Page 4122 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 18 November 2015
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The government is committed to ensuring it delivers an effective and targeted annual environmental weeds control program for the territory. Environmental weeds can spread aggressively and cause damage to the environment, the economy and animal health. Impacts include smothering and destruction of native vegetation and degradation of habitat; the reduction of farm income through competition with desirable species and crops; poisoning of grazing animals; and the degradation of recreational amenity.
Within the framework of the ACT weeds strategy and with technical input from the Weeds Advisory Group, Territory and Municipal Services, TAMS, prioritises annual control works to protect high conservation value sites from weeds posing the highest risk. There is a level of triaging that goes on here. Some weeds are at a point where their spread is such that spending money trying to manage them would not necessarily be a good use of resources; protecting things like our key river corridors from initial incursions of certain species of weeds is obviously a much higher priority. That prioritisation is taking place all of the time by our rangers and land managers, who understand the importance of keeping particular species out.
That goes to, for example, recent incursions of Madagascan fireweed, which arrived in the ACT via imported turf from the north coast of New South Wales. TAMS has worked incredibly hard to control that initial incursion, because it is not a species that is present here in the ACT. I could reel off a long list of activities that have been undertaken, including physical removal; engagement of turfing contractors; trips to the actual turf farm on the New South Wales north coast to try and address this issue; discussions with the New South Wales government; and now a program that will continue over an extended five, six or seven-year period because we know that that is the period in which, despite the fact that all current incursions of Madagascan fireweed have been controlled and the actual day-to-day plants are gone, the seeds can remain dormant. That is a great example of tackling a weed, committing the resources to it, and being very clear that this is the target. The objective that we have is to prevent, in particular, new weeds getting established in the ACT.
In 2015-16, TAMS will deliver $1.526 million of environmental weed control work throughout the territory, focusing on priority species for control such as serrated tussock, St John’s wort, blackberry, African lovegrass and Chilean needle grass. As I mentioned, the government is also focused on managing new incursion species, such as Madagascan fireweed.
I can report that $1.211 million, or 79 per cent of the total budget of $1.526 million available to TAMS, is made up of recurrent funding. This represents a 60 per cent increase of recurrent funding from the previous budget of $759,000, and a 136 per cent increase from the 2013-14 recurrent budget of $513,000.
Ms Lawder’s remarks showed a certain inconsistency. Right at the start she said that we need special project-based funding for new incursions and we need to have these hits of money coming in, but she later said that stop-start funding is not good. I agree with her on that: stop-starting funding for weed control is not a good outcome. It is what we have seen over the years. If we look at the actual funding for weeds, we have
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