The central criticism of the Safeguard Mechanism is that covered facilities buy their way to compliance rather than reducing emissions on site. Whether that is true is an empirical question, and the data to settle it is published.

The Clean Energy Regulator releases baselines and covered emissions for every covered facility, the units surrendered, and the method under which surrendered credits were created. Facilities surrendering 30 per cent or more of their baseline must additionally file a statement explaining why more onsite abatement was not undertaken, and those statements are published.

That last requirement is unusual and worth naming. It is a disclosure obligation designed specifically to expose the behaviour the scheme is accused of, imposed on the parties doing it. Independent analysis finding that a large majority of surrendered offsets came from criticised methods was possible because of it.

Recorded as a win after correcting an error. Earlier federal research for this project asserted that the joined-up series was not published and recorded fragmented and aggregated against it. Checking the CER's data page on 2026-09-01 showed a CSV covering 208 facilities.

The disagreement about the scheme is real and continuing. But it is a disagreement about policy conducted on shared published evidence, which is the condition this register exists to argue for, and it should not be mistaken for a transparency failure.

Partially checked on 2026-09-03. The regulator's data page was fetched and confirmed to publish a per-facility table of 30 per cent explanation statements, each separately downloadable -- the disclosure this entry singles out as unusual.

The rest is not yet verified. The baselines and emissions table loads through an AJAX endpoint rather than as a file, so it has not been opened, and the figures quoted in this register for covered emissions and units surrendered come from the regulator's news publications rather than from the dataset. Confidence stays reported rather than rising to verified.