Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This document is quite an astounding document. It is just a rehashing of what the government has said before. I am quite perplexed as to why the minister has chosen to make a statement today, other than that he may have been lacking something to say just before we break from parliament and is trying to make Caring for our Country look like a halfway decent program. The statement adds nothing to the debate. It is quite disgraceful in the way it has a go at the hardworking Landcare groups and those people who have been working for several decades on natural resource management. The statement makes claims about chaos—it is true that there was some chaos between the Natural Heritage Trust 1 and Natural Heritage Trust 2—but that is nothing compared to what is going on out there now in the resource management community. People are leaving in droves from natural resource management groups. Their funding has been slashed. They do not know what their future holds. They are losing expertise that has been built up for years and years, yet the minister has the audacity to claim that we have had to move to this new program because it was chaotic between NHT1 and NHT2. He then claimed that all that valuable taxpayers’ money has nothing substantial to show for it. How insulting is that for all the people that have worked for so many years on Natural Heritage Trust projects and on delivering natural resource management and land care outcomes.

If I were working in an NRM group now, I would be devastated—in fact, I feel personally insulted given that I have been working for years on natural resource management, as have hundreds and hundreds of other Australians. The work of these groups has been trashed by the minister. He should be ashamed of himself for treating these groups like that. He then has the audacity to say that this is a ‘far-reaching, strategic and accountable program’. By ‘strategic’ he means: ‘I cobbled together some of the environmental promises made during the election. I had to fund them somehow, so I thought I’d make a raid on the money that was there for natural resource management and make it look like it is a program and then dream up a few other programs.’

The minister has already made the statement that the open grants program round is currently being assessed and that it will provide $25 million for a range of activities. He said that this was a strategic program before he had developed the outcomes, which are yet to be announced. I looked through this document, thinking it would announce the outcome statements that have been promised for months and months. But no, they will be another month in coming. After that, it will be another month before we get the business plan: ‘But in the meantime we will make use of a little grants program out there and vegemite the money across the landscape like we used to in the bad old days.’ Instead of learning the lessons of the past—that just releasing small grants of a couple of thousand dollars here and there does not deliver good environmental or natural management outcomes—what we see here is ‘back to the bad old days’ so they can be seen to be doing something. Some environment groups out there will get a little bit of money, from which they cannot achieve big strategic outcomes. That makes the government feel good, that they are doing something—they have trashed programs that were starting to work.

I, for one, know that NHT1 and NHT2 made some bad funding decisions—we should not step away from that, and I have been critical of that—but the point here is that we are not learning from the mistakes that we made under those grant programs. It feels like we have gone back to the future. We have gone back to making unstrategic, poor decisions with no overall framework for investing this money. An example is the outcomes for natural resource management in remote and northern Australia. When I asked in estimates what was meant by ‘remote’, I was told: ‘Oh, that does not really mean remote. We are still going to fund all the regional groups we are funding now.’ But we know very well that the funding to those NHRM programs has been cut. After years of developing their strategic plans and investment plans, they are then all trashed.

The regional groups do not know what their future holds. In his statement the minister pulled out a couple of quotes from a couple of regional groups that appear to support his position. He should be saying what I know the regional groups are saying, which is: ‘We do not know what our future is. We do not know whether or not we can employ staff. We are haemorrhaging our staff all over the place. We have to cut our staff by 50 per cent and if we do not cut them, the staff are leaving anyway because they do not know whether they have a future.’ This is not mentioned in his announcement. He just made a feelgood announcement in response to the criticism that he knows very well is going on out there. That is why he has made this statement today: because he knows very well that there is a lot of criticism about the program out there. The groups are not able to get on and do their work. They do not know where their funding is coming from, and the long-term investment plans that they have developed will not be implemented. Yes, there were problems with this program. Yes, the Auditor-General and the ANAO found some problems. But they did not find problems of massive maladministration and massive rorting of the system. What they did say—and don’t forget we are talking about long-term change here—is that there is little evidence as yet that the programs are achieving anticipated national outcomes or giving sufficient attention to the radically altered and degraded Australian landscape.

Yes, that is the point. That is the point of the Auditor’s report: that we cannot do that because we have not been monitoring and evaluating the programs properly. What we needed to do was to evolve these programs. Instead of evolving them, we have gone back to the drawing board to small, ad hoc programs that are not strategic. It makes me laugh to say that what they are doing at the moment is strategic, particularly when there are no outcome statements yet. We have released granting programs before we have even got outcome statements. We have gone back to the future; we have gone back decades in the way that we treat natural resource management, in the way we treat our investment in these programs. It is disgraceful that the minister is trying to put out statements as if the work that has been done by all those groups in the past is nothing, that it has been massively rorted and that there have been no outcomes. Well, there have been outcomes. They are not perfect and I would be the first to say they have not been perfect, but we should move on and learn from those programs, not go back to the past and not trash the work of hundreds of thousands of Australians over the last couple of decades who have put so much of their lives into natural resource management, so much of their lives into developing these regional groups, so much of their lives into Landcare. We need to be learning from the past, not repeating the mistakes of the past.