Page 915 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 20 April 2021
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Environment—community conservation groups
MS CLAY (Ginninderra) (6.37): I rise to speak about caring for our parks and urban landscapes. I am the Greens crossbench spokesperson for parks and conservation and one of the great privileges in my role is heading out on the weekend to join work parties. I have had tours, I have done weeding and I have planted trees on Gossan Hill, Mount Painter, around the townhouses in Belconnen, on the Pinnacle and on Black Mountain. I have dug holes and filled them up with water. I have sworn at many, many thistles. I may even learn to identify a native grass if I am given enough coaching.
This is the best way to meet the enormous crew of volunteers we have in Canberra who are caring for our land. I find out what our government is doing right to help support them, and, because this is Canberra, I also find out at great length what we are doing wrong. We have a huge network of Landcare, ParkCare, catchment and citizen science groups. They run on a tiny amount of funding and a huge amount of donated time and goodwill. But we need to give these groups recurrent funds. It is not good enough to give them a handful of cash one year and no guarantee for the next, because if they are going to do the job properly they need to forward plan and come back year after year and keep at it. Weeds do not stop growing at the end of the financial year; that is not how nature works.
We need to start empowering people in their local neighbourhoods to do small plantings and community gardens everywhere. There are a lot of barriers stopping these small schemes, but when they work they are glorious. There is new self-initiated native planting in Belconnen that has been recognised by the Ginninderra Catchment Group, and there are hundreds of self-starter pocket parks everywhere. My street set up a mini golf course in our walkway during COVID. It is a fantastic invitation to play and is full of kids all the time. We need to recognise the amazing social and health benefits of nature. During COVID the volunteers grieved when they could not get out to gather and grow things together and we all realised how precious these ultra-local spots are.
We also need to get better at sharing our space. We are really lucky in Canberra, compared to other cities, because we have green spaces and we have mountains and parks, and we need to protect them. We have room for our walkers and mountain bikers, our birdwatchers and the preservation of nature, so long as we share properly. We also need to share with the native plants and animals who belong here. Tools like NatureMapr show a wealth of wildlife, from orchids to peacock spiders to superb parrots, and we need to make sure that we keep those for future generations.
I am really pleased to see that we have a greater uptake of traditional and Ngunnawal practices. We have six new Ngunnawal rangers now and are hoping for another four next budget. We are seeing an increasing acceptance of cool cultural burns and traditional techniques that really look after the land and water, and there are great programs like Kickstart that show the cross benefits in terms of health and education when we embed traditional knowledge in our lives.
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