With Scott Morrison’s new environment minister, Melissa Price, flagging a boost in support for the emissions reduction fund – the centrepiece of the Coalition’s much-derided Direct Action climate policy – it is worth revisiting just what taxpayers have pocketed for the $2.3bn that has been spent on their behalf.

The summarised view among those who have looked into the scheme ranges from “difficult to know” to “not much we wouldn’t have had anyway”.

Designed by the then environment minister, Greg Hunt, to fit the needs of the former prime minister Tony Abbott, the emissions reduction fund pays farmers and businesses to cut carbon dioxide pollution to below what it would otherwise be. It works as a reverse auction: bidders nominate how cheaply they think they can deliver reductions and what are assessed as the cheapest viable projects win contracts. The government buys carbon credits from the successful projects once the cuts are verified.

To date, the bulk of the money has been awarded to landowners who have promised to plant vegetation or restore degraded habitat to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere or to not clear land they otherwise planned to bulldoze. Rewarding these projects isn’t a new idea – many existed under what was known as the Carbon Farming Initiative when Labor was in power. But the Coalition changed who paid. It used to be mostly businesses looking to offset their emissions. Now it’s mainly taxpayers.

Most people who have studied the scheme have concluded some, possibly many, of these projects are worthwhile, but reject the idea the public should pay for them. Some have challenged the way some methodologies are designed. How can you really tell if a landowner really intended to clear their land? What happens if a farmer decides to bulldoze a protected area, releasing the emissions, once their contract expires? Would a government penalise someone who did not deliver on their contract because fire, drought or flood had ravaged their property? All are considered increasingly likely in a changing climate.

Perhaps most pertinently, what’s the rationale for spending billions of taxpayers’ funds on restoring and protecting landscapes when land clearing is happening five times faster in other parts of the country?

Things get even murkier once you move away from forests. As part of the Our Wide Brown Land series, Guardian Australia revealed an independent expert committee found landfill sites that capture leaking methane and burn it to generate electricity would have existed without the injection of public money. It suggests a straightforward waste.

To date, the government has paid $396m to finished projects, committed to another $1.9b and has $249m left in the original kitty.

Business interest in the scheme has waned since the fund started in 2015. Projects promising 47m tonnes of cuts won contracts at the first auction. At the most recent round in June, that fell to less than 7m.

An Abbott-era promise by Hunt to increase funding by $200m a year between 2018 and 2030 – to make Direct Action a major part of how Australia would meet the target it set at the Paris climate conference – has long been discarded.

Meanwhile, national emissions are rising year-on-year. Attempts to introduce a long-term policy to cut emissions from electricity generation, via the national energy guarantee, have been abandoned. The most recent greenhouse gas data shows pollution is up in every sector of the economy that gets money from the emissions reduction fund.

According to the Australian, Price plans to push in cabinet for increased funding for the scheme, prioritising projects that she says would “help the environment and give people opportunity” alongside any emissions cuts. Her predecessor, the now treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, was non-committal about the idea on Monday morning.

Perhaps someone should get in touch with Malcolm Turnbull in New York to see what he thinks. He, of course, provided the benchmark criticism of Direct Action from the backbench in 2011: that spending billions of taxpayers’ dollars on what are essentially offset programs while industry is able to pollute freely is “a recipe for fiscal recklessness on a grand scale”.