The creation of the Great Koala National Park on the state’s North Coast by the Minns government will be greeted with joy and fury.

In announcing the park, a patchwork of 176,000 hectares of state forest stitched together with sections of existing national park into a protected zone sprawling over 476,000 hectares around Coffs Harbour, the government is delivering on a key election promise at significant political risk.

Yarriabini National Park is part of the proposed Great Koala National Park.Credit: Janie Barrett

The park was first conceived of by activists in 2012 as a way of preserving some of the last critical koala habitat in the state, and was backed by Labor as far back as 2015.

In 2020, after the black summer fires killed a third of the already declining NSW koala population, a parliamentary inquiry found that without radical intervention the animal would become extinct........

© The Sydney Morning Herald