approach to data collection is that a lot of that data is held in various government departments and is not even accessible by the expert panel,” Mr Rutherford said. “Dr Saunders drawing comparisons with cancer research, where all the genomic data collected over many, many years is made public as a condition of doing the work in the first place.”

Why koala numbers are 10x higher than outdated estimates

Mr Rutherford’s concerns come after Wood Central exclusively revealed that Australia’s koala population – listed as “Endangered” in Queensland, New South Wales and the ACT since 2022 – are far larger than estimated, thanks to groundbreaking data released by the CSIRO.

Published as part of the CSIRO’s National Koala Monitoring Programme (NKMP), which has, since 2023, used expert data rather than expert opinion to calculate Koala abundance and disturbance. And the results are surprising, with the CSIRO estimating the current population range between 287,830 and 628,010, about ten times more than the numbers forecast by the Australian Koala Foundation.

Whilst solely data-driven estimates have challenges—namely limited and fragmented data—the CSIRO states that they “have two distinct advances” over past estimates: “The first of these was a concerted effort to collate koala presence, absence, and abundance data from a wide range of sources (individuals, research organisations, community groups, local governments, and state governments). The second “is an analytical framework combining all these disparate sources and data types.”

Author

  • Jason Ross

    Jason Ross, publisher, is a 15-year professional in building and construction, connecting with more than 400 specifiers. A Gottstein Fellowship recipient, he is passionate about growing the market for wood-based information. Jason is Wood Central's in-house emcee and is available for corporate host and MC services.

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