NSW Greens MP and spokesperson for the environment and climate change Sue Higginson has called on the Australian Greens and Greens senators to vote against a motion by the Nationals that would cause the NSW Labor government to continue logging native forests in the Great Koala National Park.
Sue Higginson MLC has been a frontline forest defender, locking on to bulldozers to protect the forests that became National Parks, and has taken the biggest climate polluters in Australia, including BHP, Adani and Rio Tinto, to court and won in her work as a public interest environment lawyer.
This morning she said, ‘The use of forests as carbon offset bank for climate polluters is deeply offensive to me, and I utterly reject that the protection of any forest should be contingent on carbon credits, but this isn’t the question that’s been put in front of the Greens to decide.
‘Initially, I publicly opposed NSW Labor’s plan for carbon credits from forests, and my work helped to deliver thousands of submissions to the draft method that have ultimately made the final method better.
‘The final method, that the Nationals and One Nation want to shut down because it could end the native forest logging industry, will now create significant forest benefits across all of NSW.
‘The most respected legal, ecological, and economic leaders in the environment movement recognise that this method is high integrity and will permanently protect forests.’
‘Not the hill to die on’
Sue Higginson went on to say, ‘I do not support this method, but if it’s removed then we know an alternate method already developed by the native forest logging industry will be put forward, and it will mean that the logging continues and carbon credits will be generated from forests anyway.
‘The Greens will keep fighting to end native forest logging no matter the outcome of this decision, and we will keep opposing the low integrity and fraudulent carbon credit schemes that are flooding the market with credits that do not offset any climate pollution whatsoever.
‘This was not an easy decision to make, but I know that the priority of protecting forests right now has to come first, because that’s the choice we have. The fight to destroy the scam carbon credit market must go on, but I cannot and will not accept that we have to lose our forests in order to have that fight,’ Ms Higginson said.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
