Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in order to add my praises to Landcare, one of Australia's, and I would argue, one of the world's most successful programs of hands-on community-driven natural resource protection and rehabilitation. This motion celebrates the 25th anniversary of Landcare, which began in Victoria where it remains one of the best known and successful of environmental programs. Its strength has always been the ownership and involvement of private landholders, many of them but not all, farmers whose weed or feral animal issues, or native tree or habitat loss required more than just the farm family to do the work, or more off-farm resources to buy, for example, fencing materials, seeds or seedlings, tree guards, or watering systems or the higher of special equipment.

I was closely involved in those very early days 25 years ago. I was working in the Victorian Public Service in the water and agriculture area and I supported the then Minister for Conservation, Forests and Lands, Joan Kirner, as she formed what some thought at the time was a surprising environmental alliance with the then President of the Victorian Farmers Federation, Heather Mitchell. Heather and Joan were two tireless no-nonsense champions who forged new ideas to unite and drive community environmental action and, not surprisingly, they engaged women as well as men, knowing full well that women do as much farmwork as men but are often in particular concerned about the environmental issues.

From the very beginning Landcare was a bipartisan supported program—and this has always been one of its strengths—with hobby farmers, retirees, school children and primary producers working together to bring about real, measurable change to the landscape, waterways, protecting the biodiversity, bringing back habitat to either keep or to attract back some of our very rare bird species, like around the Picola area in my part of the world.

Much of this earliest Landcare work was prompted by the Victorian State Salinity Program of the 1980s which recognised that reafforestation in the groundwater recharge areas in the Central Highlands was a key issue to be undertaken. That vegetation had been stripped during the gold rush era for urban development when the tram tracks in Melbourne were literally built on red gum blocks and the water supply in Western Victoria was literally run through timber pipes. So I always get a little bemused, as was the case with the previous speaker, who said it was all about farmers destroying the environment or cutting down trees. Actually, urbanisation particularly in Australia has been a major culprit in clearing out the forests that it had easy reach to. And of course it was the paddle steamers on the Murray that cleared most of the riparian zone of red gum and other timber as they plied their way up and down the Murray, carting wool and sheep fat for about half a century. So let us get it straight, we are not in the blame game here. There has been environmental degradation across Australia as a consequence of not understanding our fragile environmental state but also because our very development was built on the back of the use of timber. Landcare, not surprisingly then, was launched in a small town in Central Victoria in 1985 close to the Central Highlands where a major tree-planting effort was to be set in motion.

One of the key components of Landcare has been the recruitment of paid local coordinators, frequently women, who have then set about coordinating the efforts of local landcare groups who not only often own that land but who live there and care deeply about its sustainability and its intergenerational health. With these paid coordinators you are able to make sure that all the equipment has been gathered together, the seeds are there and perhaps a seed-collecting effort has gone on the season before, and the barbecue is set in place. As I say, those local paid coordinators have been key to what is, in fact, a very low-cost program. I would argue this is now one of the best environmental efforts you will find anywhere globally, but I note that more than 20 countries have taken up landcare and they understand the importance of these local coordinators.

I want to pay tribute particularly to my local Landcare groups in the electorate of Murray. They have worked tirelessly for two generations, literally changing the landscape. In some parts the trees are now thicker and more biodiverse than they were prior to European settlement, particularly in the case of the Tragowel Plain, where I come from. My mother has been responsible personally for planting thousands of trees on what was a treeless plain. Landcare is going from strength to strength. It cannot die because the concept behind it is so right and meets Australia's needs so profoundly. Yes, there has been some trimming of the budget, as there has been across the board because Labor left us with such debt and deficit. Sadly, we have had to do the hard yards there. But Landcare: I salute you on your 25th birthday. May you continue to thrive.

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