A former chair of the body overseeing integrity of Australia's carbon-credit scheme has called for the agency responsible for its administration to be broken up and data on a billion dollars worth of purchases to be made public.
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Following the publication of a series of papers outlining systemic flaws in Australia's Emissions Reduction Fund, the Australian National University's Professor Andrew Macintosh has called for the appointment of an independent body to decide who buys credits.
"I can't think, in my entire professional career, of an agency more conflicted than the Clean Energy Regulator," Professor Macintosh said.
"It develops the rules that govern the scheme, it staffs the integrity committee which is meant to sign off on the rules, it enforces the rules and then it buys credit on behalf of the government.
"That should be separated and given to something else. The obvious thing to do is to give it to the Climate Change Authority."
Among the findings of a study co-authored by Professor Macintosh was that carbon-credit was provided to companies for regrowing native forests, despite planting happening in locations never cleared.
"What is occurring is a fraud on the environment, a fraud on taxpayers and a fraud on unwitting private buyers," Professor Macintosh said.
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Greens Leader Adam Bandt has since referred the allegations to the Auditor General, calling for an independent inquiry.
"When the former head of the government's Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee reveals that the carbon-credits scheme is 'largely a scam', we need an open transparent inquiry with powers to get to the bottom of it," Mr Bandt said in a statement.
Having chaired the fund's integrity commission for more than six years, Professor Macintosh said the scheme was built on a series of mistakes.
"They weren't jumped on, people tried to sweep them under the carpet, and they compounded and they got worse and worse and things got more and more absurd. And no one wanted to fess up to it," he said.
"I think there's a fear amongst many bureaucrats and others involved that if you admit any weakness, if you admit mistakes are made, that the thing is going to escalate and people are going to throw rocks and say you got to tear down the whole thing."
Professor Macintosh said it no longer looked to be just human error, it appeared to be a deliberate decision to lower the integrity bar to facilitate the issuance of credits.
Professor Macintosh said $1 billion had already been spent on purchasing carbon credits and contracts to purchase a further $1.6 billion had already been signed.
"The evidence suggests that they spent a billion dollars on buying nothing," Professor Macintosh said.