The proposed park ends native forest logging on the land and creates a vast sanctuary for koalas and 66 other threatened species.

But it’s always best to read the fine print and understand the Ts&Cs. In this case, they reveal a diabolical trade off.

The native forest will only be saved from logging if the government can monetise it as “carbon credits”.

“The final creation of the park is dependent on the successful registration of a carbon project,” the government makes abundantly clear.

It wants the Clean Energy Regulator to let it generate carbon credits, it seems, from a national park – an unprecedented step. If it can’t, the government says the vast koala sanctuary on the state’s mid north coast won’t go ahead.

Why is this demand a worry?

The NSW plan would only protect forests if they were monetised in ways that support continued carbon emissions.

Carbon credits are a license to pollute. If the NSW government is allowed to generate carbon credits from native forests earmarked for the great koala park, the most likely buyers would be big greenhouse gas emitters.

Under Australian law, these businesses can keep extracting and burning fossil fuels provided they “offset” their emissions by buying Australian Carbon Credit Units or ACCUs.

That’s how Woodside justifies its plans to open up new gas fields and process export gas on the North West Shelf until at least 2070 – with federal government approval.

Yet for years, climate scientists and the International Energy Agency have said that if we hope to avoid devastating global heating, there must be no new fossil fuel projects allowed.

Under the new plan, native forests would become a vehicle for continued or expanded use of the fossil fuels that cause the climate change that threatens the forests’ very survival – and the survival of the koalas and other endangered plants and animals within them. Irony of ironies.

Even if the proposed credits weren’t directly sold to fossil-fuel companies, they would add volume to the market, potentially affecting prices and making it more attractive to “offset” than do the harder work of actually cutting emissions.

To make matters worse, the idea that we can use existing forests to offset additional carbon emissions is all wrong. As leading scientists have made clear, such carbon sinks are drawing down greenhouse gas emissions associated with past activity, and cannot be relied on to also neutralise future emissions.

The implications extend beyond one state.

The carbon credits method NSW has put to the regulator makes clear that it could also be used in Tasmania and Queensland – other states that are yet to ban native forest logging on public land.

Victoria and Western Australia chose to end native forest logging without resorting to carbon credits, while funding transition packages for people affected in the industry. If NSW gets its way, we may never see this happen again. And we might not see another national park created unless a government can milk it for carbon credits revenue.

There are plenty of ways NSW could fund a just transition for timber industry workers affected without relying on carbon credit income – such as increasing coal royalties and poker machine taxes.

Ask yourself which path delivers the better outcome for the planet: to end native forest logging, as some states have done, or to do so only if the carbon in the forests can be sold to allow continued climate pollution?