Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Just over a month ago Australia commemorated National Landcare Week, recognising 20 years of outstanding service and practical environmental work across our nation. Landcare has enjoyed bipartisan support and there are now more than 4,500 community Landcare groups in operation. To mark Landcare Week, the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry distributed a media release to recognise the fact that more than 100,000 volunteers roll up their sleeves in communities each year to replant vegetation, repair erosion and improve agricultural production. There is no doubt that the minister knows in theory what Landcare does, but there is a great deal of concern throughout regional communities about whether the minister actually understands how Landcare facilitates this great work and the importance of Landcare groups to the fabric of regional communities and about whether Landcare will continue to prosper in the future.

As much as members in this place lecture about the forecast impact of climate change, they should always remember the people who are on the ground actually getting their hands dirty to undertake the practical environmental work that helps to sustain our natural heritage. Our farmers are often vilified by those who have little understanding of the fact that it is the families on the land and in our regional towns who have adopted the Landcare message of sustainability and done the hard work that is required to enhance their properties and the natural environment, and it is with this in mind that I have moved the motion before the House.

In recent months my office has been contacted by dozens of Landcare volunteers and paid staff members who believe this government has failed to understand the need to employ facilitators and coordinators, who play a pivotal role in managing the volunteer programs, assisting community groups, providing professional advice and mobilising volunteer effort. As I said at the outset, Landcare has enjoyed bipartisan support throughout its history, but I am deeply concerned by the correspondence that I have received and the meetings I have attended with my constituents. The Victorian Landcare Network shares my concerns about federal government cuts to funding for natural resource management under the Caring for our Country business plan. The network wrote to the minister in August this year, and in that letter secretary Kevin Spence said:

We are concerned that, under the business plan, Landcare coordinator positions and facilitator positions will no longer be funded by the Australian government unless they are linked to priority projects.

The letter went on to highlight that there were 142 Landcare support staff working on the ground to support Landcare groups in Victoria during 2007-08. According to the information that I have received from regional areas, that number is likely to fall to less than 35 before the end of this year. Already there have been a substantial number of cuts to these positions made across Gippsland, with many people being made redundant across my electorate. A senior catchment management authority executive in Victoria has also written to me and commented:

Whilst the Caring for our Country business plan talks about the importance of Landcare and community capacity building, there is not one single dollar being allocated to the capacity, skills, knowledge and engagement targets.

There is no doubt that facilitation of Landcare funded by the Australian government is dead and whilst this may not mean the total destruction of Landcare, it will dramatically reduce the number of groups and participants.

It concerns me that those views are being expressed by people in such senior roles in the catchment management organisations in Victoria. Those concerns were also expressed by the Victorian Landcare Network. The letter from Mr Spence continued:

The VLN considers that a loss of Landcare support staff will have a critical effect on maintaining the long-term participation and engagement of the community in natural resource management.

Our concerns are mirrored by the Landcare community who question the rationale and economics of dissolving the goodwill, trust and experience built up over many years—knowledge and networks will inevitably erode.

Without coordinators and facilitators providing that level of support and communication, many Landcare groups would lose initiative, greatly reducing the capacity to participate effectively in natural resource management.

This is an issue, as I said at the outset, of significant concern right across the nation, particularly in my electorate of Gippsland. On 15 November there will be an East Gippsland community rally in protest at the cuts to Landcare funding. Residents will gather at the Orbost Snowy Rovers Football Club from 11 am to 3 pm. While it will be a community day with a free barbecue and fun for the family, it will be underpinned by a very serious message. The community is angry that this government is reducing its commitment to Landcare, and it is a story that is being played out on a national scale. The National Landcare Network distributed a media release on 7 July this year in which spokesman David Walker said that, of the $403 million in funding announced by the federal government, just $1.4 million, or 0.3 per cent, had gone to community Landcare. He went on to say:

Landcare has a proven track record in producing best practice environmental outcomes and in growing and maintaining important social and community networks. The strength of landcare is its local focus and character. Ministers Burke and Garrett must ensure that grassroots landcare has a place within their Caring for our Country program.

Regional Australians are proud of their contribution to sustainable and environmental management through Landcare in the past 20 years. It is a remarkable organisation that must never be taken for granted by anyone in this place. Without ongoing funding to support the role played by the facilitators, the coordinators and the volunteers themselves, the Landcare organisation will become a shadow of its former self, and I doubt that we will be here in 20 years time commemorating the great achievements of the Landcare volunteers across our nation.

Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to put it on record that the Rudd government is highly supportive of Landcare. This can be seen by funding commitments to the program through this parliament and through this government. Those on the other side of this House tend to be totally negative about any support given by the government to organisations such as Landcare.

I am a long-term supporter of Landcare. Landcare plays a very important role in the electorate I represent in this parliament. The Shortland electorate is very environmentally sensitive. It is situated between the ocean and a series of lakes. In the electorate, and in the whole of Lake Macquarie for that matter, we have enormous and longstanding commitments made by Landcare groups. In fact, I am so committed to Landcare that I am a member of the Lake Macquarie Landcare public funding management committee, which meets regularly to organise funding and support for Landcare groups throughout Lake Macquarie.

I will share with you some of the fine work that is done by Landcare groups in the Shortland electorate. The first point is that the financial contribution made by volunteers through Landcare in the previous year came to about $3.6 million—that is in volunteer hours given by people. It is all about people taking pride in their community. It is all about people taking pride in the environment. Landcare plays a very important role, not only in bush areas but also in areas like the Shortland electorate. Landcare is fundamentally a grassroots volunteer movement supported by all three levels of government and the corporate sector in partnership with the community, to facilitate community stewardship of their own environment. So it is a whole-of-community grassroots organisation. Landcarers have a passion for seeing that our natural environment is managed so that it will be there for future generations to enjoy and to benefit from. Landcare volunteers are people from all walks of life.

I recently had an afternoon tea for seniors in the Shortland electorate—and I am sure other members did a similar thing—where seniors were presented with certificates for their contributions to our community. At that particular ceremony there were a number of volunteers that worked with Landcare groups. Valentine Landcare group was represented, along with Galgabba Landcare group. Landcare has been classified into six different areas: wetland sites, riparian sites, coastal sites, rainforest sites, bushland sites and foreshore sites. That is the way we do it in Lake Macquarie.

In the few moments that I have remaining I want to run through some of the quality Landcare groups within my electorate for the benefit of the parliament. There is the Belmont Wetlands group, the Black Ned’s Bay Rejuvenation group, the Jewells group, the Pelican Blacksmith group, the Salts Bay group, the Warners Bay group, the Redhead Bluff group, and the Floraville Gully Ridge and Rainforest group. I will make special reference to this group because it works in conjunction with the Floraville Public School and provides a wonderful learning environment for so many of the young people who are associated with that school. It gives them the ability to be involved in the long-term care and appreciation of their environment and that is reflected in the fact that they have won the Sydney Morning Herald environmental award on a number of occasions. (Time expired)

Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Water Resources and Conservation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I follow my friend and colleague the member for Shortland. While I appreciate her contribution I am afraid she is grossly out of touch with the sentiment that is flowing through Landcare organisations right throughout Australia. Indeed, I have spent much of the last 12 months visiting Landcare groups and natural resource management groups from Cape York throughout the rest of Australia and there is a degree of anger there that I do not believe I have ever seen before in such a large volunteer organisation.

Indeed, Landcare is one of the greatest volunteer organisations in Australia, with the largest number of members, and people are walking away from it in droves. In July last year a decision was made by the Rudd government to rebadge the former coalition government’s Natural Heritage Trust and National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality programs and rebrand them as Caring for our Country. This was the first step in the government’s dismantling of grassroots conservation in this country. In just over 12 months the Caring for our Country program has virtually decimated the extremely successful conservation and resource management work that was undertaken through the Natural Heritage Trust program. It has also left natural resources management organisations in tatters and jeopardised the future of Landcare groups across Australia.

The initial reworking of the Natural Heritage Trust and the National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality programs saw funding cut for catchment management bodies by 40 per cent and Landcare by 20 per cent. Over the past year the size of these cuts seems to have risen dramatically resulting in Landcare groups across Australia, particularly in regional New South Wales, facing an increasingly uncertain future. Last year has been disastrous for Australia’s grassroots environmental movement. Many Landcare groups have had their funding halved and are running on little more than the smell of an oily rag.

What was once a remarkable example of nationwide grassroots conservationism is slowly being destroyed by a ballooning environmental bureaucracy. Moneys that were previously allocated for improvements in water quality, salinity management and biodiversity are now going to government agencies and staff who are managing these programs without having ever spent a day of their lives amongst the weeds on the riverbank or the cracked earth of a drought affected paddock. Indeed, this is a classic example of top-down, government-knows-best bureaucracy.

I believe the failures of the Caring for our Country program perfectly illustrate the hypocrisy of this government. When it suits him, the Prime Minister is more than happy to tell anyone who will listen that combating the threats posed by climate change is the greatest moral challenge of our time. However, when the opportunity presents itself to do something practical to ensure the long-term productivity and sustainability of our natural environment the government do not want to know about it. While publicly masquerading as a green tinged party with an environmental conscience the government are privately destroying the grassroots community groups that form the backbone of conservation in this country. If the government were serious about combating climate change, the first thing they would be doing is boosting funding to Landcare groups and giving expert local environmentalists certainty in their careers.

It is telling that of the 1,300 applications that were lodged for natural resource management funding under the Caring for our Country program 1,243 were rejected. This was an incredible rejection rate and one that has disheartened Landcare groups across Australia. The fact that just 56 applications were approved—and in New South Wales not one single cent went west of the Blue Mountains—highlights the serious design flaws of the Caring for our Country program. These applications are not easily done. To have any chance of obtaining funding Landcare groups are required to navigate an exhausting 30-page application that asks groups to fill out their funding needs in intricate detail.

Some groups have said the application has taken up to 200 hours to complete, often at great expense. One natural resource management group, for example, spent $80,000 putting together a professional submission for a Caring for our Country grant after being encouraged to apply by the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. They were very optimistic after being assured by the department of the importance of the unique conservation work they were carrying out. They did not receive one cent.

The changes forced upon Landcare groups through the Caring for our Country program are causing great angst among Landcare managers. One senior manager has told me that the federal government’s approach to investing in Landcare and biodiversity conservation is creating many tensions within the community, industry and project staff. Among the long list of concerns that have been raised by groups about the new process, the three that feature consistently are that it completely fails to support regional and remote land managers, that it stripped funding available to continue critical projects and that the process is leaving the dwindling number of natural resource management project staff with no job security due to the government’s insistence on month-on-month— (Time expired)

Darren Cheeseman (Corangamite, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight I rise to praise the work of Landcare groups around the country, particularly the work undertaken by Landcare groups within my seat of Corangamite. The geography of my seat is unique. We have a very famous coastline. We have the Great Ocean Road. We have the Surf Coast and the Bellarine Peninsula. We also have some famous Ramsar wetlands and very famous national parks, particularly the Great Otway National Park. It is as a consequence of that unique landscape that I have within my seat a particular passion for the work that Landcare undertakes and for that of its sister organisations such as Coastcare.

I will say a little on the history of Landcare. Landcare was formally established under the Hawke Labor government, with then Minister John Kerin and the late Minister Peter Cook playing a very substantial role in establishing a national Landcare network. At that point, they planned to have by the year 2000 somewhere in the vicinity of 2,000 Landcare groups scattered across the length and breadth of our great nation. In fact, today we have more than 4,000 groups that have been established within Australia, and I think that is absolutely fantastic. Landcare plays an important role in the conservation of our land and the economic sustainability of, particularly, our farming communities. Three-quarters of Australia’s farmers are in one way or another engaged in Landcare in Australia. I certainly think Landcare would be unique on the world stage as an example of participation in a voluntary sense.

The Rudd Labor government is a very strong supporter of Landcare, particularly given that it was our great party, the Australian Labor Party, that established Landcare in a formal sense in the mid-1980s. The Rudd government is spending more than $2 billion on natural resource management in the first five years of our platform Caring for our Country, which is a very substantial contribution to our landscape and which I think will play a very significant role. The federal government is also spending $189 million on Landcare over the same period of time under that platform. The federal Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry, the Hon. Tony Burke, has announced $33.6 million over four years for a national network of Landcare facilitators to play that important role of organising and driving the work that Landcare needs to undertake throughout the nation. Ministers Garrett and Burke have also announced $5 million for small grants of up to $20,000 for community natural resource management groups such as Landcare, Coastcare and other groups. Corangamite, being a regional electorate, has many important Landcare initiatives being supported by local farmers in partnership with the Rudd Labor government. I think somewhere in the vicinity of $150,000 has been made available to the Otway Agroforestry Network, who work in a very productive way with Landcare.

Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting. The member will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed.