Scrapping Australia’s “green army” without restoring Landcare funding to pre-2014 levels would further weaken community conservation efforts, experts have said.
The Turnbull government is reportedly set to abolish the derided environmental program – to the dismay of its creator and greatest champion, the former prime minister Tony Abbott.
Its abolition would save $350m, of which $100m would go towards Landcare in a one-off funding boost secured by the Greens in exchange for their help passing the backpacker tax.
The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, refused to confirm the budget change on Monday, telling reporters they would “have to wait until Myefo” – referring to the the midyear budget update on 19 December.
For Landcare, an internationally renowned volunteer-driven organisation born in 1989 of an unlikely partnership between the Australian Conservation Foundation and the National Farmers’ Federation, it is another chapter in a long funding saga.
Landcare lost $484m, half its ongoing funding, in the 2014 federal budget, despite promises from the Coalition that it would not be touched. At the same time, the green army, the flagship program of Abbott’s environment policy, received $535m.
The cuts had a significant impact on the morale and effectiveness of Landcare, which leverages $12 of voluntary contributions for every $1 spent, according to a 2014 report.
Landcare’s chief executive, Tessa Jakszewicz, said axing the green army without restoring its funding to pre-2014 levels could be even more devastating because the organisation would not be able to use green army resources to complete projects it could no longer afford to do on its own.
The grassroots movement is a registered provider of the green army program, which arms unemployed young people with shovels and busses them out to do conservation projects for less than the minimum wage. About 40% of those who participated through Landcare have since found work.
Jakszewicz said each program had its “unique benefits” but if the pool of money were capped, as it was in 2014, “obviously our preference would be that all that money went to Landcare”.
Ideally, she said, you would fund both. “We would not expect that Landcare would have been reduced to support the green army program, and think that the green army program could have been separate and committed to separately,” she said.
There are 5,400 Landcare groups in Australia, of which 1,400 are in rural or regional areas. Those groups link into 56 natural resource management areas.
Funding has been moved away from Landcare into other, accompanying programs a number of times in its 27 years: first to the national NRM model, under the Howard government, followed by a 40% reduction in funding to the NRM model under the Rudd government’s 2008 Caring for Our Country program.
A Melbourne University associate professor of geology, Ian Rutherford, said axing green army funding was yet another bait-and-switch to reduce overall spending on conservation in Australia.
How the additional funding secured by the Greens will be distributed is yet to be determined but Rutherford said it would not provide the long-term security required to add staff or orchestrate significant long-term projects.
“They will have to blow the money on local tree-planting efforts – that’s usually what happens,” he said. “It’s almost the worst of all possible worlds.”
Rutherford said the organisation needed funding security to rehire local coordinators – jobs funded by the pooled resources of neighbouring Landcare groups – and to organise big-picture conservation projects, such as catchment management on the Great Barrier Reef.
“These are chronic, long-term problems that need long-term, strategic decisions,” he said. “Landcare is among the most successful environmental programs in the world … Now there’s a very good chance that we are looking at its demise.”
The green army had done some good work, he said, but the effect was fleeting compared with the long-term commitment of local volunteers. “Green army rolls up in their van and they build a fence and they disappear and the fence falls down,” he said.
Max Kitchell, formerly head of the national peak body NRM regions, agreed: conservation work was done well by both the green army and Landcare volunteers, but it was the commitment of local Landcare volunteers that ensured the work was maintained, he said.
Kitchell said the loss of local coordinators, combined with the loss of morale, meant Landcare groups “deflated” and lost motivation after the 2014 budget cut.
“Landcare has always been well regarded by the government of the day and this was perhaps the first time that a government, by its funding decision, had demonstrated that Landcare was perhaps not as appreciated as it could have been,” he said.
Kitchell said he continued to hear enthusiastic support for Landcare and the work of NRM groups when meeting bureaucrats in Canberra.
But, he said: “It hasn’t translated, with this government, to a commitment of funding similar to those of previous governments, both Liberal and Labor.”
