27 July 2008
Privatising nature
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Privatising nature
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An astonishing six million hectares of Australia—something like the size of Tasmania—is now being privately protected for plants and animals. Hundreds of millions of dollars are involved as schemes spring up around the country. But private conservation faces big challenges. Reporter: Di Martin
Documents for download
Nature Refuges in Queensland - Graph (Excel spreadsheet | 719KB)
Description: A graph and table of the number and size of Nature Refuges in Queenland. Suppplied by Environmental Protection Agency, Queensland.
Queensland's Nature Refuges - Map (PDF | 757KB)
Description: A map of the Nature Refuges established in Queensland. Supplied by the Environmental Protection Agency, Queensland.
Conservation Partners Program - NSW (PDF | 137KB)
Description: Statistics on the number of Wildlife Refuges and Conservation Agreements in NSW. Supplied by the Department of Environment and Climate Change, NSW.
Trust for Nature Convenants - Vic (Word Doc | 30KB)
Description: A graph showing the number of covenants registered by Trust for Nature in Victoria. Supplied by Trust for Nature.
National Trust of Australia WA - Graph (Word Doc | 30KB)
Description: Graphs showing the number of covenants registered by the National Trust of Australia (WA). Supplied by the National Trust of Australia (WA).
Privately Conserved Land in Australia (Word Doc | 30KB)
Description: Summary of land that is privately conserved in Australia.
Transcript
Transcript
This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.
KOOKABURRA
Di Martin: I'm Di Martin, and welcome to Background Briefing, which today is traipsing off into the bush.
We discover Australia's wild areas in serious decline, and our plants and animals becoming extinct at an appalling rate. The crisis is galvanising powerful new forces.
New figures prepared by Background Briefing reveal the private sector now manages an astonishing 6-million hectares as wildlife reserves. That's an area almost the size of Tasmania.
This is conservationist, Atticus Fleming.
Atticus Fleming: I don't think there's any doubt that there is a wildlife crisis in Australia. We have the worst mammal extinction rate in the world, 1500-plus threatened species. Each year there are more species and ecosystems added to the endangered list. The challenge of saving our wildlife is now too great for government acting alone. So we certainly need to find new ways of protecting our wildlife and our land.
Di Martin: Atticus Fleming is pioneering some of those new ways. He's head of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, a big conservation charity like Bush Heritage.
Between them they collected $20-million last year to buy and manage private sanctuaries. Which they are managing better than some National Parks, according to the world's largest environmental agency.
From the International Union for Conservation of Nature here's Penny Figgis.
Penny Figgis: The private land trusts have a tremendous vested interest because they have to demonstrate to the people who give them money that they are well managed. And they're often getting money from wealthy people, demanding people, people who will say OK I'll give you money, but I want you to show me what you're doing with it. So unfortunately I think it's probably true that in some cases the private lands will be better managed.
Di Martin: But this is not just a story about charities. About half of this new private conservation estate belongs to individuals, farmers and other landholders who've been setting aside their own reserves.
Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett says it's a conservation revolution.
Peter Garrett: Right across the country we are seeing an amazing outburst of these activities. They're happening with local councils, and small farms on the other sides of towns; they're happening places that some of us have never been to, or know how to spell their names; they're happening voluntarily, because this is what the people who are living in these properties, actually want to do as well. And I think we're actually witnessing the next step if you like, of the conservation ethic of Australians.
Di Martin: Private conservation has certainly taken root. But it's facing tough new realities that threaten to stunt its growth.
First let's take a road trip up Tasmania's Midland Highway, to find out why landholders are setting up reserves.
The Midlands is fine-wool country. Extensively cleared for grazing, it's almost exclusively in private hands. But it's now the focus of millions of scarce conservation dollars.
A chance sighting starts to explain why, greatly exciting my two travelling companions.
Di Martin: What did you just see there Nathan?
Graeme Green: It's a wedgie.
Nathan Males: Yeah it's a wedge tailed eagle.
Graeme Green: A pair of them.
Nathan Males: .. a pair of them, just to our right now, we're just going past, just low to the ground. Looks like they're searching for food low to the ground.
Di Martin: That's ecologist Graham Green in the back seat, and conservationist Nathan Males in the front. They are central in the race to save what's left of the Midlands' native plants and animals.
Nathan Males: Well actually the Midlands is quite a hotspot for wedge-tailed eagles. They're an endangered species in Tasmania, just magnificent, it really excites me to see them.
Di Martin: We're in the Midlands of Tasmania, it's north of the capital city, Hobart, traditionally agricultural land. Just describe why you are interested in biodiversity in this area, which looks largely cleared, largely degraded, lots of dieback; it doesn't look like a very ecologically healthy kind of place.
Nathan Males: Look, I think that's a really good synopsis that it is, particularly this part of the Midlands that we're driving through at the moment, is really in ecological trouble, and as you can see there are dead and dying trees all around us, gorse, which is an invasive weed creeping over the landscape. But it has these amazing pockets that are left, of just the most beautiful, diverse woodlands and grasslands and forests, which are exquisite and outstanding. So it's a strange sort of dichotomy.
Di Martin: Nathan Male's Tasmanian Land Conservancy is just five years old, one of the new breed of private land trusts springing up around the country.
Like Bush Heritage, the Tasmanian Land Conservancy runs on donations, and buys up private land to protect it. But it's also running government programs, with government money, to pay landholders to set up their own wildlife reserves.
The Tasmanian Land Conservancy's latest program is funded from Canberra. It's caught the interest of many Midland farmers, including the owner of Connorville, one of the grand old homesteads of the Northern Midlands.
GREETINGS
Di Martin: Roderick O'Connor runs a massive 18,000 hectare property in the foothills of the Great Western Tiers World Heritage Area. It's one of the State's biggest farms and half of it is still under bush.
Roderick O'Connor is also a self-confessed conservation enthusiast and has already put covenants on parts of his property. That means the land title is changed, so the bush can't be cleared or developed. Farmers usually get a one-off payment to compensate for that lost right.
Roderick O'Connor is planning to covenant some more land.
Roderick O'Connor: Maybe up near the hut area, in the middle forest area, we can actually ...
Di Martin: And he agrees to give Background Briefing a tour.
As we drive out to the block, Roderick O'Connor's enthusiasm becomes obvious as he talks about his resident wedge-tailed eagles.
Roderick O'Connor: I was rapt there was one there, because it was only last year about 400 metres away we saw them doing that mating dance thing they do, or whatever, the pre-mating where they do the swooping and the diving. They were only 50 metres away from us and they were totally oblivious to the fact that we were there. My wife and I just sat down for about two or three hours and just great, one of those great moments.
Di Martin: If he gets some funding to covenant two new blocks, Roderick O'Connor will be conserving a quarter of his property.
Roderick O'Connor: The question with all this is how far do you go. I'm unsure how I want to drive the so-called business of this property. To me it's becoming increasingly evident with the drought that it's hard to sustain the productive inputs. If that's the case what should my focus be? Should I continue to try and produce livestock in some areas, or should I develop the notion which has been building within me for the last decade of trying to conserve my native estate, and convince governments of the day that if you want to do it in the long term, that it does have a significant value to the community, and if we can get paid for some of that biodiversity, maybe it might be in my best interest to be a farmer of conservation, not a farmer so much of livestock.
Di Martin: It's a fascinating development, isn't it?
Roderick O'Connor: Oh, it is. Because it's so contrary to farming thinking. But I'm terribly concerned about the loss of habitat, I'm terribly concerned about actually the loss of the degradation of the species, particularly in this last eight years of significant drought, and if it keeps on continuing, I think we'll have a massive problem.
Di Martin: Let's go and have a look.
We arrive at the edge of a vast wooded block, and hop out into icy midwinter weather. Banks of low-moving snow clouds are scudding over the majestic Tiers.
Connorville's bush blocks have been used for selective logging or running sheep for nearly 200 years.
Roderick O'Connor: Traditionally used for Saxon superfine wethers, very fine superfine wethers.
Di Martin: Those are male sheep?
Roderick O'Connor: Male sheep. To probably the tune of 1-1/2 sheep to the hectare and they will run here for about 10 months of the year. That's basically what it's been doing for the last 100-and-something-odd years.
Di Martin: And how long has this property been in your family?
Roderick O'Connor: The property's been in the family since 1824 continuously, and hoping it will stay in the family for as equally long as ahead.
Di Martin: Now Roderick, can you remember this block as a child?
Roderick O'Connor: Yes, I can remember all these blocks as a child. I suppose when you're younger it always looks bigger and always looks denser than it is today. But yes, we used to have picnics here and I think for the parents to get rid of all the children, we'd have paper chases going through all these blocks, and then they'd actually take us around in a big circle and bring us back to where the barbecue fire was. But it was great fun. I have very fond memories of it.
Di Martin: In the 40 years since Roderick O'Connor ran those chases, his view of the farm's bush blocks has radically changed. Where he once saw sheep runs, he now sees wildlife refuges. He remembers the day his view changed, during a visit by a group of scientists.
Roderick O'Connor: And when they were walking through, just like we are now, they just started bobbing down ten times every half-metre, saying, 'Here's this', and 'Here's that', of which I had absolutely no idea about. And I thought, This is staggering. And it was an epiphany. And from that day on I then said, Really, a lot of these decisions that you make should be driven by science and by understanding what you have on your property.
Di Martin: The scientist who examined this block for the current conservation funding bid is our travelling companion. Ecologist Graeme Green says the 1500 hectare block is a conservation gem.
Graeme Green: Including the area we're now standing in, which is sandy, gravelly, black peppermint country which has been greatly reduced in area and is very biodiverse, has a lot of threatened species amongst it. OK, so you can see here we've got some daisies and heathland plants and a scattering of endemic native grasses.
Di Martin: So you're talking about these grasses over here, the taller grasses, very architectural?
Graeme Green: Yes, and they provide a great deal of habitat for things like bettongs and Tasmanian Devils and quolls. So these areas are very important remnant habitat for a lot of the unique fauna that live in the Midlands.
Di Martin: Now tell us, we're seeing lots of poo here. Are we talking native poo or are we talking non-native poo?
Graeme Green: This is all native, yes.
Di Martin: So tell us, give us a poo analysis Graeme.
Graeme Green: Well you can see here that's the obvious one, that's a wombat, the square shaped scats. You can see here wallaby and possum droppings. So there's obviously a lot of activity here.
Di Martin: And these are reasonably fresh, too aren't they?
Graeme Green: Reasonably fresh, yep, and you'd expect this in a large remnant tract of bush. Occasionally you do come across Devil scats, that's very exciting when you do because obviously the Devils are under great threat in this State and to see Devil activity still occurring in these areas is quite heartening.
Di Martin: Then, just a few minutes later...
So what have you found, Graeme?
Graeme Green: It's a Devil scat which is very exciting.
Di Martin: This is the Tasmanian Devil.
Graeme Green: Tasmanian Devil. So you can see here the little pieces of bone, and quite a lot of hair remaining. So it's very heartening to know that there's still a little bit of Devil activity in this area.
Di Martin: Graeme Green says that even though Roderick O'Connor is a wealthy landowner, he's providing a conservation service to the rest of Australia, and should be paid for taking the sheep off his block and leaving the timber where it is.
Most of the money to conserve private land comes from government, and payments have been one-off and pretty modest.
Roderick O'Connor can afford to set aside a quarter of his property because he doesn't rely on the income from those blocks. But he's also a former asset funds manager, who's banking on a future income from conserving his bush.
Roderick O'Connor is negotiating with the corporate world. He says business is not just interested in his trees, but his biodiversity as well.
Roderick O'Connor: I know there's one or two that I've been discussing with recently, that are not looking at just only carbon, with carbon offsetting, with this property, but also are quite happy with the dynamic of adding a value in for the biodiversity. And they're not even questioning it, so they're streets ahead of what mainstream thinking is, so it's great.
Di Martin: But not everyone on the land is quite as enthusiastic about private conservation as Roderick O'Connor.
Back on the Midland Highway, it's time to visit another farming family which is far more sceptical about permanent covenants.
DOGS BARKING AS CAR PULLS UP
Di Martin: Very excited dogs. The Welcoming Committee.
We've just arrived at the home of Sarah and Steve Barrington. They're a young couple who've recently taken over a 1400 hectare grazing property in Tasmania's Southern Midlands. Sarah has just had her first child.
WELCOMING COOINGS
Di Martin: What's his name Sarah?
Sarah Barrington: Harrison. We're calling him Harry.
Di Martin: Hello Harry.
If Harry eventually takes over the farm, Sarah knows any one-off payment for a permanent covenant will have been spent long ago. Yet Harry will be obliged to pay for controlling weeds, ferals and fire on the block throughout his life. So the Barringtons have been offered a new deal to get them involved in private conservation, the option of a 12-year covenant.
Here's Sarah Barrington.
Sarah Barrington: Maybe we don't know best now. Give the opportunity to generations down the track that they might make decisions that might be better than what I can sit here and make at this point in time, so I guess to make that commitment to be so long-term didn't sit well with me for some reason.
Di Martin: Did you also want to leave your options open?
Sarah Barrington: Oh absolutely. I can't deny that at all, and it doesn't mean that we want to put a bulldozer in 12 years and day 1 at all. But it's just a changing world and we actually also had that bush assessed in 2001 and we were offered some money through another government scheme and the amount that we were offered then, we knocked that back.
Di Martin: How much was that?
Sarah Barrington: It was in the order of $20,000 and that was in perpetuity.
Di Martin: Sarah Barrington says not only was the original offer too low to pay for fencing, or keeping out an invasion of gorse, she had other objections. Like what a covenant would do to the price of her land.
Sarah Barrington: We didn't know what that would do if someone else wanted to buy the farm. So we let that go. And also I didn't believe that was a lot of money for what they were asking us to do. I didn't think that was particularly fair. And, what are we? Seven years later and I think the volumes of money have increased, and so what's going to happen in 12 years time? I mean if the community values that bushland, there's no reason why it can't keep increasing in value.
Di Martin: Sarah Barrington has applied for money through the Federal government program being run by Nathan Males' Tasmanian Land Conservancy.
Sarah joined Nathan and ecologist Graeme Green for a trip up to the bush block.
Graeme Green: So just here somewhere, Sarah?
Sarah Barrington: Yep, here's great.
Di Martin: We hopped out into near zero temperatures at the foothills of some rugged Tasmanian bushland.
Sarah Barrington says her family's never made much money running sheep on this block and it's not much good for logging either.
Sarah Barrington: It's not high value land, it's certainly not cropping land, I mean it's ultimately I believe to be grazing country, and even then at very low stocking rates. Even if you did knock all those trees down and put in improved pastures, you'd struggle to physically get there to some of that country, and the effort to do that I don't believe economically, particularly in today's climate as far as the input costs to do that.
Di Martin: As the drought drags on, sceptical farmers are reconsidering private conservation deals to get a bit of extra cash. Governments are also offering covenants as short as six years to attract newcomers.
Nathan Males says it's a winning combination.
Nathan Males: We wrote to everybody in the whole Midlands region and asked people if they would like to participate in a program to preserve their native vegetation on their farms. Over 80 people responded and said Yes, they would like to explore that idea.
Di Martin: Is that a large number?
Nathan Males: That's a lot. We were expecting maybe 30, 40 in our wildest dreams. So to get 80 letters back saying 'Yes please, come and talk to us', was extraordinary and we were very, very happy with that.
Di Martin: The Federal government program that Nathan Males is running is a tender. It's one of the newest forms of private conservation tools. First farmers are given an assessment of how important their bit of bush is in conservation terms.
Graeme Green assessed the Barrington's block.
Graeme Green: Well I see this land as having great conservation value. On the northern flanks we've got beautiful old growth peppermint woodland, probably some of the best examples I've seen in the Midlands of old growth peppermint. It's never been logged, again which is quite unique for the region. On the southern slopes is really great habitat for wedge-tailed eagles. They tend to favour a southerly or south-easterly aspect and again, it's mature forest and there are two wedge-tailed eagles nests there which makes the land very significant from a conservation perspective.
Di Martin: Once Graeme Green delivered his assessment, Sarah Barrington then had to name her price to set that land aside. The various bids are then sent to government, which chooses the best conservation land for money.
But Sarah Barrington says she found it difficult to set a price.
Sarah Barrington: That was the tricky thing for me to do to try to value that land and we were given some techniques to use to try to value that, but as a grower that was one area that would have been nice to possibly get a little bit more assistance with trying to put values on land.
Di Martin: Farmers are struggling to understand the new tender system, and are leaning heavily on the land trusts to help. Governments generally haven't been paying for that extra assistance.
Around Australia, governments have been enthusiastically promoting tenders as the most cost effective, market based way of getting farmers to set aside land.
But the private land trusts who run the programs, say tenders may be one of the most expensive options over time.
They say the ideal is a permanent covenant, not a short term arrangement that has to be constantly renewed. However, nearly everyone agrees that tenders with their short-term covenants are often the only way to encourage someone like Sarah Barrington to get involved.
Sarah Barrington: Who knows what's going to happen in the future. So whether there's some magical medical thing that can be found in that bushland or whatever, I mean I want it to be there so that those options are there, but I don't want it to be so prescriptive that we feel it's sort of out of our hands, I guess.
Di Martin: Sarah Barrington will find out within the week whether she's won her funding.
There are now 21 covenanting programs operating across the country.
Victoria's system is the oldest, set up in the 1970s when the State government created an independent group, now called Trust for Nature.
Its modest offices are just off Melbourne's Swanston Street, above a Korean internet gaming parlour. A quick lift-ride takes you to the Trust for Nature foyer, utterly dominated by a huge map of Victoria covered in pink and orange dots.
Here's Executive Director, Mike Gooey.
Mike Gooey: Well look, it's a fantastic satellite image of Victoria which shows the good and the bad and the ugly in the sense that we've got these really big patches in the east of Victoria which are pretty much uncleared. So they're the big green bits, and they're great, and they're very important. But the interesting bit is the stuff that isn't green. And that's everything that's been cleared ...
Di Martin: Victoria has cleared more land than any other State or Territory. So it's had to pioneer many of the tools now used to get private landholders to protect their bush blocks.
The conservation covenant is the oldest and most popular option, represented by a rash of pink dots on Mike Gooey's satellite map.
Mike Gooey: So those 900 dots, represent about 37,000 hectares of Victoria. Whilst that's exciting, the downside is there's about 1-million hectares of Victoria with native vegetation in private hands that needs protecting. And that's the great challenge for us. So that's the pink dots.
Di Martin: Tell me about the orange dots here, there's not so many of them.
Mike Gooey: No, the orange dots are pretty exciting too, it's one of our important tools which is called the revolving fund. That's a capital fund that we have which allows us to target properties with high conservation values. We go out there and we buy them and then we covenant them and we onsell them back into private hands.
Di Martin: Mike, there are an awful lot of dots and they're incredibly spread out. That's partly because this is a huge map on a wall. Once you get out into the country and start driving it's a long way away from each other too. How do you know if this farmer up here hasn't decided that times are tough, and they've stuck all the sheep in that bush block which they really weren't supposed to under the conditions of the covenant?
Mike Gooey: Yes look that is one of the risks or liabilities that we have as an organisation. So we have 20 staff spread out across Victoria, and you'll also notice that whilst there are a few dots which are out there on their own, it's actually they're in clusters. And where we do have people who might do the wrong thing either inadvertently or in fact they might do the wrong thing purposefully. More often than not it's actually one of our local covenanters who knows the property who'll give us a call or give our local staff member a call and say, 'Look, we think there's a problem here, can you come out and have a look?'
Di Martin: Is there a punishment?
Mike Gooey: We have the power under the agreements with the covenant, we can actually go on to people's property, undertake works and then pursue them for the costs. We've never had to do that over the 36 years, we actually work with the land manager when they first put the covenant on, to put a management plan on there, and we review those management plans pretty regularly. About every three years is what we aim for.
Di Martin: There have only been four breaches out of 900 covenants during the past year. But Mike Gooey's expecting that number to rise as covenanted land is sold.
Mike Gooey: It's the second and third generation owners where we need to make sure that we're actually at their front door as soon as they move in, and say, 'Make sure you understand that you have a covenant here.'
Di Martin: As it becomes more difficult to convince people to place covenants, say there is an economic alternative for the land in question, are you going to have to up your monitoring? Because the breaches may increase.
Mike Gooey: Look, I think that's right.
Di Martin: Monitoring is the Achilles' Heel of covenanting. It's time-consuming, expensive, and needs people in the regions, the very areas where State governments have been cutting back staff.
Background Briefing has been told about examples in Queensland and New South Wales where follow-up visits have been delayed for so long, landowners can't even remember the conditions of the original agreement.
And monitoring isn't the only problem. Farmers who've set aside land are starting to say they didn't get enough money to keep the ferals out and the weeds down.
Serious questions are being asked about just what covenants are really achieving for Australia's beleaguered wildlife.
Paul Sattler is one of Australia's leading thinkers on national conservation strategy. He's worried that there's no co-ordination between the scores of different departments and agencies running these schemes around the country.
Paul Sattler: We have seen a multitude of different schemes develop in each of the States by regional bodies like catchment groups, at local government level as well. And they've all tended to seek what is going to be the best way to encourage private land conservation in their areas.
Di Martin: Hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are involved. But Paul Sattler says there's no way of figuring out which money is well spent and which is not.
Paul Sattler: I think one of the concerns which has been growing with the rapid development of all of the different stewardship trials around the country has been that we haven't been all that sure how effective they have been for conservation.
Di Martin: Paul Sattler produced Australia's first detailed national assessment of biodiversity. It's been used as a blueprint to work out where's the greatest need. But he says we still need a better idea of priorities in the regions to work out how to target the conservation dollar.
Do we focus on an endangered bird, the survival of a rare fungus, or getting rid of weeds? How do we work out if the need of the arid interior is greater than that of the wet tropics?
Paul Sattler says once Australia works out what it wants to achieve, then it has to fund covenant schemes accordingly. He says that way, agencies can make sure they're picking the best bits of land to conserve in the first place.
Paul Sattler: That means that we're protecting those ecosystems that otherwise are not protected in National Parks or other types of reserves. And that's why I say this is the time now for us to try and bed all those schemes down, whereby we have much more agreed criteria in terms of what we're trying to achieve, and how we will monitor those areas to be able to provide some surety to those who are putting monies up, be it government or private bodies, that these areas are meeting conservation objectives.
Di Martin: These are difficult issues, and not just for people trying to get landholders to set aside private reserves. The big conservation charities are also trying to work out how best to spend the $20-million they collected last year.
It's all a far cry from the very humble beginnings 18 years ago.
GREETINGS
Di Martin: In his office at Parliament House, Greens leader Bob Brown tells the story of how he came to set up Bush Heritage. The priority back then was pretty obvious. Bob Brown had just won $39,000 in an international environment competition, just as some threatened bush blocks came on the market.
Bob Brown: At either end of the Liffey Valley under the Great Western Tiers in Tasmania, were beautiful blocks of forest with the Liffey River curling around one of them, and the other sitting under Aboriginal sites in the great dolerite cliffs of Dry's Bluff, which rises 1340-metres over the Midlands of Tasmania. These blocks were for sale, they were a bit more than 100 hectares each and the woodchippers were coming to get them. And I tossed and turned over that. I got a friend, Alan Cordell, to go to the auction, I was sitting in the Tasmanian Parliament, and he rang at night to say 'You've secured the blocks at the reserve price of a quarter of a million dollars'. So here was me with $39,000 and suddenly this massive debt. I went to the bank. The bank manager was very troubled about lending that amount of money. I had as collateral my house at Liffey and we found some other very generous donors. My bank manager got sick, a relief manager came along. He'd come to Tasmania from New South Wales and was in retirement. He was delighted by the idea and loaned the money.
Di Martin: You're not involved in the day-to-day running of Bush Heritage at the moment, but what's your impression of fund raising for protection of the environment these days compared to back in the early '90s?
Bob Brown: To see the Bush Heritage fund for example, go from where we were stunned if we got a cheque for $1,000 and we were just gathering $10 here and $20 there, to see now an organisation turning over between $10-million and $20-million a year, it's incredible.
Di Martin: Bush Heritage is a bit more targeted about the land it buys these days, concentrating on areas poorly represented in National Parks.
It's also a long time since the charity's tenuous financial beginnings. This year just one man gave $1-million to help buy Yourka Station, a purchase that featured on The 7:30 Report.
Reporter: Welcome to Yourka, 43,000 hectares of prime North Queensland cattle station right next to the World Heritage wet tropics.
Doug Humann: Yourka's a pearler, it's a very special property.
Kerry O'Brien: Bush Heritage has acquired nearly a million hectares of land around the country and converted it to 30 reserves to protect native species.
Di Martin: Bush Heritage now works out of Melbourne's business district. Chief Executive Officer Doug Humann gives the guided tour.
Doug Humann: Well this is the nerve centre of Bush Heritage. You're looking at the people that are talking daily with our 15,000 - 17,000 supporters around the country, and right at the moment it's an exciting time because we're at the end of the financial year so it's an optimum time for us to be inviting our supporters to think about a pre-tax donation. And they're rolling in. It's an exciting time, but it's also a busy time.
Di Martin: So when you're saying it's rolling in, can you give me an idea of how much money you might be taking per day or per week?
Doug Humann: In the last week it might have averaged about $10,000 a day but it can be more than that. And in this case it's supporters responding through an explanation of the work we're doing on our reserves on a daily basis. So buying reserves is one thing, but it's really important to manage them effectively.
Di Martin: And standing here we can see actually some of those reserves represented in photos around the office. Can you just give us an idea of the range of properties you've purchased over the years?
Doug Humann: Coincidentally we're standing right next to the Liffey River Reserve which is the first reserve acquired by Bob Brown and the first supporters of Bush Heritage. And then around to some of the more recent reserves, so grazing lands in South Australia indicated by the beautiful Boolcoomatta Reserve, moving around to South Western Australia, the Charles Darwin Reserve in the woodlands of South Western Australia which have been under enormous pressure for land clearance, for productive landscapes, and Bush Heritage is more and more working in those productive landscapes that haven't benefited from public land conservation in the past.
Di Martin: Productive landscapes essentially means agricultural land which has been extensively cleared. Australia's other big conservation charity is the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, or AWC. It manages more than 2-million hectares as safe havens for wildlife. Including Scotia Station, south of Broken Hill. Here's AWC's Chief Executive, Atticus Fleming.
Atticus Fleming: In Western New South Wales we've created the largest fox and cat free area on mainland Australia. We've reintroduced six of the country's most endangered mammals and people can come and see what's happened there. There's bilbies everywhere.
Di Martin: It takes a colossal amount of work to achieve these outcomes and a really long fence. The ABC's Catalyst program went out to have a look with Scotia's border control manager, Jamie Rockcliff.
Jamie Rockcliff: This will make it the longest feral exclusion fence in Australia. This is a fox trap just here.
Mark Horstman: Making sure Scotia remains free of rabbits, cats and foxes requires daily surveillance.
Jamie Rockcliff: What we're doing here is what we call dusting. Take this piece of mesh, drag it along behind the quad bike, which makes a nice smooth pad, so we can come along the next day, check the tracks. The tracks come up quite easily in this sand.
Di Martin: These kinds of sanctuaries are credited with major conservation achievements. But the head of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy says the days of buying up big swathes of Australia for wildlife are nearly over.
Atticus Fleming says he's seen the price of pastoral leases increase by 25% a year.
Atticus Fleming: I think we have a window of 2 to 3, maybe 4 years. I think after that time it's going to be very difficult for anyone, whether it's the private sector or government, to be adding significant areas to the reserve system, because prices of these properties are going to be very, very high. As I said, as we speak properties are selling for in the order of $70 or $80 million, and properties are being developed, and once they're developed, you do lose a lot of conservation values.
Di Martin: Head of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, Atticus Fleming.
Federal Environment Minister, Peter Garrett agrees that the window of opportunity is closing.
Peter Garrett: We've got serious issues in terms of the exposure of plant and animal species to possibilities of extinction and we need to deal with that as a matter of urgency.
Di Martin: How many years, do you think we have to add significant land to the national reserve system?
Peter Garrett: Well I think we've got four to five years to really get on with it and that's why ...
Di Martin: The Rudd government has boosted the budget for Australia's many parks and reserves from an average of 8-million a year to more than 30-million a year.
The private sector gets generous funding out of that pot. $2 of taxpayer funds for every $1 donated to buy high value conservation areas. But if Australia's only got limited conservation funds, how to work out what goes to the public sector and what to the private?
There's no real scientific basis for making that decision because there are no set national standards for measuring what's good conservation and what's not.
Paul Foreman is the chief ecologist at Bush Heritage. He says creating such standards is important but no-one's worked out how to do it.
Paul Foreman: It's a challenging thing to do, even in an organisation let alone across it, so I don't want to underestimate how hard it is, but I don't think it's impossible, and I think we should commit.
Di Martin: Paul Foreman assesses properties for Bush Heritage, and shows Background Briefing a map from Western Australia to explain how the organisation manages a sanctuary.
Paul Foreman: This is Charles Darwin Reserve on what used to be called White Well Station over in Western Australia. You can see the context of it, here there's Perth and there's the property there. It's on the Great Northern Highway up through to the Pilbara.
Di Martin: Right, this is this black line here.
Paul Foreman: And you sort of drive through a very gentle, undulating landscape and you'll see low shrubland, and there's other areas that are much more open with different sort of vegetation, heath dominated and much lower. And they're the areas that have splendid wildflower displays in the Spring. And this area is notorious, or very well known as the Wildflower Route for tourists in the region.
Di Martin: This has been purchased. How do we know that Bush Heritage is actually doing a good job, managing this land?
Paul Foreman: We like to take an approach of where we focus on the key values, the key assets first. Areas of wildflowers and endemic plants that are of significance, or those habitats of Gimlet and Salmon Gum and York Gum for instance that are very important, and then we look at those in particular and see their threats.
Di Martin: The goats?
Paul Foreman: Yes, the goats, or it might be - there's no pigs on this particular property but there's plenty of goats and wildfire's a big issue. But we also have standards in terms of outcomes, we set targets. Indicators of those values that we want to improve over time. The abundance and structure of mallee fowl in this particular property for instance. Or it might be the complexity of the vegetation or the productivity of it. These are indicators that we use for on-ground management, but it's not a standard framework that the Commonwealth and other Parks people necessarily would use.
Di Martin: So you'd say the Bush Heritage has a higher standard of ongoing management of its properties than the public system?
Paul Foreman: Well I guess that's probably debatable, but I'd say that we aim to do that. We aim to have as high a standard as we can. And we try to set it through outcomes.
Di Martin: Paul Foreman says it's high time Australia changes the way it measures conservation success. Every State and agency measures that success differently. But generally it's about things like counting the number of hectares protected, the numbers of staff on the ground, or the kilometres of fencing built.
Paul Foreman says we've got to refocus on the results of all that activity, whether our plants and animals are increasing in number and becoming less vulnerable to extinction.
Paul Foreman: We can certainly have systems that are busy, that people are doing things and we're spending money and there's people running around all over the place but are they actually achieving the results we want? Are they restoring our ecosystems, are they increasing the flows in our rivers, are they increasing the populations of our threatened species? And if we're not doing that, I think we have to seriously think about reforming everything we do and how we do it.
Di Martin: While the debate on standards continues, there are dark clouds on the private conservation horizon. The prospect of an economic downturn.
Here's the CEO of Bush Heritage, Doug Humann.
Doug Humann: This question has exercised my mind a lot, as I'm sure you'd be aware. And I've talked about it with a lot of people at different parts of the market if you like, with people who'd be considered very high donors, so people who might be giving hundreds of thousands of dollars, or a million dollars as we recently received. The general response I've got, and the sentiment that I feel is that Australia's ability to and willingness to be philanthropic is increasing and that it will weather more difficult economic times.
Di Martin: It will need to. Buying a property for conservation is the easy part of the financial equation. Doug Humann says a large sanctuary can cost half a millions dollars a year to run. He says if the economy really nosedives, Bush Heritage might be forced to sell sanctuaries.
Doug Humann: We could dispose of properties. It's not something we would readily do, and we would only ever do in circumstances of a very extreme nature.
Di Martin: Doug Humann says Bush Heritage has a pretty robust set of protections for its sanctuaries. It has $6-million in an endowment fund that would cover operations for 3 years. It's putting conservation covenants on properties so they can't be developed. And the Bush Heritage Constitution says of properties have go be sold, they must go to a like-minded group.
Meanwhile Doug Humann is exploring new ways of conserving land, without having to pay for the real estate, and which might make some money to boot.
Doug Humann reveals he's in talks with some of Australia's biggest mining companies.
Doug Humann: The mines are generally quite small and the leases are generally quite large. So we're just interested in exploring the possibility of how we might work as a consultant or as a provider of a service over the large part of a lease which is not used for mining at all.
Di Martin: Doug Humann doesn't want to talk about which mining companies. But he's more forthcoming about talks with some of Australia's major pastoralists.
Doug Humann: We have Kidmann and North Australian Pastoral Company, and Australian Agriculture as neighbours as much as we have small family holdings as neighbours. And in each of those cases we're talking to them about opportunities of working together. Could we, for example, offer our services, our knowledge by us setting up our Ecological Outcomes Monitoring Points which are particular points in the landscape where we regularly go back to, so at least annually, go back and look at that, we photograph it, we record the species at that site, we monitor soil movement, so we're monitoring change over time. And what can we learn? And what might our neighbour learn from the gathering of that data, and how might that affect the management of their land.
Di Martin: Over in Western Australia, the Australian Wildlife Conservancy is also working with its neighbours in the remote Kimberleys.
Narrator: In addition to the rivers and gorges, Mornington protects a diversity of habitat that are not protected in any government National Parks.
Di Martin: Mornington Station is Australia's largest privately owned protected area.
Chief Executive Atticus Fleming says his group has been awarded a big government contract to work with the neighbours of Mornington Station.
Atticus Fleming: Up in the Kimberley, where fire management is such a critical problem, AWC is now doing the fire management over 16 properties covering 5-million hectares. So that's working with pastoralists, Aboriginal communities, to change the fire patterns up there in the Kimberley so that they're ecologically friendly, wildlife friendly fire patterns. And we're typically doing most of this burning from helicopter.
Di Martin: Fire management is supposed to be job of government. But government hasn't ever tackled fire management on this scale in the Kimberleys.
Atticus Fleming says hiring AWC makes sense.
Atticus Fleming: You have to be able to look out the window in the morning and say 'The conditions are right to do some proscribed burning, let's go'. Our staff are up there in the Kimberley, they can do that. It's much harder for the government agencies to do that. They've got processes, they've got a whole lot of bureaucracy I guess that makes it much harder for them to do that. They tend to have to plan things weeks in advance, we can literally get up, as I said, look out the window, decide it's a good day to burn. And burn. That's really the way you need to do it.
Di Martin: It's a pioneering example of outsourcing environmental management. Atticus Fleming says his Conservancy is doing other jobs for government. He gives the example of moving endangered animals around for Western Australia's Department of Conservation and Land Management, or CALM.
Atticus Fleming: CALM originally gave us the animals to release onto the AWC reserves, they've been so successful -
Di Martin: Now they want them back?
Atticus Fleming: Well we're now able to help restock some of the National Parks.
Di Martin: It's Australia's dry, arid heartland that's the most poorly conserved. It's a priority if we're to prevent ferals, weeds and climate change from causing a future swathe of plant and animal extinctions.
Yet it's in these remote stretches of Australia where government parks and wildlife agencies struggle the most.
Atticus Fleming.
Atticus Fleming: I think there is a disturbing trend, not just in Western Australia but in other States as well, where large remote National Parks are no longer staffed. So this has happened in far north Queensland, it's happened in parts of Western Australia. Parks that used to enjoy a resident ranger are no longer permanently staffed. AWC is going against that trend, thankfully. We are staffing all our remote areas and we are building up that staff because we think that it's impossible to manage a large, remote area effectively unless you have people on the ground.
Di Martin: Atticus, would you consider running a National Park for the Western Australian government if you were asked?
Atticus Fleming: Well it's not an issue that has been raised with me. But I think that where AWC owns a property that's next to a National Park, then there are some clear advantages to co-operation.
Di Martin: Over in the public National Park system, staff are worried about politicians' enthusiastic embrace of the private sector. They fear more traditional roles may be outsourced to the conservation charities.
Certainly Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett isn't ruling out any future deals.
Peter Garrett: It's not beyond the realms of possibility for us to be devising new and hopefully creative ways of better managing the entire national estate, and if that means partnerships between NGOs and governments that operate on a different level than we're seeing now, well let's see what they look like.
Di Martin: Peter Garrett.
But one of Australia's best-known conservation figures, Penny Figgis, says National Parks should remain the job of government.
Penny Figgis: I suppose people do fear that if you privatise, or privatise anything to do with the public National Parks estate, that you might get different motives involved.
Di Martin: Like?
Penny Figgis: Well you might get a distortion for example, that the donors, that the particular donors that this private entity has, are absolutely hot to trot on endangered species programs for example. So all the resources might go into the endangered species part of it and not into some other priority that a public agency has to manage for all the goals under their legislation. Whereas if you're donor dependent, as all the private agencies are, then you might get driven by a particular objective rather than the broad sweep of objectives.
Di Martin: That's Penny Figgis.
Such debates frustrate Atticus Fleming who says they risk wasting precious time. He says governments and private groups have to join forces to work out the best way to conserve what's left of wild Australia.
Atticus Fleming: I'm not sure if listeners really appreciate the extent of the crisis affecting Australia's wildlife. You know, literally the worst mammal extinction rate in the world, more species added to the endangered list every year. There are animals disappearing from parts of Australia every year. So we have to act pretty urgently, we have to try new and sort of more innovative approaches. And there's absolutely no scope for competition or distractions that might emerge between the private and the public sector. We've got to be working very strongly together.
THEME
Di Martin: Background Briefing's Co-ordinating producer is Linda McGinness; Research from Anna Whitfeld; Technical operator is Jenny Parsonage and Executive Producer, Kirsten Garrett.
And don't forget to go to our website where you'll find links to a range of land trusts, and a breakdown on the size of Australia's private conservation estate.
I'm Di Martin and you're listening to ABC Radio National.
THEME
Further Information
Australian Wildlife Conservancy
Queensland Environmental Protection Agency - Nature Refuges
NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change
National Trust of Australia (WA)
Department of Environment and Conservation WA
Federal Department of the Environment National Reserve System
Covenants for Conservation brochure
WWF's Building Nature's Safety Net 2008 Report
Presenter
Di Martin
Producer
Di Martin
Radio National often provides links to external websites to complement program information. While producers have taken care with all selections, we can neither endorse nor take final responsibility for the content of those sites.
