The Caring for our Country program is an ill-thought-out rush-job, more designed to quieten the unrest of regional communities and environment groups than to target the conservation and resource management needs of Australia’s future.
This is not strategic approach, it is a grab-bag of ad-hoc election commitments and icon issues, and there is no new money here. This is a slight of hand with environmental and natural resource management funding by Peter Garrett. It is not at all clear from this announcement which other existing programs are being cut.
I am extremely concerned that what we’re seeing here is an ill-disguised cutting of funding to natural resource management and the environment. The Minister needs to come clean with a list of which existing programs are being cut. What will happen for instance to our marine programs or the Community Water Grants program?
While the program claims to bring a range of existing programs into a one-stop-shop, what is missing is the planning framework and longer term investment strategies to ensure projects are integrated and targeted to deliver. Far from reducing the number of scattered and isolated projects this approach will magnify the problems outlined by the audit office. It fails to build on the lessons learned from the decades of conservation and land management programs. The effect of this on funding will be to spread the vegemite even thinner.
It undermines regional natural resource management groups and catchment management organisations and returns to the bad old days of direct funding of individuals and groups for short-term projects. This is a backward step for the environment.
I am sure Latham recruited Garrett because of his potential damage to the Green vote, not his heroic aspirations for change.
Rob Hirst was the power and the passion behind Midnight Oil. Garrett was just the front man doing a funny dance. Nothing has changed.
Garrett is now the minister for green-wash. His smiling face and bald dome have been sidelined from the hard issues such as climate change to tokenistic feel good programs with little use beyond symbolism.
The demise of Garrett’s integrity is an important lesson to those who feel, as he did, that it is better to be within the circle of power than outside it complaining. Any sentiment for change that Garrett may have held has now been used as cosmetic trimmings to an ALP that is every bit as much committed to greed, pollution and ad-hocracy as the Howard government was. Rudd (and Garrett) are just administrators of the status-quo, all be it with a few more green cosmetic trimmings.
In a nation and a globe confronting ecological tipping points, small steps in the right direction is just another funny dance, not a realisitic solution to anything.
I am sure thousands of well intentioned Australians (including Greens members) will apply for funding for various programs under Garrett’s portfolio, and no doubt many of them will be photographed with Garrett and used in ALP propaganda.
It is important for the Greens to challenge this mode which is essentially pork barrelling and P.R. of the same sort the previous government engaged in with ad hoc rural development grants.
Also, watch Garrett do the same thing as minister for the arts in providing cosmetic funding programs to Aboriginal Australia. I understand Garrett is allready supporting a world class national indigenous theatre, which I fully support. But this and other “success stories” (isolated instances of reasonable funding) will become the face of the Rudd government’s indigenous program, as was the high profile theatrics of the apology and opening of parliament, while entrenched and systematic poverty and violence is maintained into the next generations - swept under the carpet.
the labor party is doing what politicians do, when in power. are you surprised?
if you want a different result, you need a different system. if you had started working for democracy 30 years ago, you would have the tools today for substantive action. but you didn’t understand this then, and probably still don’t.
the penalty for stupidity, for ignorance, for narcissistic posturing, remains the same: failure.
I wonder if as Garret is standing at the mirror (Rupert Everet fashion) in the morning, contemplating the day ahead and slowly combing his fingers through his hair, if he is thinking forestry.
Unprecedented numbers of whale calves have been abandoned on the coast of Australia in recent years, mortality apparently unheard of prior to the 1960 - 70’s.
Whales are mammals. Mammals encountering starvation or food shortage are known to abandon their young, humans included. Fish stocks are obviously depleted. Whale starvation is to be expected. Over fishing is being incorrectly blamed.
Southern Ocean krill and plankton eating baleen whales also eat pilchards, herring and anchovies but the bay and estuary seagrass nurseries of these small fish are being smothered and destroyed by nutrient pollution feeding algae and epiphyte growth. This is NOT over-fishing.
There are apparently no estimates or measurement of nutrient types and levels spewing into coastal current running along shore from southern Australia waters to the Great Barrier Reef, Coral Sea and beyond. There is downstream impact including algae causing coral bleaching and devastation of Pacific islander traditional staple food, fish resources. Impact of fish resource devastation includes collapse of the Solomon Islands barter economy and development of chronic poverty and unrest now costing Australian taxpayers billions to police.
QUESTIONS TO AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT ENVIRONMENT MINISTER GARRETT.
1. Has an environment impact study been conducted on the downstream impact on the western Pacific Ocean environment consequent to nutrient pollution exposed from deep dredging excavation of Botany Bay for a desalination pipeline in the Minister’s electorate?
2. Has an environment impact study been conducted on the total combined impact on the downstream marine environment consequent to deep virgin dredging in ancient seabed nutrient rich soil in Port Phillip Bay for superships, of the Yarra River estuary, of Botany Bay for a desal pipeline, of Moreton Bay for harbour extension, from road construction earthwork exposure intersecting many catchment creeks and rivers, and from uncontrolled dumping of sewage nutrient pollution, all combined nutrient load running into ocean along-shore ecosystem current at the same time?
3. Do environment impact studies include impact on human society dependent on livelihood and/or essential protein food resources from ocean environment damaged or destroyed by nutrient pollution?
4. Will Minister Garrett seek acknowledgement of factual existence or not of the “postulated” eddy mechanism (David A. Griffin et al) likely transporting southern city nutrient pollution from Fraser Island along shore current waters onto the Great Barrier Reef?
5. While governments are developing aquaculture policy, does the Australian Government propose development of ocean ecosystem management policy.
At present over $A.1.3 billion is leaving Australia annually to import primarily finned fish product due to local inability to now supply demand. These imports include finned fish to feed aquaculture.
There is dire urgent need for whole of ocean ecosystem -environment management policy. Ignorance with intent may constitute negligence in crime against humanity and the environment.
Another question Minister Garrett, have you got any funding for environment research to find where algae blooms in the Southern Ocean are getting their food from?
See
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/11/2186169.htm
It would be great if you could help by asking the ABC to report the name of the algae involved. It might help toward finding solutions.
The best defence we Greens have against nuclear power in this country is an aggressive program to build solar thermal plants.
Just read the article below referring to Prof Plimers comment’s and it will be obvious enough:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/03/17/2191969.htm?section=justin
If we sit on our hands and rely on the market to wake up to what is obvious to us then we take an unbelievable risk. Our grandkids (and their grandkids) expect more from us.
Ausra released a study showing Solar Thermal can supply 90% of the US energy needs.
Its too late for mere policy settings to save us. We need to take a responsible stance and get these things built asap. Its an emergency.
Our present absurd complacency about the actual implementation (i.e. no specific plan to underwrite the construction) will guarantee us a nuclear future. :(
you forgot to mention, though I know you questioned it sterlingly in Senate Estimates, that this decision has also cost hundreds of jobs. On Friday over 100 people found out immediately that they didn’t have a job past June 08.
And that is not just about the socio-economic impact it will have on various communities, particularly rural ones. It’s also about the phenomenal loss of knowledge and capacity that is about to walk out the door, severely hampering efforts to restore and protect our environment.
This government, like the one before it, not only chose to ignore advice from the public service, it also put stupid inane election promises such as $100 million for unnecessary and ineffective ‘community’ coastcare grants ahead of recogising that the key ingredient to saving our environment and managing it sustainably is humans. It is our knowledge, ability to persuade and demonstrate to others a better way of doing things, to share expertise, to find new solutions, to find ways to work across differing viewpoints that makes successful natural resource management.
This government, by cutting the legs out from under hundreds of jobs, hundreds of humans, just knee-capped its own environmental agenda. Why do governments always insist they know better in the face of mountains of contrary evidence? So once again we will lose a lot of community goodwill and capacity, and once again take several steps backwards in the name of going ‘forwards’.
myriad @ 7 - quite right.
One of the recurring problems with the NHT system is the funding rollover. After one system finished, it took a while for the Government of the day to wake up and organise the next round of funding. In the meantime, researchers and workers had to go elsewhere in order to survive. When it came time for them to come back under a new arrangement, they had already found employment elsewhere.
This causes gaps in experience and knowledge, and is no way to run effective environmental programs. What is the point in funding someone to complete several years of research, only to give them no guarantee about ongoing funding or placement?
Check out Rachel’s media release on the topic.
Mr Garrett must be losing so much sleep on some of these wacky un-environmental decisions he now has to deal with. Poor guy. In the meantime our pristine environment is suffering. I think Peter Garrett better wake up and have a good hard look at himself.