We must disallow a regulation that could tie national park creation to carbon credit markets benefiting polluters, writes former Greens leader Christine Milne
How can carbon supposedly saved by protecting forests in the Great Koala National Park be additional when the NSW government has promised for 10 years to end logging and protect those forests, Christine Milne asks.
On September 15, the Australian Senate will vote on a motion to disallow a regulation known as Improved Native Forest Management (INFM).
It might sound innocuous. It is not.
The regulation goes to the heart of Australia’s climate and forest policies and, if allowed to stand, will establish a dangerous national precedent.
The community is being blackmailed: agree to sell the forest carbon in the proposed Great Koala National Park to big polluters, or there will be no national park – the logging will continue, the forests will fall and the koalas will die.
That is the extraordinary position now being advanced by the NSW Labor government, which has promised for a decade to create the Great Koala National Park without such caveats, and a federal Labor government that signed the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, committing Australia to protect 30 per cent of its terrestrial and marine environment by 2030.
It is no wonder the INFM and the carbon-offset market are so on the nose.
Here’s why.
It requires us to suspend disbelief about what constitutes an “additional” emissions reduction.
How can the carbon supposedly saved by protecting forests in the Great Koala National Park be additional when the NSW government has promised for 10 years to end logging and protect those forests?
If the forests were already destined for protection, their preservation cannot credibly be claimed as a new climate action.
That is the central issue raised by Lawyers for Forests, which argues that the INFM regulation contravenes the Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Act 2011 and is therefore invalid and approving the regulation would be unlawful.
Suspending disbelief is also required for our core climate legislation, The Safeguard Mechanism. Under it we don’t force polluters to reduce their emissions by decarbonising but permit them to use 100 per cent “offsets”.
The consequence is predictable. If buying an offset is cheaper than investing in new machinery, changing industrial processes or genuinely reducing emissions, there is an economic incentive to do precisely that.
Meanwhile, Australia’s fossil-fuel industry continues to expand and national domestic and exported Scope 3 emissions continue to rise.
Australia encourages, subsidises and permits increased fossil fuel exports. No amount of photos of ministers hugging koalas in front of trees, or solar panels, or wind farms, changes that fact.
The science is clear: we have run out of time. Australia must rapidly stop burning and exporting coal and gas while at the same time protecting forest ecosystems as habitat for endangered species and as vital carbon stores.
The climate impacts are already unmistakeable and catastrophic – from devastating heatwaves and fires in Europe, to rising seas threatening Pacific communities and catastrophic glacier collapse in Nepal.
Yet instead of treating nature protection as a public responsibility, the Albanese and Minns Labor governments appear determined to monetise it, to promote Green Wall St at the very time neoliberalism is discredited and dying.
They have decided to abandon the public funding of National Parks and protected areas, and instead make forest protection a commodity to be sold to satisfy the insatiable “offset” demands of some of the biggest polluters in the country, such as BlueScope Steel at Port Kembla and Rio Tinto’s Tomago aluminium.
Their weapon of choice is the INFM.
The precedent it sets extends far beyond the Great Koala National Park. Why would a state government ever again protect forests or create a national park without first asking whether it could generate commonwealth-issued carbon credits by doing so?
As academic Dr Fergus Green has warned: “If the Method is allowed to stand, why would a cash-strapped state government ever again unilaterally enact climate policies unless and until they can generate commonwealth-issued carbon credits for doing so?”
He concludes: “If the Senate doesn’t take a principled stand, state climate policy will become nothing but a giant ACCU-generating machine, fuelling the fossil fuel industry’s ceaseless expansion.”
Former Leader of the Australian Greens Christine Milne says the latest Senate response to protecting forests could have a troubling implication for Tasmania.
Former Leader of the Australian Greens Christine Milne says the latest Senate response to protecting forests could have a troubling implication for Tasmania.
And there is a particularly troubling implication for Tasmania.
A cash-strapped Tasmanian government could have a strong financial incentive to follow this model, particularly if it adopts the plantation definition embedded in INFM. That could allow the government to generate carbon credits from some native forests while reclassifying much of the remaining native forest estate as plantation, opening those forests to conversion.
Governments have a responsibility to protect nature. We want koalas protected just as much as we want the Tasmanian devil to survive, or the swift parrot to have a safe migration and tree hollows in which to breed. But we should not have to trade with the big polluters to secure their survival.
We will not give in to blackmail. Nor will we embrace neoliberal markets for nature or accept a future in which the protection of nature depends on whether it can be converted into a tradeable carbon asset.
Forests are not commodities. They are living ecosystems, habitat for threatened species, carbon stores and part of the natural systems on which human life depends. They should be protected for their own sake and managed to retain their natural values, resilience and integrity in the face of land clearing, climate change and invasive species.
Australia needs genuine emissions reductions and genuine forest protection simultaneously – not accounting tricks that allow both governments and polluters to benefit by claiming climate action while avoiding emissions reduction.
The Senate should disallow INFM.
Christine Milne is a former Greens leader, who led the Australian Greens from 2012 to 2015
Appeared in Mercury newspaper 07/09/2026: https://www.themercury.com.au/news/opinion/milne-great-koala-national-park-plan-is-blackmail-to-aid-big-polluters/news-story/a565cf4e4bf220efa029b1828f231919