The Coalition will use the House to heap pressure on the Albanese Government over its controversial native forest carbon method from today, with a vote on Dan Tehan’s motion to kill it due inside six sitting days and the Senate deciding the method’s fate on 15 September. That is according to House notice papers obtained by Wood Central overnight, which list the motion at item 13 of today’s private members’ business and warn that the determination is struck down automatically if the House does not vote on it in time.
States earn Australian Carbon Credit Units under the Albanese Government’s Improved Native Forest Management (INFM) method by ending planned harvesting in multiple-use public native forests. In practice, this pays them to shut down harvesting in their state forests, with the Commonwealth and Safeguard Mechanism polluters buying the credits. New South Wales intends to fund the Great Koala National Park with it, drawing 176,000 hectares of state forest on the Mid North Coast into a reserve, and “the final creation of the park is dependent on the successful registration of a carbon project” under the method, the Minns Government’s own announcement states.
“Determination will be taken to have been disallowed unless disposed of within 6 sitting days including today,” the notice paper states beneath item 13. Tehan gave notice on 30 June, the day after the determination was tabled, and the sixth sitting day on the House calendar is Tuesday 15 September.
Ross Cadell lodged his Senate motion against the same method on 30 June, and it is decided on the same Tuesday, the last of the 15 sitting days the Senate has, with the ten Greens senators holding the balance and either chamber able to kill the determination on its own.
“Demand does not fall, it shifts to imports from countries with worse environmental standards,” Tehan said when the two motions were lodged, with the Shadow Minister for Energy and Emissions Reduction warning that the method would let any state cash in on forest closures it had already made while Australia faces a projected 43 per cent softwood supply gap by 2050. Tehan, the Liberal member for Wannon, has been Manager of Opposition Business in the House since Angus Taylor’s 17 February shadow ministry.
“I think it would be a betrayal of native forests if people who say they are for ending native forestry voted against that method,” Chris Bowen said, with the Minister for Climate Change and Energy putting the government’s case in an interview published on 22 August. Josh Wilson, the Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy, signed the determination on 25 June and it was registered the next day, open to new projects until 30 September 2036.
Rod Campbell, the Australia Institute’s research director, counted the park’s credits at 5 per cent of its running costs over the 100 years the method binds the state, in an analysis published on Friday, while Forestry Australia has found the method over-credits by 40 to 100 per cent and three signatories of a letter to the Commonwealth have given it until Tuesday 8 September to publish the modelling behind the method.
“I would imagine that the Greens would be beside themselves with dismay if the alternative method were ever to get up,” Ken Henry, chair of the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation, said on air on 27 August, attacking a second method forestry scientists are drafting to credit carbon while harvesting continues, the multiple-use approach Forestry Australia has pressed in two briefing notes this winter.
“If these rules are not overturned, Australia’s native timber industry will be lost forever,” Cadell said in the release he issued the day he lodged the motion. The Greens had not declared a position when six senior forest scientists, David Lindenmayer among them, asked them late last month not to vote with the Nationals.
