On Friday, after more than 14 hours of debate and around 160 amendments in the Legislative Council, the NSW Parliament passed legislation creating the Great Koala National Park. It is now the state's second largest national park, and it took more than a decade of campaigning to get there. Here's what actually passed.
What actually got protected
The park combines existing national parks with more than 178,000 hectares of state forest and Crown land, stretching between Kempsey and Grafton on the NSW Mid North Coast. According to WWF-Australia (23 October 2026), the result is a park of more than 475,000 hectares. ABC News puts the figure closer to 478,000 hectares, which is either a rounding difference or two organisations measuring slightly different boundaries, and either way it's a genuinely enormous amount of forest to lock in on a Friday afternoon.
Who it's actually for
WWF-Australia estimates the park protects around 12,000 koalas and 36,000 greater gliders, on top of more than 100 species of flora and fauna the NSW Government has flagged. Environment Minister Penny Sharpe called it "a defining moment for conservation in NSW," and WWF-Australia CEO Dermot O'Gorman called it "a historic win for koalas, forests and the communities who have been fighting for their protection," adding that it's "conservation at the scale nature needs." He compared it to the reserves that helped China's giant panda population recover, which is a nice reminder that habitat protection at scale has actually worked before, this isn't a first attempt at a nice idea.
The part that's genuinely hard
None of this came free. A logging moratorium across the park area has already cost jobs, Timber NSW president Andrew Hurford described a "creeping impact" on Mid North Coast mills, with suppliers in tyres, fuel, trucking and engineering all slowing down alongside it. The NSW Government has offered a transition package and says affected Forestry Corporation staff will move into National Parks and Wildlife Service roles, including new Aboriginal ranger positions, and WWF is pushing for genuine engagement with the Gumbaynggirr and Dunghutti communities on handing back public native forest. It's a real trade off for real people, not a clean win, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of greenwashing.
Why a soap and deodorant brand is reading a parks bill
Our packaging is made from FSC certified paper. We chose it because it breaks down at home, but we’re not going to pretend paper has no cost, everything does. The real choice isn’t “harm or no harm”, it’s which harm: responsibly managed, fast growing forest over oil based plastic, every time. Same reasoning behind the ink, soy based instead of petroleum, so nothing toxic goes back into the soil once the box has finished breaking down in your compost.
That’s what FSC certification actually checks. Not whether a forest stays untouched, a working forest gets harvested, that’s what it’s for, but whether the harvest comes from fast growing, well managed land instead of old growth that took centuries to get there. Nobody involved gets to zero impact. The job is keeping it as small as it can be, and not leaving the bill for whoever’s here after us.
Half a million hectares of NSW forest just landed on the right side of that same principle, responsibly managed instead of up for grabs. Same logic, bigger scale.
We’ve gone deeper on what certification labels actually promise, and what they don’t, in Is 'Natural' Just Greenwashing? How to Actually Check. If you want the other recent example of a WWF find that's more hopeful than it first sounds, we covered it here: Wildlife Populations Fell 73% Since 1970, Here's the Hopeful Part.
Fourteen hours of debate and 160 amendments, just to agree that a forest full of koalas and greater gliders is worth more standing than cut down. We'd call that a slow yes, but we'll absolutely take it.