The Albanese Government’s $8.9 million top-up for the Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU) scheme in last week’s 2026-27 Federal Budget has drawn academic criticism, with the new money offset by $164.4 million in scheme savings the Treasurer has clawed back from carbon credit units not delivered under contract across 2023-24 and 2024-25.
That is according to Australian National University environmental law professor Andrew Macintosh, who said the funding would have been better directed at restoring core capacity inside the federal department administering the program than at further method development for a scheme he argued was no longer salvageable.
“It’s so far gone, it’s a complete waste of money,” Macintosh said.
An estimated 95 per cent of ACCU scheme credits issued to date were non-additional, Macintosh said, with participants rewarded for activities that would have occurred without the program in direct opposition to the additionality test the Carbon Credits (Carbon Farming Initiative) Act 2011 was written to enforce.
The Human-Induced Regeneration (HIR) method drew Macintosh’s sharpest critique, with the top 100 HIR projects by credit volume now expected to be carrying wall-to-wall regenerated native forest cover and fewer than five, on Macintosh’s estimate, showing material change against the project baseline.
On the livestock side of the scheme, Macintosh argued red meat producers were being credited under existing methods for productivity improvements they would pursue under normal commercial pressure regardless of any carbon project running on the operation. The Federal Government announced in April it would work with industry to design a new ACCU scheme livestock method, with the design work running directly into the additionality question Macintosh has flagged.
Farmers for Climate Action (FCA) welcomed the $8.9 million federal allocation but described it as a relatively small investment against the scale of the work needed, with FCA policy director Caleb Connor arguing the priority had to be reducing emissions at source under the Safeguard Mechanism settings on Australia’s largest industrial emitters.
“Then $8.9m won’t cut it,” Connor said.
FCA has opened a farmer-led review of the existing ACCU method library, with the work designed to test where science-led pathways for on-farm emissions reduction sit against the current method suite and what new methods producers need to access value from genuine on-farm reduction work.
The 2026-27 Federal Budget, delivered by Treasurer Jim Chalmers on 12 May, confirmed the $8.9 million ACCU allocation alongside $164.4 million in savings clawed back from undelivered carbon credit units across the 2023-24 and 2024-25 contract years.
The new criticism comes after the ANU’s role in the carbon modelling scheme was unmasked in December when the university was accused of blocking a Freedom of Information request related to its timber-for-carbon-credit plan.
