30/10/2026
🐨😭
💔 The Springview 2 & 3 development within Woogaroo Forest has now been approved.
So much has changed in the last 30 years. Koalas weren’t endangered back then. So what happens when a 1990s planning framework outlasts the science?
Woogaroo Forest has been Country to the Jagera, Yuggera and Ugarapul peoples for thousands of years, and it survived as one of Ipswich's larger bushland remnants.
Then came Springfield which saw the transformation of thousands of hectares of forestry land into housing into the Ipswich Greater Springfield area. In the 1990s, the State signed
agreements and locked in a planning framework that still operates today, separate from the current Ipswich City Plan 2025. Only about 420ha of the land remains including the 160
hectares known as Lot 9999 which has been earmarked for the building of nearly a 1,000 residential lots. Campaigners and residents gave Lot 9999 the name Woogaroo Forest. The land is not a mere
number – it has a history and a geography. It is an irreplaceable habitat and home to over 1,000 recorded species including endangered koalas, vulnerable grey-headed flying-foxes, powerful owls, platypus, and gliders.
Ipswich City Council confirms development inside it is treated as exempt from certain vegetation and koala-habitat controls, even on land mapped as koala habitat.
Hugh Possingham, prominent conservation ecologist and professor at the University of Queensland, states “There is plenty of completely degraded land with no biodiversity values at all to put those houses on,” he says. “There’s degraded agricultural land, there’s abandoned land, there’s abandoned mines … south-east Queensland is 6m hectares. “If you can’t find 30,000ha in 6m hectares, then you are not looking very hard.”
What do you think…should a framework built 30 years ago still shape environmental outcomes in 2026? Please post your comments below. And if you would like to contribute to the campaign head on over to the Save Woogaroo
Forest Campaign website.
[Image Description: poster with a blue sky, green tree branches and a koala holding onto a tree on the left hand side of the image. The text says "What happens when 1990s planning rules outlasts the science? Times have changed. Woogaroo Forest needs you!” The Animal Justice Party QLD logo is at the bottom centre.]
