Former Australian chief scientist to head review of carbon credit scheme after whistleblower revelations

Chris Bowen, the climate change minister, will announce on Friday that Chubb, a neuroscientist and former vice-chancellor of the Australian National University, will lead the six-month review of the scheme, after a respected whistleblower described it as a fraud and waste of taxpayer money.

In a new paper released on Friday, Macintosh and five colleagues called for the Chubb review to go further than just looking at methods used to create credits, as Labor promised before the May election. The group, which includes ANU legal academic Prof Don Butler and University of New South Wales public sector management lecturer Dr Megan Evans, said it should consider the entire system, including the agencies that run it.

The academics suggested up to 80% of credits issued using the three most popular methods lacked integrity.

The paper said the issues with the system had arisen due to a greater focus under the previous Coalition government on providing large volumes of credits at low cost than ensuring integrity.

It said the complexities in designing carbon credit schemes meant mistakes were inevitable and a degree of error must be accepted, with most professionals working in the area accepting about 80% of cuts needed to be real for the system to have integrity.