Communiqué to the Stakeholders of the Northern Gulf Region
Over the 2011 year there are a couple of things happening that we will be involved with, and we want to be absolutely sure that you as a resident or stakeholder in the region are driving the directions we present and work towards.
The Northern Gulf Group are community owned and driven by the people who live in the catchments of the Norman, Gilbert, Staaten and Mitchell Rivers of Queensland. We see ourselves as an organisation that realises the aspirations of our community, focussing on land management, sea management and our children’s futures. Basically we are a mob that cares about the place we live in and the people we live with.
We organise to present to governments the aspirations of our community and to make use of funding opportunities to make those aspirations real and achieve long lasting outcomes for the region. Sometimes we don’t need government support as the will of our community to achieve a ‘good thing’ and a little bit of leg work is all it takes to realise a community dream. There are lots of other groups helping communities too, and we like to cooperate with all organisations or enterprises to share our energy and skills to achieve our community goals.
We encourage your feedback or direct involvement with our proposed direction with the two programs below. You can always contact us on 07 40621330 or through our website www.northerngulf.com.au. If you feel we are heading the wrong way or have missed something, please get in touch.
Programme 1: The Commonwealth Regional Development Australia Committees (RDA):
These committees are drafting regional plans that provide guidance to Commonwealth funds including the $1.4 billion Regional Development Australia Fund. Minister Simon Crean is overseeing this program and has a strong focus on ‘driving regional economic development through localism’. This indicates a desire to work with local communities to achieve local outcomes to enhance economic and lifestyle opportunities. Thus, the Northern Gulf Group would like to contribute to the planning processes by presenting key community supported projects to the RDA and possibly to the Regional Development Australia Fund.
The funds are primarily development focussed and for projects between $500,000 and $25mil. Community supported projects that we are aware of currently that we would like to table are:
- Radar installation on the Gregory Range (Croydon) and Kowanyama. To enhance weather reporting including cyclone tracking and rainfall events. Currently significant gaps exist in north and west Queensland. Monitoring severe weather events in the region is extremely difficult with the severely limited infrastructure available. Radar will improve the early recognition of severe events and disaster response to protect life and property. Also, this area of North West Queensland is likely to develop over the next 20 years and rainfall patterns will be critical to sound planning and future development.
- Local education resources for our primary schools that base learning on the child’s life experiences. Across the region, and remote areas generally, are some of Queensland and Australia’s poorest educational standards particularly in literacy. The resources available for teaching are very urban and east coast based. Therefore primary children in remote areas are asked to learn from texts that make no life sense. It is a well proven fact that we learn best when the concept being learned is relevant to our life experience. Also teachers only stay in remote schools for a short period. Thus investment towards developing learning resources relevant to the environmental and social landscapes which the children live would make learning make sense. Ideally these resources will also integrate indigenous history, culture and even language into our school curriculum.
- Ramp and Careening Facility Karumba for commercial fishing boats to safely remove, clean and repair boats. Currently the commercial fisheries are forced into unsafe practice due to the lack of appropriate infrastructure within reasonable distance to the industry. The industry based in Karumba is worth some $60mil annually, yet boats must travel some 2,000km to be safely maintained. This facility will assist the sustainability of the commercial fishing industry in the Gulf of Carpentaria.
- High speed resource management hub that utilises the increasing capacity proposed by the National Broadband Network (NBN) to provide visual access to maps, data (including remote weather, river height, water, feed, soil, biodiversity systems), and extension services for the rural industries of the region. The information will be customised to meet the industry needs of the northern gulf region and have interactive capability providing timely assistance and removing the tyranny of distance.
There are also three sustainable tourism development projects that have been identified in our region by our community and businesses. The scale of the RDA funds would mean that we would need to essentially create a tourism precinct, or package all of the development projects into one major regionally significant scope of works. This type of partnership is achievable.
Further information about the RDA’s can be found at http://www.rda.gov.au/. If you are in Carpentaria Shire specifically view http://www.rdanwq.org.au/, and if you are in Croydon and Etheridge Shires or the Tablelands Regional Shire specifically view http://www.rdafnqts.org.au/.
Programme 2: The National Environmental Research Program (NERP):
Through the National Environmental Research Program alone there is just over $30mil of research dollars across Northern Australia. The Northern Gulf Group would like to table key research needs of the communities and industries within the region. Key areas that we wish to table are as follows:
- Industry/community based landscape scale monitoring program that works to help monitor paddock level information in demand by landholders for improving practice and efficiencies, and then aggregates up to inform the National Environmental Accounts. Across the country we have many failed programs trying to measure how healthy our environment and agricultural industries are, whether the landscape health is improving or declining, and whether changed practice or tax payer funded programs are making a difference. Usually monitoring programs have been based on information that researchers or government funded programs need, so that once the research or program stops, so does the monitoring. The people managing the landscape are there for a long time and have a direct and immediate impact on the resources, therefore we feel that for effective monitoring it should be based on the information needs of the managers and communities and then fed to research and government programs.
- The fish population and ecology of the Gulf of Carpentaria is poorly known even though it supports a strong commercial and recreational harvest annually. Local communities wish to better understand the priority habitat and ecological needs of key species to ensure sustainable management and harvest. Additionally the shallow waters of the gulf are both at risk and also potentially a source of feedstock if climate change impacts include increased water temperatures. Many species are temperature dependent during breeding cycles and anecdotal evidence suggests that distribution patterns of some marine crab species are already changing. Also, understanding the breeding cycles and requirements of tropical (warm living) fish of commercial value may be useful should they become desirable aquaculture species in the future.
- The heavy metal distribution in the Mitchell Catchment is poorly known and complicated by natural presence as well as accelerated presence from historical mining practices. Communities and industries that rely on the water quality of the Mitchell Catchment have for years wished to determine the distribution, source and hazard of heavy metals in this catchment.
- ANZECC water quality standards do not exist for the rivers in the northern gulf region. Thus community, regulators, industry, consultants, community groups and catchment and water managers do not have a framework for determining water quality in our rivers, lakes, estuaries and marine waters. Our water quality is tested and compared against standards developed in catchments that are not redolent of the nature and character of our riparian systems. This essentially means that the region is not able to effectively measure and monitor water quality in terms of what is ‘natural’ for the gulf rivers.
- The Economic value of Ecosystem Services needs to be determined especially for the largely intact landscapes of the northern gulf region to help guide the true trade off decisions of impending development. Ecosystem services is defined as the aspects of ecosystems utilised (actively or passively) to produce human wellbeing. This basically encapsulates the various welfare contributions that ecosystem services provide, including use and non-use values as well as option value. The term ‘services’ contains aspects of ecosystem organisation (stocks, structure, pattern capital), the operation of ecosystems (flows, functions, processes), and the outcomes that provide human benefits (goods, benefits). Therefore ecosystem services includes products derived from our natural resources such as agriculture and fisheries but also tourism and increasingly new markets associated with conservation. Knowing the comparative value of the services provided or lost between a landscape in a natural state verses a developed landscape state provides a sound and logical decision platform for development decisions.
- Biodiversity and Ecosystem relationships - Community recognise that much of the region’s wildlife is still 'unknown' and every year our work finds new species or significant ecological facts. Over the next four years the community wants to identify the most critical habitats for landscape and species conservation given the impending development of our region into the future.
- Introduced grasses - Community want to quantify the impact of introduced grass species and identify those that are having positive as well as negative effects on native species’ distribution and densities. This is to aide decision making regarding the trade-offs of introducing non-native pastures, the impacts on native wildlife and for future planning.
Further information can be found at http://www.environment.gov.au/about/programs/nerp/about.html ; http://www.track.gov.au/ and http://www.rrrc.org.au/
And as stated above we welcome any comments and feedback about what we’re doing and where we’re heading. Please don’t hesitate to call us on 4062 1330, email admin@northerngulf.com.au , take a closer look at our website, or log onto our free forum http://forum.northerngulf.com.au/ and head to the NGRMG topic.