New South Wales Labor has promised to establish a Great Koala National Park on the Mid North Coast as part of a plan to help save the Australian marsupials, which are at risk of becoming extinct in NSW by 2050.
If elected in March, Labor will spend $80 million establishing the sanctuary, comprising existing national parks and state forests between Kempsey and Grafton.
"When you see a situation where koalas have gone from not threatened to vulnerable to endangered to potentially extinct by 2050, we've got to take action," Opposition Leader Chris Minns said.
Established national parks already make up 140,000 hectares of the proposed Great Koala National Park, with a further 176,000 hectares of state forest to be assessed for inclusion, should Labor win the election.
Opposition environment spokeswoman Penny Sharpe said the first thing Labor would do is bring together a koala summit to change the NSW koala strategy to a species recovery plan.
"There are so many people across the state who are working to save koalas, they have very little input into the plan and we also need the scientists involved," Ms Sharpe said.
Labor has also promised wildlife corridors in Woronora Heights and Heathcote, in Sydney's south.
Pledge welcomed by environmentalists
This is the third time Labor has taken the Great Koala National Park proposal to an election.
National Parks Association of NSW president, and advocate for the park, Grahame Douglas said he was hopeful the plan would become a reality.
"This will be an important initiative to protect and conserve our koala population," he said.
Mr Douglas said without a national park, koala habitat would be fragmented and reduce their ability to breed and migrate.
Coalition, forestry products industry opposed
NSW Environment Minister James Griffin has called Labor's promise a "plan for a plan", labelling it "embarrassing".
"What we've seen from them today is a plan to spend $80 million to consult on potentially creating a new national park," he said.
"That $80 million on consultation will not see a single dollar go to helping protect a single koala."
Industry group Australia Forestry Products Association said the park would result in the closure of the hardwood timber industry on the NSW Mid North Coast.
"And that would mean not just thousands of jobs lost, but also create a lot of uncertainty for anyone building a house or renovating, around where that timber is going to come from," AFPA NSW chief executive Victor Violante said.
The association said it was concerned Labor had not released detail on how the proposed park would affect the industry at a time when they were working to reduce the impact of logging through things like selective harvesting.
"We think the balance is right now, but we are open to further consultation as long as it's evidence based, because a lot of what we are seeing in this debate is ideological," Mr Violante said.
He said work was also needed on bushfire mitigation as part of any strategy to save the koala.
The sentiments were shared by Nationals MP Melinda Pavey whose Oxley electorate hosts a large area of the proposed park.
"I think the greatest risk in locking up more areas is what we saw through the bushfires — we lost a lot of koalas and koala habitat during the last big bushfires," she said.
"I think growing an expectation that everybody will see a koala every five centimetres just by creating a park is actually probably not fair to community expectation."
