Greens weigh blocking NSW koala park over carbon credits — SkimNews
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- Greens are considering an extraordinary move — supporting a Nationals motion to strike down Labor's koala national park plan — with the Senate vote delayed until next month after the party asked for more time to reach a consensus position.
- NSW Labor announced in September 2025 it would add 176,000 hectares of state forest to existing protected areas to create a 476,000-hectare reserve, protecting about 12,000 koalas along with water catchments and carbon stores.
- Albanese government approved the NSW proposal in June, allowing the park to generate carbon credits worth hundreds of millions of dollars — a funding mechanism critics say fails the "additionality" test because NSW Labor first promised a koala park in 2015.
- Bob Brown, Christine Milne and the Australia Institute argue taxpayers, not carbon credits, should fund the end of native forestry, and that credits let the country's 200 biggest polluters buy cheap, dubious emissions cuts under the safeguard mechanism.
- NSW forest campaigners, First Nations groups and ecologist Prof David Lindenmayer counter that the project goes well beyond Labor's 2023 election commitment, now capping logging across NSW's public and private native forests well below the past decade's average — a change they say could rapidly accelerate the industry's decline.
- Carbon credits from the koala park would represent less than 1% of total credits issued annually across Australia, meaning the broader safeguard mechanism fight cannot be won by blocking this single project.
- NSW Greens MP Sue Higginson has warned things could get "worse, not better" if the carbon credits plan is disallowed; a possible compromise would legislate that credits from protecting forests could only be bought by industries not involved in fossil fuel extraction.
Why it matters: If the Greens block the park, they hand the Nationals a political victory and forfeit a decade of campaigning — but leave Labor's broader carbon credit scheme, which scientists say undermines real emissions cuts, unchallenged. The compromise path (restricting who can buy the credits) would test whether Australia can police climate policy through Senate deal-making rather than principled opposition. Either outcome reshapes who counts as a "winner" in environmental politics.
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