On Tuesday, Bob Brown told ABC’s 730 that the NSW Government’s plan to make the creation of the Great Koala National Park dependent on being able to sell carbon credits “a scam”. And Bob Brown is right, these credits do not represent actual carbon abatement.
Thu 27 Aug 2026 01.00 AEST
Photo: AAP Image/David Wigley
Environmental groups are launching a coordinated push to make native forest protection a national political issue, arguing communities can no longer be left to fight logging and clearing “one forest at a time”.
A new working paper released today has found the Federal Parliament should disallow a controversial new method for making carbon credits. The paper, by University College London Associate Professor Fergus Green, examines the New South Wales Government's proposal to sell carbon credits in return for creating the Great Koala National Park.
On Tuesday, Bob Brown told ABC’s 730 that the NSW Government’s plan to make the creation of the Great Koala National Park dependent on being able to sell carbon credits “a scam”.
You know Jacob, we’ve got over 600 national parks in Australia, and they’ve all been protected because of their natural values. Now we’re getting Labor introducing a monetary factor, you can’t have a national park unless you pay money to polluters or to somebody else or for some other reason. It’s wrong, it’s not part of our history, and it should be stood up to.
There’s no way we can guarantee that those forests are going to be protected for the next 100 years, let alone the next thousand years, so, they’re a scam. The only way to protect nature is to protect it.
Is that true? Are carbon credits for the Great Koala National Park a scam?
Carbon credits are a kind of token generated by reducing the amount of CO2 polluting the atmosphere – also known as “carbon abatement”. Generally, that’s done either by storing it, such as growing trees, or not creating it in the first place, such as making a coal plant more efficient or not chopping down trees. In Australia, these are aptly named “Australian Carbon Credit Units”, or ACCUs.
In theory, each ACCU represents one tonne of CO2 that would have been released into the atmosphere, but has not been because of a certain project, such as growing trees or using more energy-efficient technology.
Carbon credits are designed to encourage carbon abatement by giving it a dollar value, and to allow highly polluting industries to pay to “offset” their emissions with carbon credits. If they worked perfectly, slowly reducing the number of carbon credits available could simplify reaching Australia’s climate targets.
Unfortunately, they don’t work perfectly – far from it. There are already significant problems with the way carbon credits work in Australia, with many methods of generating them likely representing significantly less than one tonne of abatement per credit because of issues with their integrity.
But the Great Koala National Park has introduced a new problem. The whole point of carbon credits lies in their “additionality”.
Say someone is planning on planting a new grove of trees, enough that they’d reduce CO2 emissions by a tonne. Without carbon credits, that’s exactly what happens. But if they’re given a carbon credit for planting those trees, something they were doing anyway, that credit can be sold to someone else who can use it to “offset” a tonne of CO2 from burning coal – turning those new trees into a licence for extra pollution. That’s why carbon credits are designed to only pay for additional carbon abatement.
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In 2015, then-NSW Labor leader Luke Foley promised to establish a Great Koala National Park in Northern NSW, with no mention of carbon credits. While Labor lost that election, they made the same promise in 2019, and then again in 2023 when they won government under now-Premier Chris Minns. Carbon credits still weren’t mentioned. Neither did they come up when NSW unveiled its 2023-24 state budget, which committed $80 million to establish the park.
It took until September 2025, over ten years after Labor’s initial promise and after NSW had already surveyed the park area and locked in funding for it in the budget, for the creation of the park to become “dependent” on receiving carbon credits for doing so.
It’s no mystery why NSW Labor wants the credits – they could be worth over $1 billion to the state’s budget – but to call a park that’s been planned for ten years, surveyed and paid for as “additional” is a long stretch. And that means that the $1 billion in carbon credits represents extra pollution, rather than true offsetting of existing CO2. While NSW has promised not to sell the credits to fossil fuel companies, the planet doesn’t care where emissions come from – whether fossil fuels have offsets or not, they warm the planet.
Bob Brown is right, these credits do not represent actual carbon abatement.
Verdict: True
And there’s still a chance for this carbon credit scheme to be stopped.
To enable NSW’s plan, the Federal Government has approved a new carbon credit method, “Improved Native Forest Management”.
This new method isn’t limited to the Great Koala National Park, meaning NSW’s strategy could spread to other state governments and make them hesitant to approve national parks without carbon credits in return.
The Senate can vote to “disallow” that new method, which would stop the carbon credit plan in its tracks. The Nationals and Liberals are moving a motion to do just that, but the Greens – whose votes would be enough to pass the motion – are still deciding what to do.
Bob Brown had something to say about that, too:
I think the Greens will win more seats if they stand up to Chris Minns on this one. He made the promise for the Koala National Park, the Greens should take him on and make him keep that promise.
