The only reason a country needs to create more ‘carbon offsets’ is because it expects to fail to decarbonise. Which is why the Greens are about to face a decision that has less to do with technical detail and everything to do with who they are.
Tue 25 Aug 2026 11.39 AEST
Photo: AAP Image/David Wigley
Crossbench MPs and environmental groups have warned Australian taxpayers could be left exposed to billions of dollars in offshore oil and gas decommissioning costs unless Australia’s petroleum laws are urgently reformed.
A bitter battle over fracking is brewing in South Australia, with a consortium of community groups and councils imploring Premier Peter Malinauskas to abandon plans to lift a decade-long ban in the state’s South East two years early.
Here’s the thing about a carbon offset: it’s a confession. Whatever the paperwork calls it, an offset is a corporation saying we’re going to keep polluting, and we’re paying someone else for the permission slip.
That’s not a design flaw that better regulation could fix. It’s the actual design of the whole scheme. The only reason a country needs to create more ‘carbon offsets’ is because it expects to fail to decarbonise. Put another way, firms that are rapidly reducing their carbon pollution don’t need to buy any carbon offsets.
Which is why the Greens are about to face a decision, when Parliament votes on September 15 on whether to allow even more carbon offsets, that has less to do with technical detail and everything to do with who they are.
You would think it was a simple decision for a party that is focused on both climate science and listening to its members.
The NSW Greens Native forests policy, point 57, commits to “ensuring that the carbon value in existing forests cannot be traded to offset fossil fuel or other greenhouse gas intensive industries.”
Not regulated. Not capped. Cannot be traded.
The federal party has the same position in different words: its national forests policy promises to reform carbon accounting so that ending native forest logging “delivers real climate benefits, not loopholes for fossil fuel polluters.”
Two Green branches, one premise: a neoliberal pollution permit using public native forests to allow vested interests to keep polluting is unacceptable.
The Great Koala National Park is that loophole litmus test. The proposed ‘method’ for making even more carbon offsets would let the Commonwealth’s biggest polluters buy carbon credits generated by NSW state government inside the boundaries of this publicly owned park. The actual thing that point 57 of NSW Greens policy exists to prevent.
There are lots of problems with this proposed method – as the Koalas for Coal analysis demonstrates – including the fact that the park has been long promised, has already been funded in the NSW budget, and perhaps most significantly, if a bushfire burns down the trees, there is no way to ‘recapture’ the carbon the trees stored. But even leaving the law and science aside, the real test for The Greens is whether they still support an end to native forest logging as a standalone objective, or whether they now believe that forests should only be protected once a market decides they’re worth more as a carbon offset than as an ecosystem.
The vote on September 15 is a key test of whether the Greens are going to fully embrace Labor’s neoliberal approach of only protecting the parts of the environment that can ‘pay for themselves’, or whether they are going to stand up for all of the environment, not just the profitable bits.
Back in 2022, the Greens mocked Tanya Plibersek’s call for Australia to be home to the world’s Green Wall Street, but it seems under Larissa Waters, they might be looking to invest in the extension of competitive free market capitalism into all areas of life, even a threatened species’ last habitat. It’s the exact ideology the Greens were founded to oppose.
Minister Chris Bowen has said the quiet part out loud, describing the scheme as a market like any other, one the government helped design, but a market, nonetheless.
His comments to The Saturday Paper that “some people think you can regulate absolutely everything…and that a properly designed market mechanism has a role because Australia is a capitalist economy” are clear. This is a government-initiated public native forest market for Safeguard Mechanism credits and ACCUs (Australian Carbon Credit Units), and an offset is a plan for more emissions, laundered through forest protection that was already promised and budgeted for since 2015.
Sophie Scamps has called the Koala Park plan one of the biggest greenwashing hoaxes Australia has seen.
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The NSW government has tried to give itself cover by promising to ban coal and gas companies from acquiring carbon offsets from these public forests; an admission that the offset premise never worked in the first place. But it can’t enforce that promise; the Safeguard Mechanism is a federal scheme, and nothing stops a buyer reselling Koala Park credits on to a coal or gas plant anywhere in Australia, regardless of what NSW intends.
Functionally, the Minns Principle is an appeal to Canberra, and to NSW voters, dressed up as a state announcement.
The Koala Park is the opening move. The National Parks Association of NSW has proposed the Great Southern Forest National Park as an addition to the carbon offset pool for big polluters, with a proposal for 365,000 hectares to be added to the state park system to be used as carbon trading chips.
It doesn’t stop in NSW.
Tasmania is next, and the finance sector isn’t waiting to be asked. On day one of the MONA’s Forest Economic Congress in 2023, Macquarie Bank explicitly linked ending native forest logging to carbon offset markets, pitching standing forests as a revenue stream.
It’s important to notice who’s pitching it, and that taxpayers already prop up the state’s native forest logging industry to the tune of $8 million a year. Sustainable Timber Tasmania, the state government’s logging Government Business Enterprise, has received ongoing government funding for an unviable industry for decades. Why this cannot fund forest protection is the key question. A global bank doesn’t need to be involved and does not attend a forest congress for love of rainforests or Tasmanian devils.
Whatever offsetting could raise to let vested interests keep polluting isn’t significant against a state budget. What is significant is the cost already carried by the public purse: the hardwood division of NSW Forestry Corporation lost $32 million in 2024-25, on top of losses every year for the past decade. Ending native forest logging removes that cost outright, no carbon offset market required.
Protecting forests has always been a political choice, just as protecting the Franklin River was, and pretending otherwise only helps the case for a carbon offset market that enables more pollution.
There is a potential promise in the silence from the federal Greens leader’s office in the lead-up to the September 15 Senate vote. It’s possible the party is playing a longer game, holding its fire publicly while it works the numbers in the Senate, betting that a quiet, harder line now buys a better outcome later, real protection without handing public forests over to big polluters. Because why would they give away these public native forests to big polluting corporations for free?
Silence isn’t automatically surrender. A party founded on the fight for the Franklin and Tasmania’s wild places has earned the benefit of the doubt that it isn’t about to give our forests away for free to vested interests whose business models depend on increasing pollution.
But the longer that silence runs without a clear public position, the harder it is to tell negotiation strategy from capitulation to capitalism. Vote to stop big polluters privatising public forests as carbon trading chips, and everyone who has campaigned on fossil fuels, climate and forests understands the party kept its word. Vote to allow neoliberal capitalism to monetise public forests for big polluters, and the outcome is a park now and more pollution permits for 100 years, and exacerbating dangerous climate and connected biodiversity crisis, the exact neoliberal market logic the Greens were built to oppose.
Public forests were never meant to need a corporate buyer to survive. That’s not radical. It’s the Greens’ own longstanding policy position.
September 15, 2026, will be the day we find out whether the silence was a confident negotiation strategy or surrender.
Louise Morris is Head of Fossil Fuel Transition at the Australia Institute, with 20 years’ experience encompassing climate, energy, forest protection, and law reform in the not-for-profit sector, and federal politics.
