After a Decade of Campaigning, the Great Koala National Park Is Law 🇦🇺
Something rare has happened in Australian conservation: a long campaign has won. This week the New South Wales Parliament passed legislation that officially creates the Great Koala National Park, and after a marathon debate the state has its second-largest national park.
The park runs across the Mid North Coast between Kempsey and Grafton, and its territory is reported at about 478,000 hectares. It joins existing national parks with more than 178,000 hectares of former state forest and Crown land. The government says it will shelter around 12,000 koalas and more than 100 other threatened species.
From a conservation idea to law
The idea is older than most of the politicians who voted on it. The National Parks Association of NSW lodged its Great Koala National Park proposal with the government in 2015. The Nature Conservation Council says the concept was inspired by China's panda reserves. The principle is to protect a species by protecting the whole connected forest it depends on, not by saving scattered remnants.
The path was rough. In 2022 a Greens bill to create the park was defeated 30 votes to 7, with Labor voting alongside the then Coalition government. Labor changed course and made the park a signature commitment of its 2023 election campaign. After winning, it spent more than two years on advisory panels, assessments and negotiation. The boundary was finally unveiled in September 2025, and logging in the area stopped immediately.
The scale of the loss in the wild is why this mattered. The 2019–20 bushfires burnt an estimated 3.5 million hectares of koala habitat across NSW, Queensland and the ACT. NSW had already listed the koala as endangered, and the fires deepened a decline that clearing, disease, drought and heat had long been driving. On the Mid North Coast, longtime advocate Ashley Love began lobbying after residents kept telling him koalas were no longer as common as they once were.
What the park protects
Koalas are the headline, but they are far from the only residents. The forests hold an estimated 36,000 greater gliders, along with powerful owls and yellow-bellied gliders. These are old, hollow-bearing trees that take generations to grow and cannot be quickly replaced. The government describes the area as one of the world's top biodiversity hotspots. Joining existing reserves into one connected estate matters as much as the added area, because animals can move between patches and the whole system is more resilient to fire and a warming climate.
The Gumbaynggirr and Dunghutti peoples have helped shape the park and will continue to guide its management. That is welcome, and it should become the norm for protected-area management.
The cost on the other side
Conservation wins have costs, and the people who bear them deserve to be named. The earlier logging moratorium affected six of about 25 local timber mills and roughly 300 workers. In July, Forestry Corporation announced more than 30 job cuts in Coffs Harbour because of the park. Local mill operator Andrew Hurford told the ABC that many mills now have no wood to process in the region.
The government has promised support. It has put a worker assistance package in place and says affected Forestry Corporation staff will be offered roles with the National Parks and Wildlife Service. Its funding commitments are substantial, with $60 million announced on top of the $80 million set aside in 2023. The Nature Conservation Council puts total new funding for the region at more than $140 million, covering conservation, restoration, park management and local jobs. Whether that reaches the right people, quickly and fairly, will be the real test of the transition. The government also stresses that forestry will continue elsewhere on the North Coast, including in plantations.
Carbon credits and compromises
The park's financing is unusual. Its creation was tied to a carbon credit scheme under the Improved Native Forest Management method, which lets states earn income by not logging public native forests. The Clean Energy Regulator has now approved the park's carbon project, which the government says clears the final hurdles to establishing the park.
Carbon accounting for avoided logging remains contested, and the Greens have questioned the method. Others argue that without it the money to support workers and manage the park would not have materialised. Both views have merit, and the scheme will need independent scrutiny over time.
Some conservationists have also raised concerns about how parts of the estate may be used. The North Coast Environment Council has warned that some areas are earmarked for recreation and said the fight continues for a world-class park rather than a patchwork of reserves, citing car racing and quad biking as activities it opposes. The park is a major achievement, but the quality of its management will decide whether koalas actually benefit.
What comes next
The government says the park is on track to open before the end of the year. It hopes to turn the region into an iconic tourism destination, and earlier projections put the extra tourism revenue in the order of $163 million for the state's economy. For Mid North Coast towns that have depended on timber, a visitor economy is a real opportunity but not an automatic one. It will need investment, infrastructure and time.
The deeper lesson is about persistence. This park exists because scientists, local residents, Traditional Owners, councils and independent MPs kept pushing through changes of government and at least one defeat in Parliament. The Nature Conservation Council notes that polling has consistently shown more than 85 per cent of New South Wales residents support the park, though that is the council's figure and not an independent finding.
Koalas still face threats a single park cannot remove, including disease, climate change, vehicle strikes, dog attacks and habitat loss on private land beyond its boundary. Protecting 178,000 hectares of forest does not end the extinction risk. But it gives a species in trouble something it has badly needed: a large, connected, legally protected place to recover.
After more than a decade, that is a reason to celebrate. It is also a reason to keep watching what happens next.
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Sources include ABC News, the NSW Government, the National Parks Association of NSW and the Nature Conservation Council
More interesting reading:
National Tree Day Australia: Planting Hope Against a Backdrop of Deforestation
Koalas: Australia's Tree-Top Treasures and Their fight for Survival
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