DEAR News Of The Area,

I WAS appalled to see our local member (NOTA 17/3/23) deny, avoid and once again roll out the same old statements from the National Party head office in Sydney regarding the logging industry and koalas.

Things are not that rosy Gurmesh.

Here are some facts.

Houses are built from plantation softwood (not native hardwood as claimed) and have been for decades.

There has been a significant increase in logging on the Mid North Coast since 2019 making the statewide statistics misleading.

Forestry Corporation has been found guilty of recent illegal logging in this area.

A Forestry Corporation employee was involved in an assault by logging contractors on a local ecologist and his friend who were on a public road.

Forestry Corporation in collusion with other public agencies have continued harassment of the ecologist and he is now under ridiculous and onerous bail conditions preventing him from entering any State Forest and conducting his work.

There is NO ‘peer reviewed’ science relating to impacts of the industrial scale logging regime and species conversion of our native forests on koala populations in our area supporting current practice.

The $190 million dollars allocated to the ongoing NSW Koala Strategy that Gurmesh refers to includes a program in which hundreds of thousands of dollars is offered to private landholders to grow koala feed trees on their degraded land, while Forestry Corporation are busy losing public money and destroying established Koala habitat in the adjacent State forests.

This is our current Government’s alternative to protection of our biodiverse native forests and long term public investment in native hardwood plantations.

Because our local member denies there is a local problem and has not fought for it, there is no specific allocation to secure habitat or hospital and research facilities for local koala populations in our area of the North Coast, regarded by many as some of the best remaining natural wild populations in the country.

Sadly another lost opportunity for our area Gurmesh.

Regards,
Dave WOOD,
Boambee East.