‘Nice forest you’ve got there. It’d be a shame if somebody messed with it.’
This isn’t a line from a mobster movie, it’s effectively what the NSW government is saying to the koalas and people of NSW.
The NSW government is proposing to make a Great Koala National Park to protect forests in the north east of the state. In fact, making the Park has been NSW Labor policy for more than a decade, but it has recently taken on a new twist.
The Minns government now says that the koala park will happen if, and only if, it can take the rights to the carbon in the trees to sell on the carbon market.
If this sounds dodgy, that’s because it is. The NSW Labor government first promised to make this national park as far back as 2015, without selling carbon offsets. They promised it again in 2023. Now they say they will need some protection money for those trees.
