The carbon credit method that lets New South Wales fund the Great Koala National Park by permanently ending native forest harvesting will face a Senate disallowance motion on 18 August, after the Coalition moved on Tuesday to strike it down. That is according to NSW Nationals Senator Ross Cadell, who lodged the disallowance against the Improved Native Forest Management (INFM) determination and warned the rules would end the native timber industry for good.
Because the reserve would be funded by carbon credits that Australia’s heaviest emitters buy to offset their own pollution, the method confronts the Greens with their own objections as the vote nears. Greens MPs have spent months attacking that polluter money while welcoming the harvesting halt it delivers, a split the industry says cannot hold once the motion reaches the floor.
Maree McCaskill, chief executive of Timber NSW, told Wood Central that green groups had urged their political affiliates to oppose carbon credit funding for a national park, a stance whose own logic would commit the Greens to disallowing it. Voting to keep the method instead, McCaskill said, would mean “it completely contradicts everything they’ve said in the past.”
On the Greens’ side, environment spokesperson Sue Higginson has savaged the determination as accounting games and condemned a model that turns forests into offsets for climate polluters. Ending harvesting still matters more than the funding route, and “we cannot afford to wait for accounting games to be developed,” Higginson said.
Cadell, however, cast the dispute as one of transparency rather than industry versus the environment, accusing the government of burying the method’s workings within the bureaucracy. Both Labor and the Greens were treating the scheme as “a political football,” he said, citing a lack of consultation and undisclosed documents.
Shadow Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction Dan Tehan warned the method would let any state monetise pre-existing forest closures through the Australian Carbon Credit Unit (ACCU) scheme, even as Australia faces a projected 43 per cent softwood supply gap by 2050. Reduced native supply would draw in imports or push builders toward steel and concrete, he said, because “demand does not fall, it shifts to imports from countries with worse environmental standards.”
Beyond the politicians, the foresters who manage the estate have also rejected the method, with Forestry Australia judging it short of genuine improved management. Meanwhile, Tasmanian senator Richard Colbeck pressed the same scientific case, arguing active management stores more carbon than locking forests away, a point he attributed to CSIRO.
Opposition extends to organised labour, with the Timber, Furnishing and Textiles Union, the country’s only dedicated timber union, rejecting the method as dead on arrival. That a union, the foresters, and the industry have all moved against it leaves Labor’s determination isolated across the political spectrum.
Technical objections cut deeper still, with an expert familiar with the method telling Wood Central it leaves the NSW Government conflicted, both regulating native forestry and now running a carbon forest business that profits from closing it down. With just 10 per cent of the state’s public forests still open to timber and the rest held for conservation, the state was “wearing two conflicting hats, forest regulator and carbon forest business operator,” the expert said.
To earn the credits, the government must stop harvesting from shifting to private land, the leakage rules at the method’s core, which the expert said would bring tighter monitoring and onerous new reporting for private growers. In the expert’s view, holding a commercial stake in the outcome would give the state every reason to cap that private activity and wind back the programmes behind it, leaving thousands of small growers exposed.
The carbon method approved this month lets state governments earn ACCUs for permanently halting harvesting on public land, with the Commonwealth and Safeguard Mechanism polluters buying the credits that bankroll the reserve. Nationals leader Matt Canavan, who is driving the motion, said the change would lock productive forest away for a century and weaken a sector that directly employs about 80,000 people, with another 100,000 jobs indirectly tied to it.
Please note: Wood Central has not taken an editorial stance on Australia’s native forest debate. It will however publish content that it deems to be in the public interest that it will fact check before publishing.
