27/06/2026
The Great Carbon Credit Rort Has Begun
One of the greatest public policy failures in Australian forestry has just taken another giant leap forward.
The Albanese Government has approved a carbon credit methodology that will allow state governments to earn Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs) by permanently ending native forest harvesting and converting state forests into national parks.
NSW is first in line through the proposed Great Koala National Park. However, don't be fooled by the language. This is not about "improved native forest management." It is about paying governments to stop managing forests as productive public assets and rewarding them with taxpayer-backed carbon credits for locking them up.
That creates an extraordinary conflict of interest. Governments now have a direct financial incentive to close industries, remove multiple-use forest management and convert public forests into carbon-generating assets.
If that sounds absurd, it is because taxpayers will pay for this failure twice. The public already owns these forests. We have invested generations of public money in roads, fire trails, research, silviculture, regeneration, fire management and sustainable harvesting systems.
Then taxpayers are expected to finance the transition through carbon credits that governments can sell into the ACCU market. This is a taxpayer-funded wealth transfer not environmental reform and it certainly isn't climate policy.
In return, the public loses a renewable resource, regional communities lose jobs, sawmills lose resource security and Australia loses domestic timber production.
The approved methodology falls short on several fundamental principles, including additionality, leakage and its limited capacity to generate genuine carbon outcomes.
Australian forests do not protect themselves simply because governments declare them protected. Australia is the most fire-prone continent on Earth. Carbon stored in forests is only secure if forests remain healthy, resilient and actively managed.
Without active fuel management, ecological thinning, regeneration, pest control and adaptive management, forests accumulate fuel, become increasingly vulnerable to severe bushfires and place the very carbon store at greater risk. Locking forests up does not make those risks disappear, it just magnifies them.
Perhaps the greatest weakness in the scheme is leakage. Stopping sustainable timber harvesting does not stop Australians needing timber. We continue to build homes, buy flooring, furniture, poles, packaging and countless other timber products and transport goods on wooden pallets.
If Australian timber production declines, someone else supplies the timber via imports shifting harvesting elsewhere with poorer environmental controls.
The irony is breathtaking. The Government claims this is a climate solution while accepting that timber production will simply move somewhere else. What we are seeing is a brazen shift of carbon accounting that replaces science.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect is the philosophy behind the scheme. For decades Australia managed state forests as multiple-use landscapes producing renewable timber, providing recreational opportunities, protecting biodiversity, supplying water, storing carbon and reducing bushfire risk through active management.
Now the forest is valued exclusively through one lens — carbon accounting. Everything else becomes secondary as forest management becomes subordinate to accounting rules. Instead of sustainable ecological management, we will get financial engineering.
The Great Koala National Park is only the beginning. Once governments realise they can generate millions of dollars by converting state forests into carbon projects, why would they stop? Every remaining native forest becomes a potential carbon asset, every forestry operation becomes a candidate for closure and every regional timber town becomes expendable.
And taxpayers bear the burden. Businesses will be forced to purchase ACCUs under the Safeguard Mechanism. Consumers will pay higher prices for timber and regional communities that lose productive industries. But more importantly, future generations will inherit forests with growing fuel loads and increasing bushfire risks. Meanwhile governments congratulate themselves for creating invisible "green jobs" funded by closing existing jobs.
Australia deserves genuine forest policy built on science, transparency and active land stewardship. Instead, we are being offered an accounting exercise that rewards governments for locking up forests, weakens regional economies, increases reliance on imported timber and expects taxpayers to foot the bill.
If this methodology becomes the template for the rest of Australia, it will go down as one of the most damaging forestry policies in our nation's history simply becasue it monetises their closure and susceptibilty to benign neglect.
