The pay-to-clear switch: national approvals wired to an offset market with three projects and zero certificates

Three projects. Zero certificates. That is the entire supply side of the market the Commonwealth is about to wire into national environmental approvals.

Over the next twelve months the government intends to let developers discharge their obligation to make good destroyed habitat by buying units from this market, or by writing a cheque into a fund. This is the story of a demand switch being flicked on above an empty shelf, and of who profits from the gap.

01The entire market is three projects in New South Wales

Here is the market, in full. Three projects, all in New South Wales, registered under the Replanting Method. From them, and from everywhere else in the country, the number of biodiversity certificates ever issued is zero.

That is not a slow opening quarter. It is the whole national inventory of the Nature Repair Market, the Commonwealth scheme built to grow habitat that developers can buy to make good the habitat they clear. The market was legislated, the market opened, and almost nothing arrived.

Hold those two numbers. In the next twelve months the government intends to make this market a place where the right to destroy threatened habitat can be discharged. Three projects. No certificates. A national demand switch about to be flicked on above it.

Update, 9 September 2026. The Clean Energy Regulator's Biodiversity Market Register now lists two registered projects: Cooplacurripa (NR001014, registered 12 August 2025) and Karinya Downs (NR001018, registered 27 May 2026, a separate New South Wales parcel). Both still show certificate status Not issued. See The Rort's follow-up, 'Two paddocks and a deadline,' for the government's own commencement timeline and the restoration contribution channel.

Correction, 8 October 2026. The Clean Energy Regulator's Biodiversity Market Register, which read 'Last updated 2 October 2026' when we read it on 8 October, now lists three registered projects, not two. The third is the Nortongong Biodiversity Restoration Project (NR001016, New South Wales, registered 2 October 2026, under the same Replanting Native Forest and Woodland Ecosystems 2025 method). All three still show certificate status Not issued. The title, subtitle, image caption and image description, lede, figure, brief, key facts, contents list, graphic, the note on reference ¹ and reference ⁶ now say three. So do the heading of this section (which read 'The entire market is two paddocks in New South Wales'), its first paragraph, its fact box, its paragraph beginning 'Hold those two numbers' and the closing line of 'The switch, and who is standing under it'. The 9 September update above stands as the record of that date. The address of this article still reads 'one project'. That was this article's first count, taken from Clayton Utz's May 2026 alert ¹; the address is unchanged so that existing links keep working. See 'Two paddocks and a deadline' for the timeline.

02In 2023 the certificates were banned from offsetting. In 2025 the ban was quietly written out.

The Nature Repair Act only became law in 2023 because of a concession. Certificates from the new market were expressly barred from being used as environmental offsets. That prohibition was the price of passage: without it the numbers were not there, and the market would not have cleared the Senate.

The Environment Protection Reform Act 2025 reverses the concession. It amends the framework so that biodiversity certificates issued under the Nature Repair Act can, in time, be used to offset impacts under national environmental law. The Act passed both Houses in late November 2025 and received Royal Assent on 1 December 2025.

Read those two dates together. The exclusion that got the market passed in 2023 is being removed in 2025, before the market it governs has produced a single tradeable unit. The safeguard is gone. The supply never came.

03The supply cannot exist before 2027. The demand is scheduled for 2026.

This is the switch, and it is a timing switch. Under the proposed ENV method, the one designed to make certificates capable of standing in for a real offset, Clayton Utz's May 2026 alert states that a project cannot even apply for certificates until at least five years after it is registered. Clayton Utz's June 2026 analysis adds that the method itself is expected to be finalised only in late 2026. On that timeline, offset-capable supply cannot exist before 2027.

Now the demand side. Australia's first National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA) commenced on 1 July 2026. DCCEEW's own pages now state, in the department's own words, that all remaining reforms will commence on or before 1 December 2026, a category that includes the provision lifting the ban on using certificates for offsets. So the year in which developers gain a legal pathway to discharge offset obligations with these certificates arrives before the year in which any real certificate can be issued.

A market with a mandate and no stock does one thing reliably. It makes the few units that do appear expensive, and it sends everyone toward the cheaper door.

Correction, 7 October 2026. The fact box in this section and the matching key fact in the sidebar presented the conclusion that offset-capable supply cannot exist before 2027 as if it were Clayton Utz's. Clayton Utz's alerts give the five-year rule and the late 2026 method timing; the 2027 conclusion is this article's reading of those dates, and both now say so.

04Pathway 2: write the cheque, clear the habitat

That cheaper door has a name in the drafting. It is the restoration contribution. Instead of finding and delivering a like-for-like offset, a proponent can pay a charge to an independent statutory office, the Restoration Contributions Holder, and let it carry the obligation to restore.

The Holder pools money from many projects and spends it on restoration it judges will deliver better outcomes, keeping a public register of what it funds. On paper this is tidy. In sequence it is something else. The clearing is approved and happens now. The payment is made now. The restoration is a future action, funded from a pool, delivered by an office at a time of its choosing, if the ecology cooperates.

The Act frames the target as 'net gain', defined as measurable improvement for the affected matter against an agreed baseline. But a baseline is a document, and a cheque clears in days. The gain, if it comes, is counted in decades.

The clearing happens now. The restoration is a future action, funded from a pool, delivered if the ecology cooperates.

05The people who build these markets say this one is not built

None of this is a watchdog's inference. It is the assessment of the organisations closest to the reform.

The Biodiversity Council, whose members helped design the science these markets rest on, says the Nature Repair Market is not fit for the job now being handed to it. It notes, plainly, that the original Bill only passed because certificates were barred from offsetting, and warns against switching that bar off before the market can supply anything real.

It has a phrase for the sequencing: building the plane while flying it. The Environmental Defenders Office, in its submission on the draft Offsets Standard dated 25 May 2026, is blunter about where the framework leads.

Note who is not saying this. The critique of a pay-to-clear pathway belongs to these submissions, in their own words. It is not a line from a corporate law firm's client alert, and we will not dress it up as one. The advocates said it. We are quoting them.

06The switch, and who is standing under it

Strip the acronyms away and the mechanism is simple. A 'net gain' promise has been turned into a cheap, near-immediate compliance instrument: a certificate from an empty market, or a cheque into a pooled fund. Either way the habitat can be cleared now. The restoration is deferred for years, and some of it will never land.

Who gains is not a mystery. Property, mining and infrastructure proponents get a faster, cheaper way to clear. First-mover developers, brokers and aggregators holding the first offset-capable certificates get to sell scarcity into a demand the government has legislated into being. Around every compliance market grows an advisory layer that lives off the plumbing: accounting and audit firms, strategy consultancies, forensic and restructuring advisers. We name no particular firm as engaged in this scheme; the point is structural. They do not need the trees to grow. They need the instruments to trade.

Who pays is not a mystery either. The threatened species and ecological communities cleared today against a restoration that is delayed or unproven. And you, the public, who lose the biodiversity, fund the rollout, and stand behind any shortfall in the fund. This is Regulatory Capture without a smoke-filled room: a market designed so the safeguard is optional and the extraction is automatic. The Revolving Door did not need to turn. The rules did the work.

Three projects. Zero certificates. A national approval system about to accept them as payment. The government led by Anthony Albanese calls it net gain. Read the sequence, and it is a licence to clear now and restore later, with 'later' left undefined.

If it's a rort, we cover it.