Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Well, it gives me great pleasure to rise tonight to talk about Landcare Tasmania. I had the honour of going to their AGM last week and note that for the House that Landcare Tasmania is 30 years old this year and it was indeed the first independent peak body for land care in Australia. So, congratulations and happy birthday to Landcare Tasmania.
What do they do? They operate under a vision that reads: ‘All Tasmanian communities are empowered and enabled to care for the land and water of lutruwita/Tasmania’. They have a mission to build resilience and capacity to protect, restore and manage Tasmania’s landscapes by connecting, supporting and educating the community. They have a purpose to represent, strengthen, support and grow Tasmania’s community landcare movement. Their objectives are to promote community landcare, to represent community landcare as an advocacy body, to connect people and organisations with interest in landcare, to support landcarers with admin info and funding, and to establish and maintain a public fund. They do a really good job.
People might remember from back in 1996, one of their first actions, let us call it, was to paint a tree red in the Midlands to highlight the problem of tree decline in the Midlands. They have been around a long time and done a very good job.
I acknowledge the board in particular, because the board are volunteers, chaired by Bill Harvey and also Peter Voller, Melinda McHenry, Vanessa Bleyer, Rosemary Collins, Mark Harrison and Katrina Spark. They oversee the governance of this organisation. I give a shoutout to Peter Stronach, who is the CEO, and his staff. There are 22 staff at Landcare Tasmania. They have project officers, education officers and event managers, and they do a fabulous job.
At the end of the day, Landcare Tasmania are a member organisation. They represent the peak body for member organisations that are working in the landcare space. This includes landholders, farmers, schools, community groups and businesses. There are 313 groups that are members of Landcare. That is a 14 per cent increase over the last year or so.
To give you sense, some of the Landcare groups in my electorate in Clark include Claremont Coast Care, the Derwent Catchment Project, Friends of Collinsvale, Friends of Knocklofty Reserve, nipaluna Nursery, the Taroona Environment Network, Hobart Rivulet Bushcare Group, Friends of Sandy Bay Rivulet and the Friends of Mount Nelson Bushcare Group. A great cross section of groups there doing fabulous work.
Nearly all of those organisations are volunteer based. Obviously, the staff of Landcare are paid, but the real engine room of Landcare and its member groups is volunteers. They estimate that they have 7000 volunteers across that network of groups. They have come up with the figure of 177,000 hours of volunteer work that was delivered in the last year.
We have just had our volunteer week and been recognised with some volunteer awards. That is an incredible effort. If you cost that out at $30, which is probably pretty cheap for someone working on the tools these days, that is $5.3 million of work being put into our local environment in some incredibly important projects.
The programs they run are things like member support, where they execute projects, they engage with volunteers, they assist their groups with the administration, they upskill and train people to build capacity and they manage this great project called Project Bank, which is an opportunity, an interactive map that tells people where a whole bunch of projects are going on.
They are involved in landscape restoration. They give grants, they have active restoration projects on the west coast, the east coast and the Huon and Channel catchments. It begs the question of the establishment of a restoration fund here in Tasmania. The Tasmanian Government can and should be funding to empower groups to do more in this space. We really do need to get a restoration fund up and running in this state.
They work on feral cats with information and workshops. They have a couple of pilot projects where they trap, dispatch and then monitor feral cats. That is happening in the Huon Valley and on the east coast. They are about communications and outreach. Last year they had 53 outreach events. They build capacity and they teach people about important projects such as the NRM South Swift Parrot Project.
Last year I went to their annual conference at Spring Bay Mill. There were hundreds of people there who were sharing stories, sharing knowledge and making connections. Through advocacy in schools and local groups, they are building knowledge. In the last election, they engaged in advocacy to try to improve the policy space.
Congratulations to Landcare. Happy birthday.
Time expired.
