I skipped school to strike for climate action, but now I’d vote against protecting the forest

Cheek’s Digital Content Producer, Varsha Yajman, unpacks how Labor’s Great Koala National Park is wedging environmentalists - and why the carbon credits scheme proposed to fund the project might actually do more harm than the deforestation it’s supposed to combat.

In 2019, I was one of the organisers of the national climate strike - skipping days of school to call for climate action alongside 350,000 people.

Today, I don’t want to protect the forest.

How did I get here?

I spent most of Year 12 lying to my mum.

Time and time again I told her “I’m heading into my room to study”, when really I was about to jump onto a Zoom meeting with high schools across Australia, slowly building and mobilising climate strikes. That was seven years ago.

Now at 24, I have no interest in NSW Labor’s proposal to build the Great Koala National Park (GKNP).

No, it is not because the “real world” made me realise that all that matters is money, like I was told so many times as a teenager. Instead, it’s because the Labor Government has lied to us about it.

The lore behind the Great Koala National Park spans more than a decade. It was first promised by the NSW Labor party in 2015, led by Luke Foley at the time.

“How can we call ourselves a civilised society if we stand by and watch the slow loss of the iconic koala in Northern NSW?”, Foley asked.

He went on, “I want to lead the nation, by creating in NSW national parks explicitly to protect our remaining koala populations.”

Since then, NSW Labor has made this promise at every election.

But when they were elected in 2023, they put off the promise, with the NSW government cutting down over 10,000 football fields of forests in the area of the promised GKNP instead of protecting this land.

As Caitlin Fitzsimmons and Janie Barrett stated in the Sydney Morning Herald, “Throughout 2025, any time [NSW Environment Minister Penny] Sharpe was asked when she would deliver the Great Koala National Park, her response was the same: “Soon.””

It was only in September last year that the NSW Labor Government released its formal proposal for the GKNP. The plan was accompanied by a temporary pause on logging in state forests earmarked for protection as well as a plan to support workers, industry and local communities.

This announcement sparked excitement and, most importantly, hope that climate action was being taken seriously.

Then things took a turn last month, when Premier Chris Minns said the promise to establish the GKNP depended on funding from carbon credits.

Okay - so who cares how it’s funded? At least the government is doing something? Right?

That’s the argument many are putting forward. But the reality is, carbon credits are a permit for governments and companies to keep polluting, fuelling fires that are killing the very koalas Minns claims he wants to protect.

Projects that “earn” credits, known as Australian Carbon Credit Units (ACCUs), store carbon by planting trees or restoring soil, or stop emissions through building solar farms, capturing landfill gas.

The claim is that buying one credit equals avoiding or removing one metric tonne of carbon dioxide emissions.

But this claim has been widely disputed, with experts noting three key issues with carbon credits. The first, additionality, is whether projects like the GKNP would’ve been built regardless of a carbon credit being purchased. This means that no carbon dioxide is actually “removed” or “avoided”.

The second issue experts note is that trees and soil only temporarily store carbon, raising concerns about permeability and permanence, as the polluting emissions of fossil fuel companies can never truly be “removed” or “avoided”.

Finally, experts have accused the regulatory authority of allowing many carbon credit projects to inflate impact estimates, where the project stores much less carbon than it claims.So billion-dollar companies, governments, and organisations can buy an unlimited number of credits and continue polluting.

In the case of the GKNP, the NSW Government has barred fossil fuel companies from purchasing carbon credits; however, regardless of who can purchase them (such as aluminium or steel companies), additionality remains a key concern.

As noted by The Australia Institute’s Research Director, Rod Campbell, in The Point, since its first budget in 2023, the NSW Government has publicly stated the allocations to the GKNP, meaning purchasing carbon credits would not actually be funding a new project.

In its Budget Papers, the government “committed $80 million... to support the development of the Great Koala National Park.”

On an existing website, the government committed $60 million “for the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service to support the establishment of the park.”

From its most recent budget papers, the government points to a special appropriation of $140.5 million that “has largely been related to the Great Koala National Park.”

Additionally, as Campbell noted, the papers also point to funding “to compensate Forestry Corporation NSW for not being able to log this area.”

As co-CEO of The Australia Institute, Richard Denniss, said, companies and governments buying carbon credits in the name of protecting nature is like smoking a pack of cigarettes a day and then going on a long walk in the name of health.

Whether the GKNP is built depends on whether the federal government approves the Improved Native Forest Management Method (INFM).

The INFM would allow states like NSW to earn carbon credits by stopping planned harvesting in public native forest areas that would otherwise be used for commercial forestry.

The Nationals have a plan to block the INFM method - and the Greens are considering voting with them.

This is something we don’t see happening very often at all: two parties on different parts of the political spectrum coming together on an issue, but for very different reasons.

The main driver of the Nationals’ plan is the claim that stopping native forest logging costs regional industries and threatens thousands of jobs. However, this is a claim that has been repeatedly disproven, with conservation biologist and landscape ecologist David Lindenmayer calling “the claims about job losses through the new method” a “trope from the industry”” in an interview with The Saturday Paper. “The reality is that the industry does not employ many people, and it hasn’t for years,” he added.

Meanwhile, the Greens are divided; their differing opinions delayed the Senate vote on the plan from August 18 to September 15. They are pushing to vote with the Nationals against the INMF because of the environmental concerns outlined above. However, some of their key stakeholders, such as the conservation group, the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation, are arguing that voting with the Nationals would drive further native logging “whilst torpedoing the most rigorous and high-integrity carbon proposal that has ever been placed before the Australian parliament”.

I understand the concerns around native logging, but the evidence shows these carbon credits are not high integrity and, in fact, are a permit to pollute. For me, it comes down to this: the Minns government is blackmailing us.

The funds are there, have been there, so now the NSW Labor government must follow through on its decade-long promise.

And we know that Australians want to protect koalas.

According to polling by The Australia Institute, more than 80 per cent of Australians overwhelmingly say that governments have an obligation to protect koala habitats, with only 3% thinking governments have this obligation only if they are paid to do so.

A majority of Australians support the Minns Government’s decision to ban coal and gas companies from buying carbon offsets from the GKNP, and agree that protecting forests should not be used to justify continued fossil fuel pollution.

I do not expect “perfection” from the government; in fact, the bar is a bit low for that given the lacklustre climate action we have seen in recent decades. Since December 2015, the NSW government has approved 23 coal and gas projects, allowing for approximately 3.2 billion tonnes of future emissions.

And that is why it feels so clear to me that this is blackmail: instead of facing backlash for approving another project that will fuel fires, the Minns government can just permit polluters to pollute in the name of funding koala conservation.

I did not skip school to fight for million dollar companies to keep polluting. My peers and I, and generations of activists long before us have spent too long fighting to simply fall to the behest of shoddy schemes.

​Varsha Yajman is the Digital Content Producer at Cheek Media. She is a youth advocate and lawyer with a background in climate litigation and is passionate about looking at the intersection between race, climate justice, and mental health.