Wyatt Roy (Longman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Green Army Program) Bill 2014—the coalition's landmark legislation to muster a practical grassroots action group that will take on local environment and heritage conservation projects across Australia. It is an exciting concept. It is a plan that underscores the government's commitment to the environment. This concept is well on the way to becoming reality with this legislation, which will clarify social security arrangements for participants receiving the Green Army allowance.

The Green Army will see young Australians aged 17 to 24 gain training and experience in environmental and heritage conservation fields and learn about careers in conservation management. The program will start in July with the rollout of 250 projects and about 2,500 people undertaking on-the-ground environmental activities in the first year. It will grow to become Australia's largest ever environmental workforce, with 15,000 participants by 2018. A diverse range of young people are set to be involved, including school leavers, gap year students, graduates and job seekers. Up to nine eligible participants and at least one team supervisor will constitute a Green Army team. There will be six-monthly placements in what, for many young Australians eager to gain work-like experience, activities and training, will serve as an alternative to income support. Through the amendments to the Social Security (Administration) Act 1999 that are introduced in this bill, a Green Army allowance will be paid to participants who, at the same time, will not be allowed to receive a social security benefit or social security pension. Team supervisors will be paid a wage consistent with the gardening and landscaping services award.

If I may turn to my region, I would like to spend a few minutes outlining the huge benefits in store from approved Green Army projects at Bribie Island and Burpengary Creek. Buckleys Hole Conservation Park sits on 90 hectares of the south-west corner of beautiful Bribie Island, 70 kilometres north of Brisbane, and it is protected under the Queensland Nature Conservation Act 1992. It is also protected under the international Ramsar Convention. The focal point of this high-value, natural precinct is its freshwater wetland—the most important wetland within my electorate of Longman and the Moreton Bay Regional Council. It is, in fact, one of the nation's key wetlands because of the diversity of birdlife that inhabits and visits the park.

Aside from the wetlands, Buckleys Hole includes portions of Pumicestone Passage, one of the eight major flyways for migratory birds—some of which are listed as endangered or vulnerable—coming from the high arctic of Siberia and Alaska to feed during the northern winter. Buckleys Hole is also the site of a major tea-tree forest. That makes it a prime area of study as the reforestation with tea-trees of degraded wetlands is thought to be greatly advantageous in terms of carbon sequestration efforts. The park hosts other vulnerable or endangered species, including the acid frog.

To preserve and maintain an internationally acclaimed wetland is clearly a favourable outcome for the local, state and Australian community. But more than that, urgency is afoot. Currently Buckleys Hole is subjected to great pressure. The Buckleys Hole Green Army project will help secure a vital wetland that has recently come under siege from several angles. It will propagate and plant thousands of trees and shrubs to replace an array of defined pest plants. These trees and shrubs will also stabilise the embankment around the wetland and other areas at risk. Seawater incursions into Buckleys Hole during king tides have in the past severely compromised the embankment. The project will endeavour to upgrade security and surveillance of the car park, a known trouble spot. There have been many complaints about traffic and hooning in the park, as well as litter and the dumping of domestic waste. As well, it is hoped the Buckley's Hole Green Army will be in a position to upgrade explanatory and other signage, steering traffic away from the pedestrians and cyclists who use the roads and tracks to the park.

The Buckleys Hole Green Army workers will receive a substantial environmental education. They will learn about valuable and pest flora and fauna species and the potential devastation from human impacts on a fragile ecosystem. They will gain an appreciation of the value of revegetation as a tool to protect and enhance Australia's environment.

Also on Bribie Island, a Green Army project has been approved to restore and protect degraded sections of the picturesque Woorim Beach. The plan entails removing pest plants, fencing off areas, propagating and planting thousands of trees and shrubs along the foreshore, repairing various beach accesses, upgrading stormwater exits to better protect Moreton Bay and improving public education on dune protection with signage, field days and education.

The planting of trees, shrubs and groundcover along the dunes and foreshore will help the dunes to recover and rebuild. Restoration of the eroded beach will see it fit again for recreational use, while renewal of the fauna habitats will benefit native and migratory birds and endangered loggerhead turtles—erosion has destroyed some loggerhead nesting areas. The work will also reduce the sediment load into Moreton Bay, a major cause of ocean degradation.

Our remaining Green Army project moves west to another special part of the Longman electorate. Burpengary Creek catchment encompasses 7,960 hectares—6.5 per cent of the former Caboolture shire. Two distinctive creeks, Little Burpengary Creek and Burpengary Creek, drain the catchment. The catchments upper sections start in the D'Aguilar Range in the north west of Longman. Burpengary Creek runs down into the prime residential area of Morayfield around the township of Burpengary and spills into southern Deception Bay. Unfortunately, Burpengary Creek is in a perilous state, with erosion exacerbated by flooding. Due to the encroachment of urbanisation, only 6 per cent of natural vegetation is left within the footprint of the greater Caboolture area.

In the heart of the creek catchment, lies a rare, giant 350-year-old fig tree, supporting a mini ecosystem within its branches and demanding protection and preservation. This approved Green Army project involves the removal of lantana and other pest flora from the banks of Burpengary Creek and revegetation of the site with thousands of native trees and shrub plantings propagated at the nursery of the well-known Caboolture Region Environmental Education Centre or CREEC.

Additionally, the project would like to accomplish the building of a boardwalk climbing metres into the tree canopy to give visitors an overview of the creek and divert them from directly impacting and eroding the riverbank. The catchment and adjacent areas reveal an alarming count of threatened species—46 plants and 60 animals. This Green Army project would help these species recover. The plants under threat would be bolstered by the nursery propagation of their species and subsequent replanting. The vulnerable riverbank fauna would then have more protective cover to rebuild their numbers. As well, other animals and birdlife would be attracted back to the region. Rampant weed growth, strangling food, cover and nesting trees has resulted in bird species around the creek plummeting from 123 to 45 over recent years. Formerly, there were 127 butterfly species along Burpengary Creek. Now, the figure is around 40.

Friends of CREEC, a not-for-profit organisation of volunteers operating from the Caboolture Region Environmental Education Centre, have told me from experience that if 10 people work on such a project, they, through family, friends and other contacts educate and influence another 40 people. Those 40, in turn, advance this knowledge through their social and business circles. And it goes on, exponentially. Potentially, thousands of citizens are exposed to the practice of bringing nature and the built environment into some sort of harmony.

This captures perfectly what the coalition's entire Green Army program is intent on achieving. In the next step, the government will shortly be undertaking a tender process for service providers which will oversee the Green Army initiatives through the nation. Once selected, the service providers will engage with the local Green Army teams to develop and manage activities and report regularly on progress. The Green Army will take a leaf from the book of the Howard government's celebrated Green Corps program of 1996.

The Green Corps worked by providing young people participating in environmental and heritage projects with improved career and employment prospects through accredited training and personal development. The Howard government's Green Corps program propagated and planted more than 14 million trees, erected more than 8,000 kilometres of fencing, cleared more than 50,000 weeds and built or maintained more than 5,000 kilometres of walking tracks or boardwalks.

And what did the succeeding Labor government do? As with so many other innovations of the Howard government, Labor ripped the Green Corps program apart, rebadging it in a way that disincentivised participants, disenfranchised local communities and discarded the needs of the environment. By 2012 it was finally terminated. A grown-up government, which commits itself to a cleaner environment through clean air, clean land, clean water and heritage protection, is back in charge.

I would like to take this opportunity to inform the House and to thank now Minister for the Environment and his parliamentary secretary, Senator Birmingham, for visiting the locations of the Green Army that I have outlined tonight. I think the Minister for the Environment first visited our region in 2010, when I was a candidate. He visited Woorim Beach and he visited CREEC, where the second program will be unfolding. And in the last term of parliament the now environment minister visited the electorate several times, once again to meet with the environment groups that will be participating directly in this program.

Then, of course, in the last election campaign Senator Birmingham, the parliamentary secretary, once again visited CREEC, to meet with the environmental groups involved in the Burpengary project and also to commit the coalition government to delivering these programs. It is a great tragedy for the local environment and my community that we were not fortunate enough to form government in 2010, because perhaps these environmental programs might have been concluded by now. But it is exciting to be sitting on this side of the chamber post the election so that the new coalition government can go about delivering this scheme, to have a real and substantial positive impact for the local environment in my community.

The coalition's Green Army will make a tangible difference to the environment and communities, replenishing and protecting habitat, weeding, planting, cleaning up creeks and rivers and restoring cultural heritage sites. Marshalling 15,000 participants, fostering teamwork, local ownership and community spirit, the Green Army stands to deliver a broad and lasting national legacy. I commend this bill to the House.

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