‘Soil magic’ may be the biggest rort of all — who could have guessed?

Professor Andrew Macintosh’s brave decision to go public with the fact that up to 80% of carbon credits issued in Australia have little or no integrity has confirmed another colossal Coalition rort — one of extraordinary scale. This is a major story not just about environmental integrity processes but pork-barrelling and rorting.

With $1 billion already wasted and billions more in the pipeline, the Clean Energy Regulator has been overseeing the Coalition’s Emissions Reduction Fund (ERF), with advice from the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee, which ANU’s Macintosh has chaired.

The ERF began life as Greg Hunt’s delusional “soil magic” program (Guardian Australia editor Lenore Taylor crafted that inspired description), devised as a fig leaf for Tony Abbott’s rejection of a carbon price, all the way back in 2010 — despite the Coalition explicitly rejecting the idea of such a fund.