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

I rise to speak on the motion to take note of the National Landcare program report. This was a very important inquiry looking into the national Landcare program. It was very timely, given the changes to the Landcare program. The report provides, first off, a very good overview of the history of Landcare—over almost the last 30 years; not quite that long—from what people talk about as the birth of Landcare in 1989. Those of us that have worked in Landcare for longer than that know that Landcare was a concept that had been around for a significant period longer than that; in fact, I was working in Landcare in the early eighties, and there was a lot of early work done in Victoria. Then my home state of Western Australia took it up with gusto and formed a large number of Landcare groups. The report goes through some of that work. It goes through the history of some of the early programs in the National Heritage Trust, and then the rollout of the first and second stages of that, then to the Caring for our Country, and then to this new process. We travelled quite a bit around the country and spoke to as many Landcare groups and natural resource management groups as possible, and learnt a great deal. I think that people who are not that engaged and do not know that much about Landcare and natural resource management in this country will learn a lot from this report. However, what I want to get to is focusing on the conclusions and recommendations.

I think that the recommendations around funding are going to be particularly important. What we did ascertain, and it is extremely disappointing, is that the funding that is available—and here is Senator Urquhart coming in, so I will apologise that I am speaking to the motion first. As chair of the committee, I am sure that Senator Urquhart will want to make some comments on this report. The issue around funding is extremely important, and the first recommendation is:

The committee recommends that the Government provide funding to the National Landcare Programme to the same level as provided under Caring for our Country.

That needs to be at least to the level of funding provided, because we have seen a decrease in the level of funding that is provided to national resource management and to Landcare. Under the current process, after the rollout of the small grants for the 25th anniversary of Landcare which were granted last year, there will be no more funding available for small grants. That is extremely disappointing. After the government had promised there would be more funding made available for Landcare, it has been really obvious that there will no longer be that additional funding available. Funding will be made available by the NRM groups, but it is to come out of their existing funding. Some NRM groups already make that 20 per cent available, they argue. Others do not have such a clear devolved grants process. But the point there is that that will then come at the expense of the NRM groups—so their funding will be reduced. One of the other recommendations deals with landscape-scale projects. I also want to focus on that. Small grants are very important, particularly for Landcare because they do initiation projects. They are small projects that groups can get focused around and get done. Having been involved with NRM and Landcare for a very long time, I know that those landscape scale projects are also important. That is what we talked about in the report. From the information that was available to the inquiry, there is a very real concern for the future of those landscape scale projects.

We also looked at the Green Army and 20 Million Trees in the report. The point that was strongly made to us in evidence we received in submissions and from people who appeared at the hearings is that there is very deep concern that funding for those projects not replace funding for the types of programs that are provided through both small grants programs for Landcare and the larger landscape scale projects. It is only through landscape scale projects that we will ultimately achieve what we need to in sustainable natural resource management. I am not dismissing small grants at all. They play a very important role. But if we do not have the funding made available for landscape scale projects that are coordinated across the landscape and that engage everybody then we are not going to really, truly ensure that we are sustainably managing our natural resources.

There are recommendations in the report around those landscape scale projects. There are also recommendations made around needing to make sure we monitor and have a good look at the assessment evaluation next year of both the Green Army and 20 Million Trees. There is also a recommendation that the Commonwealth government consider avenues to ensure the continuation of landscape scale projects and to foster further collaboration between stakeholders on the long-term landscape scale strategic planning and action. That is the next point in dealing with the landscape scale projects. We need to ensure that they are long term. People need certainty to have the ability to plan for the long term, because we are talking about projects that need to be carried out over a number of years.

The other point that was strongly made to the committee was about the impact of funding uncertainty on staff and the ability to keep staff. I have been involved in NRM and Landcare long enough to have seen the cycle so many times—funding becomes available, uncertainty kicks in and we lose staff. Then we go through another round. The funding kicks in, we take on staff, uncertainty prevails and we lose staff. That is happening again, and that is deeply concerning.

I will wrap up by saying that the other area we touched on was around monitoring and evaluation but also looking at how we measure outcomes into the future. This has been another persistent issue for Landcare and NRM. We can count the widgets when we are doing our monitoring and accounting, but how do we know we are actually achieving long-term outcomes? That is why I think there is a lot of appeal in the proposal of the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists on national environmental accounting. I think recommendation 11 is a very important recommendation. It recommends that we investigate the feasibility of implementing such a system or a similar system that incorporates the merit reporting process that is already underway. I think that is a really important recommendation for the future so that we can put in place a proper system of national environmental accounting. I recommend that people look at that report from the Wentworth group, and I really urge the government to seriously look at the group's proposal on national environmental accounting.

I commend the report to the Senate and urge senators to read it. If you care about Landcare and the future of natural resource management, please read it. Take on board the issues around funding. Funding is absolutely essential if Landcare and NRM are going to continue into the future.