Kingborough is a long, narrow municipality stretching from the southern fringes of Hobart down the Channel to Bruny Island and the approaches to the Huon. The bulk of our population lives in the north. But much of our land, and much of our natural environment, lies in the rural communities that run along the length of the LGA.
Those rural communities are the best stewards of their own land. They are farmers, smallholders, families, and small business owners who have invested their life savings into properties they know intimately and care for personally. They are on the ground every day, nursing their land through drought, fire, storm, and regrowth.
Environmental rules that apply to rural Kingborough land are most credible when shaped by the people who live on that land day to day. Lived local experience should carry real weight in how policy is designed and applied. Rural landowners who have nurtured their properties through every season, every fire risk, and every regrowth cycle bring insights that no policy document can replicate.
As Mayor, I will lead a review of council generated environmental rules to determine whether they are helpful guidance for good stewardship or punitive green tape that acts as a handbrake on the aspirations of our rural families and small businesses throughout the rural parts of our LGA.
This substantive review of environmental policy will be conducted as part of the broader Environmental Services review set out in Priority 3. That review will determine which instruments are fit for purpose, which need reform, and which should be retired. I am not going to pre-empt the findings of a review that has yet to be conducted. What I will commit to is that the review will be honest, thorough, transparent, community informed, and prepared to make hard calls where the evidence supports them.
The principle is simple. The people best placed to nurture and care for the local environment are the locals who live in it. Council’s job is to support rural families and landowners in the stewardship they are already doing.
Bushfire risk and fuel load management
The greatest single threat to Kingborough’s biodiversity is a catastrophic bushfire. For at least 15 to 20 years, council’s environmental regulations are alleged to have actively discouraged landholders from reducing fuel loads on their properties. The same policies intended to protect the environment may instead be creating the conditions for its destruction.
The rural community that lives on and manages this land is Kingborough’s best asset in fire prevention. Council must stop working against them and start working with them.
A council I lead will:
- Review all environmental regulations for their impact on fuel load management and fire risk
- Work directly with rural landholders on practical fuel reduction strategies
- Extend green waste collection arrangements in the lead up to fire season to assist landholders in preparing their properties
- Hold Council land and road reserves to the same fuel management standard Council expects of ratepayers
- Allow burn registration flexibility for multiple or larger piles, rather than one pile at a time, where it is safe to do so
- Support biochar and other alternatives for landholders who cannot safely burn
- Ensure environmental policy explicitly accounts for bushfire risk as a primary threat to biodiversity
- Advocate to state and federal government for funding and support for community based fuel load management