The real reason why NSW is logging koala habitat
Tue 9 Apr 2024 00.00 AEST
The NSW Labor Government took office promising to create a vast koala sanctuary on the state’s mid-north coast – the Great Koala National Park.
Despite the threat of koala extinction in the state, more than a year later the Great Koala National Park is yet to be established.
Officially, the Government cites consultation with stakeholders as the reason for the delay. Last year, NSW Premier Chris Minns’ remarkable admission disclosed a further motive for the go-slow: the government is reluctant to create the new national park or end logging and land clearing that is destroying koala habitat until it secures another way to make money from the trees.
In essence, it wants to exploit the forests for carbon credits.
In this video report, dual Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist, Stephen Long talks to people fighting to save the native forests, and peels back the curtain on why the koala habitat on the mid-north coast is still being logged.
Last week’s Budget gives some insight into how the federal government intends to regulate logging of native forests going forward, setting aside millions in public funds to “progress a landscape-scale approval pathway for jurisdictions with RFAs”. This signals the government is planning for native forest logging to continue.
Budgets are not communications exercises. They are statements of priorities, the most literal answer a government can give to the question: what do we value? Ask that of the 2026–27 federal budget, and the answer, for nature, for Australia's irreplaceable native species, for the ecosystems that took millions of years to evolve on this continent and exist nowhere else on Earth, is clear. Nature is not a priority.
