The New South Wales Government helped design the carbon method behind the Great Koala National Park, owns the 176,000 hectares it covers, lodged the project with the regulator, and would collect the credits, an arrangement that leaves it judge, jury, and beneficiary of its own scheme. That is according to Bob Debus, a Labor life member who chairs Wilderness Australia and sat in the Carr Cabinet, writing in The Point, the Australia Institute’s news masthead, twelve days before the Senate votes on disallowance.
“Judge, jury and beneficiary of the INFM method,” Debus writes of a government he says wrote the rules alongside a contractor and then qualified under them as the largest eligible landholder in the state. He counts a fifth interest beyond those four, with the biggest industrial plants in New South Wales able to buy the credits to meet their obligations under the Federal Safeguard Mechanism.
The proposed boundary holds more than 12,000 koalas and 36,000 greater gliders, and Debus argues their protection now depends on whether that habitat can be sold as carbon, a reserve first justified on biodiversity grounds and now tied to offset revenue. He calls it a troubling precedent for every conservation deal that follows.
Labor took the park to successive elections and announced it last September, and the Commonwealth had to treat those promises as interim feasibility steps rather than commitments before credits could be issued for stopping harvesting the state had already promised to stop. Only on that reading, Debus argues, does the method apply to the site at all.
Neither government has costed the revenue at issue, and the widely quoted $1.5 billion comes from Mandala Partners modelling commissioned by the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation, the body chaired by former Treasury Secretary Ken Henry. Debus calls that work unpublished and unverified, and Timber NSW named the same consultancy last year as the firm the National Parks and Wildlife Service hired to count the workforce inside the park.
That figure assumes an end to harvesting across every public native forest in the state, not just the koala park, whose own credits supporters value at more than $300 million over the same 15 years, or $20 million a year. The Foundation’s campaign material shows credit prices rising 78 per cent over the decade, which is why Debus puts the real return as low as a tenth of the headline return.
Three assumptions inside the method draw his sharpest criticism, each of which must hold for a century or for the next 15 years: that climate change will not alter bushfire severity, that harvesting would otherwise continue, and that no government would protect the forests without credits. Each one, on his account, needs the public to hold the same view for 15 years.
Eucalypts give back their carbon and take it up again over decades and centuries, while coal burnt this morning returns carbon that spent millennia underground, a distinction Debus draws beneath the technical argument. Credits traded as offsets do not cut emissions at all, he writes, but hold the position steady while emitters keep burning.
“A preemptive buckle,” Debus writes of the decision by the NSW National Parks Association and the NSW Nature Conservation Council to take up the government’s advocacy for the method, a judgment that sets a party elder against two of the state’s largest conservation bodies.
It comes as wood processors and forest industry groups pressed the same objection through 371 submissions before the committee signed its letter of advice in June, with the moratorium already costing 300 jobs across six mills and closing the green mill at Herons Creek. The Senate now votes on a motion that industry and a former Labor minister both support for opposite reasons.
Debus built the nation’s first biodiversity offset scheme as a last resort requiring no net loss, and watched the Baird Government strip out its guardrails until, on his account, it failed utterly to protect nature. He offers Frontier Economics as the alternative, whose report for WWF-Australia estimates a full transition out of public native forest harvesting at $302 million, $244 million of which is up front, compared with the $300 million the park’s own credits are set to earn across 15 years.
