Speech to the National Landcare Conference

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Thank you to Landcare for having me here today, at your national conference, on the home of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation.
 
I pay my respects to their elders past and present – the traditional owners of this land – and acknowledge their ongoing connection to Gadigal country. 

We can never forget that land care in Australia has a sixty thousand year history. 

We are so lucky to share this continent with the world’s oldest continuous culture, and the most successful environmental custodians on earth. 

Indigenous Australians actively managed their country, with controlled burning and established fisheries and the gradual domestication of native plants.  

They developed a living relationship with the land – not of domination and conquest, but of mutual care and dependence.  

As contemporary land carers, as supporters of sustainable agriculture, we can all learn from their remarkable example.
 
That’s why I’m so pleased our government will double the number of Indigenous Rangers by the end of the decade. 

Can I also acknowledge the other speakers joining me this morning: 

• Doug Humann, the Chair of Landcare Australia 
• Dr Ian Cresswell, the co-author of the latest State of the Environment Report  

And of course, Costa Georgiadis –  

The wizard of worm farming. The undisputed king of compost.  

And the already legendary host of Gardening Australia.  

After you’ve met Barack Obama, it takes a lot to leave you star struck … but this might be one of those rare occasions. 

Because like most of you at this conference, I’m also a passionate amateur botanist.  

If you scroll through my phone, you’ll see pictures of my kids, you’ll see photos of my new puppy dog, but mostly you’ll see a stream of native plants and flowers.  

It’s a bit of an obsession – and it’s starting to become an issue at work.  

My staff members will be trying to rush me off to our next event, and I’ll be crouched over a wattle bush – trying to get the perfect shot.  

But that’s what gardening does: it gets under your skin.  

There’s something about feeling the soil in your hands – about watching a tiny seed grow into something wild and beautiful – that makes you fall in love with the natural world.   

You see the magic of creation up close … and you feel a new reverence for the web of life that’s all around us.  

Costa has done as much as anyone to light that fire in Australians.  

And he’s a worthy successor to another icon of Australian conservation: Peter Cundall.  

Peter passed away in December last year, aged 94.  

He lived an amazing life, from the streets of Manchester to the Tamar Valley, and I know you all join me in honouring his wonderful legacy.  

Friends, this was one of the first invitations I accepted after I became federal Minister for the Environment and Water.  

Because Landcarers are my people.  

I love what you do. I love what you stand for.  

And when I retire and have free time again, I have no doubt that I’ll be in a comfortable sweater, a sensible hat, and I’ll be weeding the local bushland with my fellow volunteers.  

Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of meeting one of the Landcare groups in Canberra – the Red Hill Regenerators.  

These volunteers live on the hill behind Parliament House, and they’ve spent the past thirty years restoring one of the last remnants of red gum and yellow box grassy woodland in Australia.  

It’s been a painstaking labour of love – pulling invasive species out of the ground, clump by clump, patch by patch – and it won them a very deserving national Landcare award last year.  

After the event, it struck me that the Red Hill Regenerators could teach their neighbours and my colleagues down in Parliament some helpful lessons.
 
Because if you follow the debate in federal politics, you hear a lot of nonsense about the environment.  

Like that climate change is an issue for people in the city, but not for people in the country.  

Or that the environment is a luxury issue.  

Or worse, that the whole thing is a hobby for sandal wearers and latte sippers …  

… which, by the way, must really confuse our rural baristas – who’ve been selling delicious, organically sourced flat whites for years now.   

But I digress.  

One thing I respect about Landcare is how you don’t get slowed down by these petty debates.  

I’m sure that every Landcare group contains a great diversity of political opinion – but that’s not the point.  

The point is getting together to clean up your local water way.  

The point is restoring native vegetation to a back paddock – so a threatened species has a better chance of survival.   

It’s helping a farmer improve their soil – so their operation can be more efficient and more productive.  

It’s teaching a new generation of kids, often from the city, about the land and agriculture and where their food comes from.  

That’s what Landcare has always been about – and that’s why you’ve been such an enduring success.   

People are hungry for these kinds of opportunities.  

They want to be part of something optimistic and practical.  

Something that solves problems. That looks after country.  

That brings people together.  

When Bob Hawke announced the national decade of Landcare back in 1989, he was flanked by Rick Farley and Phillip Toyne – the President of the National Farmers Federation and the President of the Australian Conservation Foundation. 

Fittingly, the three of them met in the town of Wentworth, which is the point where Australia’s two great rivers, the Murray and the Darling, finally converge together.   

As Bob acknowledged that day, these were organisations ‘one would probably not imagine forming an alliance’.  

But perhaps we shouldn’t have found it so surprising.  

Because as Rick and Phillip both argued, farmers and conservationists had a great deal in common. 

Australian farmers were concerned about the growing cost of erosion, soil degradation, and a loss of fertility in the land.  

And conservationists were worried about what this immense ecological stress would mean for the vast expanse of Australia covered by agriculture.  

That’s how it all began.  

With a farmer, a greenie, and a trade unionist.    

Three decades later, three has grown into more than 100,000 people – with over 6,000 chapters around the country. 

And from Landcare, you’ve branched out into Junior Landcare, Intrepid Landcare, Coastcare, Rivercare, Dunecare, and Bushcare. 

Landcare didn’t just bring farmers and conservationists together.  

It brought out the inner conservationist in farmers – and it helped environmentalists better understand the realities of rural life.  

It tapped into a form of country environmentalism that was always there, but just needed to be encouraged out – like a seedling from the soil.  

In hindsight, this should have been obvious.  

Because no one lives closer to nature than people on the land.  

And no one is more reliant on a healthy environment and a stable climate for their economic viability.  

It might not be the cuddly version of nature we get on television.  

It can be brutal and violent and unpredictable. 

But out of that daily connection comes a love that you can’t really replicate from a distance.  

Landcare has helped break down the walls between the city and the country.  

I would also note that it’s helped break the barriers between men and women.  

Landcare has always offered a space for female leadership.  

The first time the term Landcare was used in Australia, it was an agreement between Joan Kirner and Heather Mitchell – the first female Premier of Victoria and the first female President of the Victorian Farmers Federation.  

Again, at first glance, this was an odd couple: a country Liberal from Horsham and a Labor activist from Essendon.  

But Landcare created a lifelong bond between the two trailblazing women – and Joan Kirner gave a beautiful eulogy at Heather’s funeral.  

It was the Landcare story in miniature. 

Bringing unexpected groups of people together.  

Transcending their differences.  

And finding real solutions to the problems facing our environment.   

That’s why the Landcare model is as relevant today as it’s ever been. 

When I became Minister for the Environment, one of the first things I did was publicly release the latest State of the Environment report.   

Dr Ian Cresswell is speaking after me, and as a lead author of the report, he will be able to expand on it in more detail.  

His team of researchers did an incredible job – but they produced a very disturbing piece of work.  

• Australia is now the mammal extinction capital of the world, having lost more species than any other continent.  
• In the past five years, the number of threatened ecological communities has grown by another twenty per cent. 
• The number of threatened species has grown by almost ten percent.  
• And for the first time, we have more foreign plant species than native ones in this country. 

It’s clear that, while groups like Landcare are doing brilliant work on the ground, you’re being let down by poor environmental laws. 

Professor Graeme Samuel reviewed the Commonwealth legislation two years ago. 

He concluded that our environmental decisions are slow, they lack coherence, and they don’t actually protect the environment.  

That’s why our government is committed to rewriting the national environmental laws – to build trust, integrity and efficiency into the system.  

And that’s why we’ve promised to develop a new Environmental Protection Agency – to make sure these new laws are being enforced in practice.  

And today, I’m announcing a third arm of this agenda: regional planning.  

Currently, Commonwealth environmental approval decisions are largely done on a project by project basis.  

But these individual decisions don’t take into account the cumulative impact of human activity – which is what actually places an environment under intense stress.  

Currently, approval decisions consider what a single block of new housing will do to a koala habitat – but they don’t consider what a dozen different new developments will do to the same stretch of bushland.  

If we only assess each of these applications on their own – rather than their impact on a living region, with all its organic connections and relationships – it’s easy to conclude that everything will be fine.  

But that ignores the combined pressure that overlapping changes might be placing on the same ecosystem or a waterway. 

And it means we won’t know when a system or a species is reaching a breaking point, or falling below a critical mass.  

It’s not usually the first proposal that’s a problem … it’s the 10th proposal or the 15th proposal.  

This is how we end up with the findings in the State of the Environment Report – where things are bad and getting worse.   

Or to take another example: it doesn’t always make sense to manage our threatened species individually, as we currently do.  

That’s because species within a region often face the same threats.  

It could be cats on Kangaroo Island, Gamba grass in Kakadu, or feral horses in the Alpine region.
  
In these cases, it’s not clear why we manage these threats as if they apply to an individual species, or to a single property.  

It’s more effective to think and act regionally.  

Regional plans can tell us what habitats are growing in abundance.  

And they can tell us what habitats have been so degraded that even minor projects could have serious ecological consequences.
 
They can tell us what areas are vital for connectivity in the landscape – where animals travel for food and water and to escape disasters like bushfires.  

Regional plans can tell us which parts of the landscape need to be protected.
 
And they also can tell us where projects can proceed with minimal impact.  

These plans are like good data and effective compliance.  

They’re not a direct part of our environmental laws – but without them, our laws can’t deliver the standards of protection we expect.  

Now, I know that many of you will be thinking: regional planning is not a new concept.  

If you’ve been around for a while, you’ve probably taken part in some sort of regional planning exercise.  

We already have regional natural resource management schemes, and some states have their own regional development plans.  

And you’re right: a lot of regional planning work has already been done. 

And we have no interest in going in, pulling things down, and starting again from scratch.  

We will absolutely build on all the great work that has been done already. 

But what’s new here is how regional plans will be used by the Commonwealth to underpin and improve our system of environmental protection: 

To help us better understand the cumulative environmental impacts of individual projects and past decisions. 

And to more effectively address threats to our vulnerable and threatened species.   

I want to talk to fellow environment ministers about how we can make regional plans as useful as possible and how we can avoid duplication.  

If the Commonwealth and states and territories can cooperate to establish regional plans, they become more useful. They provide more certainty. 

And I want to consult with stakeholders – with the people involved in managing our land and waters, and who have an interest in land use planning. 

That means First Nations Australians, National Resource Management organisations, farmers, industry, community and volunteer groups, and of course the Landcare movement here today.  

Everyone needs an opportunity to be involved in consultation about how regional planning will roll out – and in the planning process itself.  

We need policy experts – but we also need people with local knowledge. 

Because these plans need to be integrated across land uses, programs and tenures. 

We don’t want artificial boundaries getting in the way of us managing ecosystems as ecosystems.  

Regions come in different sizes – some very large and some quite small. 

Good environmental management means adjusting to the landscape as it exists – not forcing our own models onto the natural world.  

And of course, our plans need to be guided by evidence and good science and take account of our changing climate.  

Improving resilience to climate change needs to be heart of everything we do.  

We will start working on these regional plans immediately.  

My department will consult on the practicalities – like how we decide boundaries and how plans will be formalised.  

We want regional planning to be well underway by the time we pass our improved environmental laws next year. 

But the full rollout will happen over time, and no doubt the plans themselves will evolve.  

Friends, these are big changes. 

New Commonwealth environmental laws.  

A new Environmental Protection Agency.  

Regional planning.  

And tomorrow, the Prime Minister will announce another important part of our environmental agenda.  

We’re being ambitious – because we have to be.   

If we don’t act now; if we don’t change our behaviour; if we don’t begin to treat our home more gently; we’ll be resigning ourselves to another generation of decline and loss.   

We need to reform our system of environmental protection. 

But legal changes will only succeed if they’re matched in the community … if they're supported by millions of Australians, in every state, in every suburb and town, doing their bit for the environment.  

Being here today, seeing the inspiring work that Landcare is doing around the country – it fills me with hope.   

And it reminds me of something my Dad taught me as a kid.  

My Dad planted many trees over the years, and he liked to take us back to visit them as they grew bigger and stronger. 

But perhaps his greatest contribution to our local environment were the trees he watered through long hot summers, in the park across from our house.
 
He’d fill two huge buckets from our house and carry them across road, to keep the trees alive.  

Those trees are still there today.  

Huge, magnificent trees, home to birds and possums and other tiny creatures.     
 
Dad never needed to say it out loud – but the lesson shone through the power of his example.  

Each of us has a responsibility to the environment – and each of us can help in our own way, big or small.
  
That was my Dad’s message – but it’s also the message of Landcare.  

So thank you all for doing what you do.  

This organisation is a national treasure – and every single one of you should be incredibly proud of your contribution to it.
 
Thank you.