Today in Parliament, Abigail welcomed the Great Koala National Park as a hard-won victory for decades of campaigners, while vehemently condemning the Minns Labor Government for delaying it and for tying its protection to the sale of carbon credits under a flawed methodology.
Abigail said:
I contribute to debate on the National Park Estate (Great Koala National Park Reservations) Bill 2026. Firstly, I echo the thanks and appreciation already so ably conferred by my colleagues Ms Sue Higginson and Ms Cate Faehrmann—both of whom have had a long history with the campaign for this Great Koala National Park—to all of the countless climate, ecology and forest campaigners, both within and outside Parliament, who have advocated and fought over decades for the formation of a Great Koala National Park. As my colleague alluded to just now, for some of us, including me, this is a truly bittersweet moment.
When the bill is passed later today—or perhaps some time tomorrow—it will be a moment for celebration, but for me it will also be a time of grieving. I grieve for the forest destruction that has been allowed to occur in the time that people have been calling for this action. I grieve for the forest destruction that has occurred since Labor, in opposition, joined The Greens in adopting as its policy the declaration of the Great Koala National Park. I grieve for the forest destruction that has occurred and escalated every single day since this Government came to power, dangling the declaration over the heads of communities and activists desperate and distraught at the ecological devastation being perpetrated before their eyes. That it took until today, with only four days of Government business remaining for this entire parliamentary term, for the bill to even arrive in this Chamber is a damning indictment on the Minns Labor Government and its Ministers.
I also grieve for the people and animals of this planet, both current and future generations, who will pay the cruel price of the climate vandalism being perpetrated by this Government. It has added to its sad and sorry rap sheet of a litany of climate-destroying decisions by making the park contingent on the Government's ability to create and sell carbon credits to polluting industries, based on the utterly falsified and unmeritorious claim that the reservation represents genuine additional avoided deforestation. NSW Labor first promised to establish the Great Koala National Park in 2015 and promised to do so again in early 2023. That election promise was not contingent on the registration of a carbon offsets project. Subsequent policy announcements by the Minns Labor Government in late 2023 likewise did not indicate any such contingency.
That all started to change, however, once Labor came to power and started work on developing what is now called the improved native forest management method, a carbon crediting methodology that was ultimately adopted by the Commonwealth Government under its Australia Carbon Credit Unit Scheme in June this year. That methodology is profoundly and fundamentally flawed and will only serve as a net negative when it comes to action on climate change. First, the method will allow abatement projects, like the Great Koala National Park, that are not genuinely additional to what would have occurred in the ordinary course of events. The method substitutes the two relevant default additionality requirements under the Act with a new additionality requirement and simultaneously exempts States from the new requirement in circumstances that are tailored precisely to the New South Wales Great Koala National Park. As the Koalas for Coal working paper so aptly states:
The regulatory reverse-engineering entailed in this exemption makes a mockery of the additionality criterion, which is foundational to any attempt to demonstrate carbon credit integrity …
Regulatory reverse engineering is quite simply par for the course with Labor governments, perhaps most recently and devastatingly encapsulated by the Minns Labor Government's plans to directly overwrite the ruling of a landmark High Court decision and write bespoke legislation permitting the Mount Pleasant coalmine to increase its coal production by 32 per cent. Premier Chris Minns has been clear that his intention and that of the Government is to go against the ruling of the High Court and authorise MACH Energy to increase the annual coal output at its Mount Pleasant coalmine by four megatonnes to 16.5 megatonnes per year until 2032. These are the climate credentials of this reckless, feckless and hopelessly captured Labor Government. Like government, like carbon credit methodology, they are entirely without credibility or integrity when it comes to the urgent action required to do our part to prevent the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.
This week the United Nations Environment Programme announced that the world needs to cut carbon emissions by nearly one-fifth in the next four years and by close to half within a decade to avoid overshooting climate targets by a disastrous margin. Although the window has closed on holding temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius, in line with scientific advice, limiting the overshoot of that target is still possible, according to the latest United Nations report. But that would require cutting greenhouse gases by 18 per cent by 2030 and by 45 per cent by 2035 to yield a good chance of limiting temperature rises to 1.7 degrees Celsius above pre‑industrial levels. That would still allow events such as the record heatwaves and climate devastation and disasters of the last few months to become frequent and common but could help prevent them from getting drastically worse.
The executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, Inger Andersen, has condemned governments such as this one and the ones that preceded it for their failure to act despite being warned for years that time was running out. She said that the United Nations used to say there was still an opportunity if the world made a herculean effort to stay within the 1.5 degrees Celsius limit. She also stated:
It's now clear the herculean effort was not made. We procrastinated, and now we are saying this window has closed.
Nevertheless, she has urged countries to keep the 1.5 degrees Celsius goal—the centrepiece of the Paris climate agreement—stating:
We can make the overshoot as brief and as short as possible. It's not time to throw in the towel and give up. This is about how to find our way back, as shortly and quickly as possible.
Allowing the carbon stored temporarily in the trees supporting the existence of our precious koala population to be monetised through the creation of carbon offsets that will make it easier for heavy climate polluters to cause more of the climate pollution that is burning down those same trees and devastating ecological communities is not finding our way back. It is an active choice to forge deeper into a terrifyingly dangerous and unpredictable climate future. A carbon credit is supposed to represent the equivalent of one tonne of avoided carbon dioxide equivalent that would otherwise have been released into the atmosphere. If carbon credits are generated from the Great Koala National Park, it is estimated it will create about 3.7 million carbon credits. Once sold, they will allow 3.7 million tonnes of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere while purporting to be carbon neutral. That is a farce.
For the Labor Government to make the protection of the park contingent on that level of climate destruction is unconscionable, and it sets a terrible precedent. Why would any government beset with the same rotten neoliberal ideological mindset as this one elect to do any other climate mitigation measure at all unless and until it can identify a method, or create a new one, that will enable it to generate financially valuable carbon credits via the Federal Government's Australian carbon credit units scheme? The commodification of nature will be utterly complete, and, with it, its death sentence surely written. Neoliberal economic ideology that seeks to commodify nature is at the root of that destruction and harm. Let the uprisings in France be a warning to this Government and all who seek to form government. Student protests over education underfunding and racialisation soon developed into a national mobilisation on 6 October, involving half a million students, teachers, parents and trade unions taking to the streets in protest against the French Government's campaign of austerity and repression.
A key complaint of the student protest was excessively high temperatures in classrooms, which exceeded 40 degrees Celsius with no air conditioning or adequate ventilation during the 2026 European heatwaves that were turbocharged by climate change. Professional firefighters joined the national protests in large numbers, saying that a lack of firefighting resources was laid bare during the summer's huge wildfires. Years of funding cuts have left schools crumbling, but those exceptional temperatures provided the spark. The demand for more school funding is also a demand for climate adaptation. The national mobilisation that has risen up is a rejection of the deeply flawed and failing leadership of neoliberalism's final boss, French President Emmanuel Macron.
Terrifyingly, but in keeping with historical precedent, the failures of economic liberalism breed fascism, providing legitimacy to capitalist dictatorship and the unbridled power of capital. In France, fascist candidate Marine Le Pen threatens to win the upcoming presidential elections. That prospect should serve as a dire warning to the Labor Government, which is pursuing a similarly flawed, austerity-ridden neoliberal agenda, with right-wing reactionaries breathing down its neck. It is the wrong way. Go back. The people demand climate and economic justice. They demand ecological restoration and care, and a rejection of the dehumanisation of capitalist excess. I say this in good faith and in the hope of a better outcome and a better future: It is not too late to sever the link between the Great Koala National Park and the carbon credit unit production industry.
I rejoice in the creation of the Great Koala National Park. I am in awe of and eternal gratitude to the brave environmental and forest defenders who have dedicated their lives, sweat and passion towards its creation. I take immense pride in being a very small part of that movement of people who have taken the beautiful idea of nature preservation forward from imagination to what will soon be reality. I am endlessly inspired by the ability of people to come together in selfless defence of nature and one another to organise for and deliver real change in this world. There is truly no greater force on earth than the collective will of good people working together in common cause. Here is to many more victories for the people. I proudly join my colleagues in supporting the bill.
Read the debate in Hansard here.
22 October 2026