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I want to talk, Mr Speaker, about the community landcare groups and their support from the Environment and Culture Division of my department. These groups include park care groups which relate to a number of areas of Canberra Nature Park, the Murrumbidgee River Corridor, and Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve. Their focus is generally indigenous native vegetation and related weed control, with some also assisting with survey and monitoring roles. Groups with an urban landscape focus, many identifying themselves as landcare groups, are distributed across Canberra and tend to focus on native vegetation and/or weed control, although some have a particular ecological or wildlife emphasis. Other groups include rural groups, identifying themselves as landcare groups, or catchment protection groups. These relate to the Paddy's River catchment, the Royalla-Williamsdale area and Pialligo, with a focus on coordinated approaches to land degradation problems such as erosion, salinity, vegetation loss, and so on. Another group is paddock carer groups for horse holding paddocks, some identifying themselves as landcare groups. These vary in their depth of activity from serving as a point of contact to preparing land management strategies involving revegetation and erosion control.

School-based groups, which I referred to earlier this afternoon, have a diverse range of focused activities. These are distributed across Canberra, with some development of coalitions based on educational clusters. Some identify themselves as park care juniors or junior landcare groups. Waterwatch groups, supported by the Office of the Environment, engage in very significant environmental monitoring. Other community groups have emerged with a specific focus which is not part of a system as such, such as the newly formed friends of grasslands group and community groups such as those which assist at the Namadgi National Park and Googong foreshores without assuming a care group title. They tend to have different focus activities, such as revegetation, hut restoration, track development and interpretation, et cetera. Another group is the Australian Trust for Conservation Volunteers, which assists with a wide range of on-ground activities in a number of areas, and there are representatives of community groups in mechanisms for landcare-related planning and policy development, grant assessment, judging awards and other activities, through representation on consultative mechanisms within the Environment and Culture Division.

Mr Speaker, over the past five years, and in particular over the last two years, the ACT region has been experiencing very rapid growth in levels of community participation in landcare projects, the most rapid growth being in and adjacent to the urban area. This growth in demand has coincided with three things: First of all, ACT self-government and the attendant realities of managing the Territory within the bounds of economic efficiency, ecological sustainability and social responsibility; secondly, increasing integration of policy, regulatory and planning aspects of environmental management previously treated as separate issues; and, thirdly, increased focus on and improved mechanisms for community participation in land use planning and management through integrated planning legislation and the Territory Plan.

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