Federal funding for natural resources management (NRM), including the Landcare movement, has become a “closed shop” that is undermining regional and local efforts, a damning new Senate report says.
An inquiry by the Senate Standing Committee on Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport, chaired by Nationals Senator Fiona Nash, looked at three decades of NRM programs and found that the latest versions misstook the forest for the trees.
“ ... the national priorities and targets do not translate readily to the local or regional level and have thereby excluded funding for initiatives to address important issues,” the report’s authors wrote.
The report was so critical of the Rudd Government’s $2.8 billion Caring For Our Country funding program that the committee’s Labor Senators felt obliged to defend the program in an appendix.
Landcare NSW chairman David Walker welcomed the review, saying that Landcare was struggling and a fresh approach was needed.
This means not only a funding system that recognises that Landcare co-ordinators and administrative expertise are essential for getting physical work done on the ground, he said, but the rebuilding of networks that have withered or died over recent years.
“There’s currently not a lot of money there to allow volunteers to do what they want to do, and at the same time have some support there for incorporation, or things like finding and applying for funding,” Mr Walker said.
“People need to be able to get on with the on-ground stuff in the knowledge that the organisations that are supporting them are moving ahead.”
The Senate committee report is the latest in a succession of acknowledgements that the Landcare funding model is flawed.
The report said a failing of the current NRM funding is that it is based on “limited consultation with a selective range of stakeholders who were, for the most part, Commonwealth Government agencies”.
“The consequences of this closed shop approach to the establishment of priorities and targets are significant and far reaching.”
The report reserved its strongest condemnation for the Caring For Our Country program, which it said had “alienated and disenfranchised people whose participation in NRM is crucial to its success”.
The program’s emphasis on short-term competitive funding, coupled with reduced support for regional-level planning, is “critically undermining social and institutional capital in regional areas”.
Commenting on the transition to the program from previous funding models. the authors wrote, “The committee has heard from people who are struggling to maintain physical and human resources while they attempt to secure ongoing financial resources.”
“For many, seeing hard won gains in community involvement and project outcomes put at risk during this period of uncertainty has been a source of great stress.”
The committee recommended that more consultation at a regional and local level be undertaken during establishment of national goals, and that the role of regional and local bodies be better defined by the Caring For Our Country program.
It also urged that the competitive grant process be modified “to give greater consideration to the likelihood of projects achieving defined and measurable environmental outcomes".
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