New South Wales Forestry Corporation has begun logging in Pine Creek State Forest (PCSF), despite ongoing community efforts to protect the area as part of a critical wildlife corridor linking significant koala habitats.
Friends of Pine Creek (FoPC) is campaigning to stop logging in a 1600-hectare area of PCSF, which provides the corridor between Bongil Bongil National Park and Bindarri National Park.
FoPC facilitator Susan Harwood told Green Left the group welcomed the NSW Labor government’s Great Koala National Park (GKNP) announcement, but said the proposed boundaries leave a crucial gap between two “intergenerationally significant areas” of koala habitat.
FoPC’s “forest bridge” proposal would protect habitat connecting the two parks, allowing koalas and other species to move between the coast and tablelands, as conditions change due to fire and climate change.
Harwood said the proposed GKNP contains “a big hole in between those two national parks where extensive logging will occur”. For five years, FoPC has been asking Labor to include the entire forest bridge in the proposed national park.
Harwood said FoPC had deliberately decided on a conservative approach, only seeking to protect the areas required for ecological connectivity, rather than all of PCSF.
Despite much of the forest bridge area being classified as “plantation”, Harwood said it was planted many years ago and now provides habitat for koalas and other species. “It’s basically regenerating native forest.”
Harwood said Forestry Corp has begun clear-felling compartment 32 in the PCSF, just south of the forest bridge. However, the next area scheduled to be logged will enter the proposed koala corridor, directly alongside the proposed GKNP.
Harwood said clear-felling in this vital transport corridor will have significant impacts; log dumps and debris create major obstacles for koalas and other species to move through.
Harwood said the Save Pine Creek community group set up a blockade on Tower Road — a haulage route for the logging — on June 14 as Forestry Corp was due to start operations in PCSF.
Aunty Alison Buchanan, a Gumbaynggirr Elder, was key to the blockade. Because the blockade was located on National Parks land, rather than in state forest, National Parks and Wildlife Service officers and police ordered protesters to dismantle the camp and leave on June 23.
“They kicked Aunty Alison off her own land — it was just horrendous,” Harwood said.
In subsequent protests, people have climbed trees and locked on to machinery.
In July, an injured koala was found in compartment 32 and taken to Port Macquarie Koala Hospital, before it had to be euthanised.
Harwood sought information from Forestry Corp and the hospital about the koala, but received no response. A Freedom of Information request prompted Forestry Corp to release information last month.
The veterinary report and autopsy revealed the koala had suffered abdominal bleeding, fractured ribs, lung contusions, brain trauma and other soft tissue injuries. FoPC said the koala’s injuries were inconsistent with Forestry Corp’s account that it was “found on a pile of logs”.
Harwood said FoPC is focused on getting the forest bridge included in the GKNP, as the law establishing the park has not yet gone to parliament.
The federal Labor government, with the support of most Greens Senators, passed the controversial Improved Native Forest Management (INFM) system last month, which is claimed will help deliver the GKNP.
The carbon trading scheme sets a dangerous precedent that new national parks can only be created if money can be extracted, rather than for their ecological importance and critical role in mitigating climate change.
Premier Chris Minns, despite NSW Labor’s promises to the contrary, is now saying the GKNP is conditional on the creation of the INFM.
Harwood condemned Minns’ move as “criminal”. “To turn around and say, ‘If I don’t get money for it, then we’re not having it’, is basically what it comes down to.”
Harwood said when Labor first proposed the park, there was no mention of carbon credits. After Labor won the NSW election in 2023, environment minister Penny Sharpe rejected the use of carbon offsets, promising that the GKNP would be set up without them.