Factcheck: Is selling offsets for the Great Koala National Park a “common sense” approach?

In an interview with ABC released on Tuesday, Federal Minister for Climate Change and Energy, Chris Bowen, suggested that criticisms of the NSW Government’s plans to sell additional carbon offset credits in return for the Great Koala National Park represent:

A really dogmatic approach getting in the way of a common-sense approach which creates an income stream to help a community make the transition to provide new jobs.

Is Bowen right?

Labor’s vision for a Great Koala National Park started in 2015, when then-leader Luke Foley promised a “clear plan” to protect koalas within an initial 315,000 ha area in northern NSW during an ultimately unsuccessful election campaign. At the time, the primary focus was protecting koalas. Subsequent prospective Labor Governments reaffirmed the promise in election campaigns in 2019 and 2023, with koala conservation again at the heart of the issue.

The Great Koala National Park (GKNP) has been promised for over a decade, with  $80 million already allocated to bring the plans to life in the 2023-24 state budget. But it wasn’t until September 2025 that the Park became “dependent” on the selling of offsets for its creation.

In short, carbon credits are ‘tokens’ generated by reducing the amount of CO2 polluting the atmosphere, either through storing it, such as planting new trees, or by simply not emitting pollution in the first place, such as making heavy industry more efficient. Polluters can purchase credits if they are unable to meet their emissions targets as a way of ‘offsetting’ their own environmental shortcomings, with the premise being that paying for new trees to be planted, or not cutting down additional trees, results in a 1:1, zero-sum situation for CO2 emissions.

The logic behind offsetting is controversial, but in the case of the GKNP, and its newfound dependence on carbon credits, the problem arises from additionality.

Given that $80 million for the park has already been set aside, its boundaries drawn, and stakeholders surveyed, it is fair to say that until this pivot from the NSW Government, the Park was going to be created. The whole point of carbon credits is to sequester additional CO2 which was not going to be accounted for otherwise. If there was a proposal to further expand the proposed boundaries of the GKNP, and the only way to do that was by raising funds through selling carbon credits, it would make sense using the logic of offsetting, because this would be native forest that was not already going to be protected. As it stands, NSW Labor’s plans don’t hold up when using the environmental logic behind creating offsets.

So, is selling offsets in exchange for the GKNP a “common-sense approach”, as Bowen puts it?

Verdict: Not true

If the reason for creating the Park was to protect koalas, common-sense has little to do with it. The GKNP was on course to do that before the proposition to wed it to carbon credits.

In both the government’s own explainer on why we need the GKNP, and Premier Minns’ initial statement on the Park, there is no mention of any “income streams”,  so why are they now a metric for the success of the Park?

Recent polling from the Australia Institute shows that 82% of Australians think governments have an obligation to protect koala habitats, but just 3% believe they are obligated only if they are paid to do so.

The NSW Government can deliver a National Park (that it has already budgeted for) without first selling harmful carbon emission credits to polluters if it chooses to.