Wednesday, 29 May 2024

Landcare funding

Melina BATH (Eastern Victoria) (17:53): (928) This evening’s adjournment is for the Minister for Environment, and it relates to the government’s cutting of ongoing funding for Landcare facilitators and coordinators. The action I seek from the minister is to find the funds – reallocate funding – to ensure that there is continued operation of Landcare Victoria Inc beyond 2025 to support the vital role that our volunteer land carers play in tackling diversity loss, habitat restoration and weed and pest control.

Landcare is a volunteer grassroots movement. My understanding is it started as a collaboration between the Victorian Farmers Federation and Joan Kirner back in the 1980s to tackle farmland, public land and waterway degradation. There are many different versions of that in my electorate. We will say it was us and it was our weed eradication. Landcare evokes passion – passion to the extent that when we interviewed in 2021 the then CEO of Landcare, whose name is Andrew Maclean, he spoke about 600 groups, 17,000 families and 60,000 individual members. There are a diverse range of activities in restoration and in support of ecosystems, including fox and rabbit control projects in Venus Bay. The Bass Coast Landcare Network is leading the climate change adaptation project with its mass plantings. The South Gippsland Landcare Network is looking at threatened invertebrates in the western Strzeleckis. Yarram Landcare looks at and helps with coastal saltmarsh protection and wetlands revival. Whether it is pests, weeds, habitat restoration or projects on private land or on public land, tree planting is the religion of Landcare, and we all should sign up. I know when I first came in here some many years ago I planted with Landcare, and I went back recently and saw the growth of those beautiful native trees around Korumburra waterways.

What we now know also is that this government is cutting funding after June. There is only funding up to June next year. They are cutting part-time Landcare facilitators and regional Landcare coordinators. On that same inquiry we heard that the Landcare facilitators program was an outstanding program that supported the important work that the volunteers did – leveraged that work. We heard that the coordinators look at data collection and group coordination surveys to know that the work that they are doing makes a difference.

In our own small way, in the minority report into the declining ecosystems, I and the Nationals and Liberals called on this Victorian government to invest in strengthening regionally based natural resource management programs, including Landcare. So I call on the minister to reinvest. Find the money and continue the support for Landcare coordinators and facilitators.