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Parliamentary Questions


Question Without Notice No. 638 asked in the Legislative Council on 12 June 2019 by Hon Diane Evers

Parliament: 40 Session: 1

NATURAL RESOURCE MANAGEMENT — 2019–20 STATE BUDGET

638. Hon DIANE EVERS to the Minister for Regional Development:

I refer to the $6.5 million per annum allocated to natural resource management activities in the 2019–20 state budget.

(1) Is the minister aware that this amount is significantly lower than historical state government funding levels—for example, $30 million in 2009?

(2) Given that the scope and impact of environmental problems has been increasing and is likely to continue to do so, why has this level of funding not been increased in this budget?

(3) What steps is the state government taking to address the difficulties of keeping volunteers engaged in NRM activities when federal contributions are limited and often based on a reductionist, rather than holistic, decision-making model?

(4) Given we have another three years of Liberal control of federal funds, what is this state government doing to ensure that land conservation district committees are able to carry on addressing environmental issues?

Hon ALANNAH MacTIERNAN replied:

I thank the member for the question.

(1)–(4) First of all, I need to correct the member: the sum she referred to is regional natural resource management, and we have in the budget, across the forward estimates, around $7.6 million per annum. It is not just $6.5 million; that is just the regional allocation. In total, we are committing $7.75 million.

In respect of the $30 million figure in 2009 that the member has chosen, we have not been able to discover why we saw that huge spike that year and to what extent it may have consisted of federal funding. But we can tell the member that that was totally and utterly atypical, and the funding the following year was less than $5 million. Generally speaking, funding levels continued at around $6 million. We made a very clear election commitment to provide NRM funding to guarantee at least $6.5 million, but we have added to that and made it $7.75 million.

We certainly cannot fill the gap created by the federal government; we think it is completely reprehensible that it has moved away from funding its share. Given our current budget constraints, we cannot fill that gap, but we are trying to get the next rounds moved forward very quickly so we can keep our pipeline of projects going. Indeed, the applications for next year's funding round closed this month. We have a series of small grants of between $1 000 and $35 000 for projects of a duration of up to 12 months—really focusing on smaller projects—and we have large grants, intended to be more strategic, that can last for up to three years. We think we are certainly more than meeting our election commitment in this area.