The Greens’ majority in the Senate will support Labor’s demand for carbon credits as a precondition for saving forests. A strong minority dissented.

In Hobart, Christine Milne and Bob Brown have commented.

“One hundred and fifty years ago, the proposal that coal mining be allowed under the Royal National Park near Sydney (Australia’s first national Park, founded in 1879) for royalties to help fund it, was rejected. Since then, the public has strongly backed Australia’s national parks being funded by governments because they’re for everyone’s enjoyment and for the protection of nature, in particular, rare and threatened species. Now, Labor has reneged on that ethos by making the Great Koala National Park subject to cheap carbon credits from the saved forests, so polluters can avoid cutting their greenhouse gas emissions,” former Greens leader Bob Brown said in Hobart.

“Premier Minns made it clear that, although he knew koalas could be extinct within decades, he would not protect them without giving the big-end-of-town polluters a gift.”

“So be it,” Brown said.

“Minns Labor, welching on its 2024 unconditional promise to create the park, and backed by Albanese, is the villain. I understand environmentalists, including Greens MPs, who felt they had to accept this Labor fix. Unlike Labor, all environmentalists remain with the majority of Australians who want the forests and koalas saved for their own sakes. But the creation of future national parks, always previously based on their natural, cultural and spiritual values, has suddenly become more likely to depend on the big-end-of-town getting a dividend such as cheap carbon credits. Money rules.”

Former Greens leader Christine Milne said, “Tasmanian Senators Nick McKim and Vanessa Bleyer and WA Senator Jordan Steele John, together with state MPs in Tasmania and WA and, importantly, NSW MPs Abigail Boyd and Amanda Cohn, are on the right side of history and I thank them.”

“As neoliberalism invades every public space, they have demonstrated great courage in standing up for the science and in asserting the role of government in protecting Nature in the public interest. It is what The Greens stand for.”

The protection of our iconic koala should not be left to the corporates and the logic of commercialism. Credits that let a polluter avoid reducing emissions are not forest protection; they are a licence with a koala on the front,” said Christine Milne.