NSW Greens senator urges federal peers to reject Nationals' bid to scrap koala park carbon credit scheme

Sue Higginson, a NSW Greens upper-house member and former forest campaigner, has publicly urged her federal Greens colleagues to vote against a disallowance motion introduced by the Nationals, which seeks to overturn a carbon-credit method that would fund a new koala national park in NSW. The method allows state governments to earn credits by protecting native forests on public land, a scheme the Nationals argue benefits the forestry industry and therefore want to eliminate.

A Senate vote is slated for next week, with the Coalition and One Nation expected to back the Nationals. Greens senators will meet to decide whether to oppose the motion, weighing the risk of being seen as blocking nature protection against the desire to reject a flawed offset system. Environmental groups such as the Bob Brown Foundation, Wilderness Society, WWF and Greenpeace contend the park would protect 176,000 hectares and over 100 threatened species, while industry advocates warn a replacement scheme would lock in more logging and produce lower-integrity credits. Higginson, who previously opposed the method, now argues that dismantling it would do more harm than reform, and she has the backing of independents like David Pocock and former Green Lidia Thorpe.