Letter to the Editor: How did we get here?

DEAR News Of The Area,

AGAIN, in response to Ashley Love’s Letter of 11 March 2026, I feel it is necessary to highlight his hypocrisy regarding plantations within the proposed Great Koala National Park footprint.

His last two paragraphs say it all.

Koalas trump taxpayer investment in plantations, no matter what.

The plantations within the GKNP footprint were deliberately excluded from being part of the Park itself because the Government recognised that society still needs timber.

Indeed, most environmental NGOs recognise society still needs timber when they demand that we cease native timber harvesting and transition (immediately, but that’s another issue) solely to plantations.

But Mr Love wants the 16,000 hectares that make up half the State’s current hardwood plantations included in the GKNP.

Why, because koalas can’t tell the difference between a plantation and a native forest when it comes to looking for something to eat.

How did we get to this?

How has the koala been weaponised by activists and the Greens?

Why are koalas classified as endangered in NSW?

Whilst the koala has been listed as Vulnerable in NSW since 2012 (again based on “expert” opinion, not data), it all starts with an Upper House inquiry chaired by the Greens and Animal Justice Party, more selective guesstimates (opinions) from chosen “experts”, ignoring the government’s own science and data and finally a lack of a dissenting report by the LNP government rep on the inquiry (either from general laziness or lack of interest).

The preordained finding was that “koalas could be extinct in the wild by 2050”.

Then have the activists in the environmental bureaucracy take that to Canberra in 2022, split a species by geographical distribution for the first time ever (hate to be a koala with a home range that crosses the Victorian/NSW border – endangered one minute, abundant the next!) and based on the “expert opinion” (rather than data) that the population had declined from 184,748 to 92,184, they are now listed as endangered in the ACT, NSW and QLD.

The latest CSIRO’s data-driven estimate for the size of the listed (NSW, ACT, QLD) koala population is between 398,000 and 569,000 (May 2025).

The latest data-driven population model has been built based on tens of thousands of data points spread across the species range.

Ironically, the Endangered population in NSW, QLD and ACT exceeds the unlisted population in VIC and SA (only 303,000 to 381,000 koalas).

The latest CSIRO data comes after NSW Department of Primary Industries scientists revealed that koala populations are ‘high and stable’ in NSW forests.

Then, the NSW government’s environmental department very quietly announced the results of their Statewide “baseline” koala survey before Christmas and estimated that there are 274,000 koalas in NSW (with a 95 percent confidence interval).

That’s eight times as many as when they were listed as endangered.

They would have known this before their disastrous GKNP announcement on Father’s Day.

Yet, Environment Minister Penny Sharpe MLC still clings to the idea that koalas are endangered in order to justify the destruction of the timber industry, regional jobs, regional communities and future conservation decisions.

Kind regards,

Steve DOBBYNS,

Forest and Wood Communities Australia.