BY JIM GREEN

Environment groups have slammed the May 22 federal budget for failing to provide much-needed funding for environmental repair, for creative accounting and disguising corporate welfare as environmental reform.

The Coalition government claims that the budget represents the largest environmental funding commitment in Australia's history. The major funding initiative is a $1 billion addition to the Natural Heritage Trust, which funds projects to improve and integrate bio-diversity, land, water and vegetation management on public and private lands.

The Natural Heritage Trust, sometimes described as a farmers slush fund, has cost $1.5 billion since 1997. Initial funding was made contingent upon the part-privatisation of Telstra. The additional funding is budgeted from 2002-03 until 2007.

According to a May 22 media release from the Australian Greens, “The much-vaunted Natural Heritage Trust was supposed to spend an average of $250 million per annum over six years ($1.5 billion). The environment has been cheated of $36 million per annum through the simple expedient of stretching the expenditure over seven years. There is no new money until the year after next, presumably predicated on the sale of Telstra.”

Don Henry from the Australian Conservation Foundation said: “ACF and the National Farmers Federation have identified that public investment of $3.7 billion per year over 10 years is required to repair our land and water, but this budget only reaches 10 percent of that figure.”

Henry add that “a quarter of a billion dollars of Natural Heritage Trust money over the last three years still sees 100 trees cleared for every one planted, and we remain the worst land clearer of any developed country on earth because of a lack of national leadership”.

The budget also provides $65 million as a first instalment of $700 million for a National Action Plan for Salinity and Water Quality. However, this amount is matched by cuts to other water-related environment programs. Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown pointed to cuts of $31.6 million to the National Landcare Program, $15.7 million to the Murray Darling 2001 project, $9.5 million to the National Rivercare program, and a total of $9 million from the National River Health Program, National Wetlands, Waterwatch and wetlands ecology and conservation.

In a media release, Brown said: “The apparent increase of $96 million in overall environment expenditure (from $1528 million in 2000/01 to $1624 million in 2001-02) is mostly accounted for by corporate largesse — the Greenhouse Gas Abatement Program ($90 million), largely to help the mining corporations restructure, and other expenditures like $10 million on insulation around Adelaide airport, which are hardly `environmental’. Most core programs have taken a cut, for example Bushcare (-$21.4 million) and the National Reserve System Program (-$16.7 million).”

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