National Forum

Forum Concluding Summary

Dr Judy Lambert (Community Solutions) and Mr Carl Binning (CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems)
Delivered by Dr Judy Lambert

As most of you know from the program Carl Binning and I were supposed to be sharing this task.  I have worked with Carl on various projects over a number of years and I think that he is getting to be pretty slick at having good reasons for not being here when we need him.  My apologies that you are stuck with me doing the presentation rather than with Carl and I doing some sort of a song and dance act. 

It is certainly a challenge to try and present in what I think is on advice 25 to 30 minutes, because there have been a number of requests for some participant input in this final session as well.  I should say at the start that I am not going to pretend to moderate or respond to any participant input.  I hope our chair or someone is doing that bit of it.  But in discussing it, what we had heard late yesterday afternoon and early evening, Carl and I decided that there was no way that we were going to be able to capture the enormous amount of positive material that has come out of what were two really information packed days.  Rather we are going to try to capture some positive things that we think have either been reinforced, entrenched or secured. 

Some things that we have identified as certainly needing more work, some places where this forum has expanded beyond where we see as having been previously and then to offer some challenges to all of us for the year ahead.  Before I try to do that, I guess I would say that for me some of the most impressive aspects apart from the content have been the fact that the trust and the other conference organisers have brought together well over 200 of us.  I didn’t get a final count but I believe that it was around 230, from a fantastic diversity of backgrounds and experience.  I seem to spend more of my time in workshops, conferences and forums than I would sometimes like but I don’t think that I have seen the mix of expertise in experience that we have had here.  I think that the National Trust and everyone else involved is to be congratulated on that. 

The other thing that has been very impressive for me is the commitment and the passion that all of us have brought to the issue of nature conservation on private land.  I think that commitment and passion, while we are going to offer some challenges in some areas that need further work it certainly gives me hope that we are going to move ahead on this issue. I think that it is for all of us individually and collectively to make sure that happens. 

The Givens

What did we see as the givens?  We have called them the givens because we think part of what this forum has done is to move us beyond debate over who’s approach is right, how should we go about it, which are the most important methods, where should we be focussing our attention.  I have heard less of that sort of debate in this forum than any other that I have participated in the last year or two.  Really what we have accepted, is the need for partnerships. 

I know that governments have been talking about partnerships in natural resource management, in one form or another for at least ten years, but my business partner Jane Ellix and I went back in preparation for another forum a couple of weeks ago to look at what term partnerships has meant in various policy statements over the last ten years.  It has really been a movable feast.  One I think that we have accepted here is that there is a need for partnerships and we have identified some of the players and some of the ways that we might make those partnerships work. 

The other thing for us and Carl and I had separately had written this down in big bold letters in our note taking during the past two days was the importance of flexibility.  I guess in discussing it yesterday at the end of the day, we thought that perhaps it was the government agencies, present company accepted, but the higher levels of government agencies who most need to hear that message of flexibility.  I have had the privilege I will call it, of working both as an environmental advisor to government and as a ministerial environment consultant in my past life and I know that there has been a tradition of wanting to get set programs and to go with those programs and to give them lots of structure.  I think what we have heard very much out of the last two days is that flexibility is the name of the game and that flexibility has a whole lot of areas of application. 

The area or size of the nature conservation targets everything from the tiny little half hectare or smaller, the roadside remnant right through to things like Carnarvon station and the grand plan of the Gondwanna link.  Certainly a flexibility of ecological communities and I will comment some more on that one later.  A flexibility of the people involved, like just within this room there is an amazing array of not only expertise, but approaches, ways of thinking from the sort of artistic approaches to the hard core scientific approaches. I just comment in passing that perhaps what I think of as the hard core scientific approaches, having come from a traditional science background originally, were the ones that were least apparent here.  I might comment a bit on that later.  Also there needs to be  a flexibility of approaches and incentives. 

Partnerships

But what I think makes these things givens is that they are fundamental to us making further progress and they are also a foundation for new comers who join us in the quest for nature conservation on private land.  Certainly both partnerships and flexibility probably need some fine-tuning, some further work.  Who are the players in the partnerships.  I am not sure that we captured them all, we kept going back to this list as we were reviewing at the end of yesterday. 

·        Governments (Commonwealth, State and Local )

·        Rural landowners

·        Indigenous landowners

·        Urban/Metropolitan residents

·        Corporate sector

·        Scientists

You will notice there is a couple of things in bold.  Perhaps the corporate sector should be in bold as well. and perhaps, even the urban and metropolitan residents should be. I think the need to better engage local government; and the need to better engage with our indigenous partners are certainly things that came out clearly at this Forum. All of these sectors however, are clearly identified as having a place in the partnerships, not necessarily on the partnerships;  it will be a mix and match. It is our view that in order to make the partnerships work effectively, any of the players involved need to have clearly defined and agreed roles, right from the outset, not half way down the process of setting up a project or a program for nature conservation on private land. 

Effective partnerships is a bit of a favorite theme of the work that Jane and I do in community solutions.  We have tried to capture what we think are some of the keys that underpin effective partnerships, be they for nature conservation on private land or other sorts of partnerships.  Partnerships in our lives generally and we have often found it useful when we are doing rural workshops to do some role-plays and some analogies with our own personal partnerships, partnerships that we might engage in within other parts of our lives.  We have tried to capture some of the important elements in making those partnerships effective. 

I think that in different ways, we have heard a lot about all of those elements during the last couple of days.  Certainly trust is a word that I have heard many times during the last two days.  The ability to communicate effectively, the ability to be open and honest with each other and the need for real cooperation and we think that cooperation is so important that we have kind of brought it in to various areas.  That cooperation brings a whole lot of benefits and sometimes we don’t think early enough about those benefits. 

Another of the really important elements of effective partnerships is the mutual respect.  Respecting the different skills that come to the table or come to the forum like this.  I think again this forum has been really important in showing that respect; be it for indigenous knowledge; rural land holder knowledge; government policy; understanding of government processes; or the scientific perspective; or  the economic sector perspective.  Respecting the different skills, understanding where other people are coming from and how their opinions are formed. I wasn’t fortunate enough to be at that work shop because that is when Carl and I were doing our deliberations, but I understand there was a pretty effective role play in putting ourselves in other peoples shoes at one of the workshops yesterday; helping us to understand where people form their opinions and expectations but also understanding other peoples needs .

I guess the place where that’s most been reinforced for me has been our discussions about drawing in more support from the philanthropic and corporate sectors.  Of course the other important component of any effective partnership is an equality of power sharing; not always all taking on the same roles but feeling that we have equal roles. I  guess I would point the finger traditionally, historically, at government agencies who have tended to hand down a program to us and then tell us we should all work within it.  Capitalising on the diversity of ideas that are in forums like this and taking the opportunities and ensuring that there are mechanisms to share power at whatever level is most appropriate for the circumstance are all pretty important to the success. 

The other area of course where we need that flexibility in a big way, is in designing our programs and the incentives that support them.  I was almost loath to put a tool kit up there.  Some of you will recognise this as a diagram that originally came from reimbursing the future that we worked with Mike Young, Carl Binning and Neil Cunningham from ANU. 

[INSERT DIAGRAM FROM BRIEFING OHPs]

I think perhaps the move to the term the esky might be more appropriate but then I had a bit of a problem thinking about what the things are we take out of the esky are an whether they are really going to further conservation of nature on private lands.  Maybe they are but maybe we need some lubrication.  It is about recognising that there isn’t a single answer and we need voluntary incentives, property rights, price based incentives and the regulatory safety net. 

I guess we have talked about and of course underpinned with informational, educational, motivational activities.  We have talked about all of those and I guess the regulatory one has come up in a somewhat negative context a few times as one of the few areas that needs work and I will move on to that.    The other thing that I think has become much more of a given in this forum than in where I have been previously is the acceptance of covenants.  I think we are all moving in the direction of covenants being one of the important things that come out of the esky. 

I guess that I have heard a number of times and for me it has been most often from land holders the desire for those covenants to be in perpetuity not to see undone all of the good stuff that has been done when the current land holder moves on.  Yes, there are times when less than permanent covenants may be appropriate in drawing people into the system, but the needs for covenants, the role of trusts in administering those covenants and other aspects of nature conservation on private land and the place of revolving funds I think are all things which have moved from being under discussion to being givens and the challenge now is to make them work in the most effective way.  They are all in place in one or more locations. 

We have heard that over the last two days and what we need to do is to fine tune and to learn from each other while accepting that we do all work within different legal policy and other frame works.  Where do we need more work?  Where are the big challenges? Where have we perhaps not even in this forum got to adequately address issues?  For Carl and I there were three key areas:

·        Champions

·        Government and non-government /community perspectives

·        External pressures on achievers

The whole issue of champions, I think that most of the projects that we have heard about in the last two days had one or more individuals who have been champions.  From some of the other work that community solutions has been involved with, I all too aware and I didn’t see much evidence of it in the last two days we had very motivated fired up on the move kind of champions here, but I have seen too many champions burned out because they are the people that everybody in their project or their community looks to for everything and we really need to better acknowledge them and provide them with recognition. 

Often they are quite achievers who don’t want a lot of public fanfare but there are other ways of providing recognition.  I had a delightful example when I was working on a project on women in agriculture of one woman who is just an absolute gem in her local remote community, and she said to me “the best thing that’s ever happened to me was when I had been away for a week at workshops and conferences and I came home and one of my kids had fallen of the horse and had a few broken bones and things, not only had the neighbor from 120km away dealt with that, but they had left enough casseroles and things in the fridge for the next 3 days”.  

So there are a lot of ways in giving recognition, there are a lot of ways of giving support and I don’t think that we are quite there yet and I think I heard some of  our champions in the last two days quietly making us aware of that.  Certainly it is often not the champions that are going to speak out and say “hey I need some help too” but we all have a responsibility.  We all have a responsibility to take our share of that load so that we can have more champions out there and not have the really leader people bearing too much of the burden.  I think that we have got more work to do in there and I don’t know if we have directly addressed that adequately in this forum. 

The other area that I certainly agreed with Carl but he felt very strongly about was that there is still a mismatch in some areas between government and we have called it non government/community because we are not just talking about the organised non government organisations the NGOs but local communities as well, in that there is still a sense that when NGO’s or communities take on a project there is kind of a service provider element in bureaucratic terms expected of them.  That is not what they are and we have to make sure that all of the operating structures deal with that.  We also have to recognise that NGO’s and local communities are often not equipped for the levels of administration that are necessary for accountability and I will talk some more about that in a minute. 

The other one that came up certainly more than once in both workshops that I was in and in the preliminary forums was the whole issue of external pressure on those who are out there doing good nature conservation and private land stuff.  Both pressures in their local communities and the institutional pressures and I will come back to those too. 

There are some areas that we think that this forum has really expanded the boundaries.  I would have to say it is the first forum that I have been in and Carl expressed the same view where we have had real indigenous participation where our indigenous partners have given us material on their terms and in their language and in their ways.  I guess for me the indigenous session was one of the most moving sessions of the whole program because it made me think about how we are doing.  I guess that Carl’s comment that after the opening ceremony it really brought it home to me, that a lot of us, and I am certainly one of them that is guilty, certainly have a lot of cultural learning to do.  We are not there yet by any means but this forum took that a lot further than a lot of others that I have been involved in.

 I guess the other thing that this forum clearly did was to go beyond the science or the policy and to really drive home the importance of the passion, the commitment, the emotions of the people involved, the pride in the work that is being done.  The work that we have perhaps got to do there and we heard a couple of good examples of it in individual papers, was to do the social science to back up what we all know is really  good stuff and I will come back to that in accountability.  The landscape scale, I know there is still some scientific concerns about the term landscape but I think that this forum more than others that I have been in has really entrenched the fact that we need to be thinking about the landscape scale and where the private land remnants fit in that landscape conservation.  Yes we still need some research at the plot scale.  We certainly need paddock relevance for landholders to become more involved and we certainly need the work to continue at the property scale because with roughly 70% of the land in private of leasehold ownership, its going to be the people who are running those properties who do a lot of this work.  I think we have entrenched that the thinking needs to move to the landscape scale no matter how big or small we make that landscape. 

The other thing that I have found really rewarding and it is a personal prejudice after ten years in my past when I worked on forests and forest policies, is that this conference has clearly moved beyond, not just forests but woodlands.  We have gone from forests being everybody’s focus in nature conservation to woodlands almost being the current ecological system that everybody is looking at and sure the woodlands need a lot of attention and that is where I am most working at too but  we have heard project here that stretch across ecological communities and across the landscape and even in one case across the continent.  An ambitious project but lets be ambitious. 

I think the other thing that has really expanded the boundaries here is the extent to which we have all discussed the need to expand the markets.  Whether it is in bush for sale, in selling  environmental services or bringing in philanthropic or corporate investment.  So what has come out of this forum I believe is that we have confirmed that the tools are largely there.  Some of us have more work to do in our own communities or own states and territories than others, but what we have heard time and time again is that the institutions are not yet adequate to support the application of those tools. 

Carl and I decided that we just needed to diverge for a minute at this point and talk about what we mean by the institutions because we often hear the term thrown around but we actually think that scientists, economists, communities might have all different things in their heads when they talk about institutional barriers.  I guess for us we thought it meant the legal frameworks, the cultural norms and sometimes they are rural cultures but much more often they are government cultures and the policy frameworks.  Some of the particular examples that have come up in the last two days are the tax system, the planning laws and entrenching the legitimacy of public good. 

So where are we today after a very rewarding two day forum?  Carl and I at one stage in discussion with the conference organisers had suggested to us that we might be able to come up with some recommendations out of this two day forum.  We have decided that we as a group are not yet ready for specific recommendations. 

We think that this is a really exciting, rewarding process that is a very dynamic process I think in the introductory speeches there was a comment about us learning from each other.  Well that is certainly true for me but I think a lot of others from what I have heard, we are learning from each other but we are still learning from each other and if we try to document, prescribe and put boundaries around that too much we might actually lose a lot of the dynamism that is there.  So we don’t actually think that we are ready for real recommendations out of this conference. 

I will contradict myself in a moment, but in general we think it is much more productive for us to set some challenges and we have thought of them as challenges for the coming year because we think that there is a huge amount of momentum, we need to keep this momentum going and we need to look at where we are in a years time. 

What are those challenges? 

Well the first of them is to build genuine indigenous involvement to go through to cultural learning experiences that many of us need to be able to achieve that but to ensure that we are involving the indigenous community right from the outset in achieving that.  The next challenge is to discover those markets a number of people are working on and Carl made the point that while we were reviewing that in other economic forums that he has been involved with, that there is a sense that the real estate market in particular, but other economic sectors as well are still needing us to more clearly communicate what is our common purpose, what is it we are trying to achieve, what are the benefits in that and moving to the landscape scale, we believe make that easier. 

The other area that we are only just getting started on is in communicating the Eco-system services and if you like selling that to the economic sector.  There is a huge amount of work to be done in what we have called discovering those markets.  It may be more about communicating those markets; it may be more about communicating those markets and clarifying our own thoughts in relation to markets. 

We believe there is also a need to expand our own networks,. There are over two hundred of us have come together here.  It is probably one of the most diverse both geographically and from an interest point of view groups that have come together to discuss nature conservation on private land but we are probably only a small fraction of the people that are doing it.  So we need to share our experiences and our learning’s with the other people and I guess here that we are pretty impressed with the fact that the trust is already getting their information up on the website and getting lots of hits, but all of us can contribute to getting that information out and expanding the networks and it may mean that there needs to be some structures for letting others tap into those networks.  Some of these were discussed at the Complan meeting.  That provides one forum; the web obviously provides another forum but lets all think actively over the next less than twelve months on how we expand our own networks. 

One of the really important areas that I think we are not yet adequately serving is both accountability and reporting of progress.  If we want to draw in many times the resources that we currently have and that we clearly need in nature conservation and private land we are going to have to get better about accountability and reporting our progress.  How many of us have had to fill out forms that report our progress on the number of kilometres fences or some other similar measure.  The more progressive parts of the corporate sector are rapidly moving down the pathway of triple bottom line reporting some of us whom have tried wrestle with it hate the term.  It is probably a fairly bureaucratic term the way that it is used at the moment but in one way or another we really do need to start in a good documented way backed up by the sort of data we saw in one and perhaps only one presentation document the social benefits and to the extent that we canned the economic benefits.  I know a lot of us, including me are ambivalent about putting dollar values on some of the nature conservation outcomes but if we have got those social outcomes well documented through good scientific approaches as well then that will help both our accountability and our reporting. 

Of course we need to better engage local government in its role as we have heard several times again local government is a major manager of nature conservation outside of the reserve system.  There are some areas that are doing pretty well.  There are a whole lot of reasons as we have heard from yesterdays workshops and the previous session why that is not happening and that is another of the real challenges.

I guess I would just like to think a little bit more about a term that Carl attributed to me and in fairness to my business partner Jane Ellix, it was actually she who coined the term, we jointly coined the concept and that was the concept of cultural translators and what is their role in achieving all of this.  Cultural translators to us are people who straddle different sectors in their understanding, people who bring different value sets and perceptions to the table, almost invariably people who are respected and trusted amongst the piers that they are dealing with and at the same time people who are articulate and versatile with language.  People who are able to talk with an economist, a local landholder who rarely moves out of their own district and a Canberra bureaucrat and to be accepted in all of those circles. 

It is our view that people with those skills and they will sometimes be landholders building links between farmers, scientists, government agencies, they will sometimes be people from those agencies who have particular skills, they may be people from completely outside our sector who bring other social human skills to the whole process and I am going to do one small plug I guess we are hopeful because we are the co-managers of the bush for wildlife project that bush for wildlife will become one of those translators.  So wherever Sally is I am expecting her to be a cultural translator by the time her project is finished.  It is not a role that is formalised in any way.  In fact when we put ______ application that very explicitly included someone that we called a cultural translator, it was going to be knocked out of the grant and in the end we didn’t go ahead with the grant because we felt it was missing the whole point of doing the project.  The project wasn’t about the nature conservation, so much as trialling this concept.  We actually think we are trialling it in other projects that we are working on where landholders are being “extension officers” and there are lots of example around the room in the last two days that we have heard.  So I think  that human element of identifying the right people to build the bridges is an important component of this challenge in the next 12 months.

We do need to work together as this group, as the bigger group that we expand our network to in our own communities and in our own organsiations.  I think over the next twelve months and a brief conversation in the corridor with Mike Berrick this morning confirms this for me.  We need to grab any opportunities that arise political or otherwise and there will certainly be political ones to further what we have all been talking about. 

We are going to finish with just one recommendation and that recommendation is that we should go away and act in our various capacities on those challenges and that we would love somebody to convene another forum of this sort in twelve months time because we believe by then we will be ready for very explicit recommendations and also to review where this forum has taken us. 

Thank you.

Speaker - Judith finished 

Host

Again it is always a tremendous accomplishment  for a couple of people to pull together in a few short minutes the accomplishments or the aspirations and the hopes of two days of conference.  Could you again join me in thanking Judith and Carl for their efforts in capsulating the essence of the proceedings and papers over the last two days.

We are calling these wrap up sessions, but really it is not the end it is only the beginning as Judy has mentioned.  We want to now go forward from here and one of the themes throughout has been active involvement throughout at all levels, linkages, partnerships and using the tools that we have available to further the outcomes that we wish.  So I think that it is entirely appropriate that the next session is delivered by the Honourable Judith Edwards Minister for the Environment and I invite Doctor Edwards to address us now.

Speaker - Judith Edwards

I am delighted to be here this morning to give this closing address.  But I have to admit that I looked at the program again this morning and I saw that this evening many of you are going spotlighting.  For a moment I had a shear abject terror as where I grew up, you know how sometimes you revert to your childhood, I grew up on a farm and the word spotlighting meant that you got in the back of the ute with a fair bit of alcohol and a few guns and a couple of torches particularly on a Friday or a Saturday night and belted through the bush picking off whatever you could.  I have been to Coracomire at night and I know the spotlighting that you are talking about and I am sure that you will really enjoy it.  It won’t be anything that my primordial urge made me shudder about. 

The recently released National Land and Water Resources Report predicted a startling future.  The area of farmland lost to dry land salinity will treble across Australia by the year 2050.  In Western Australia, as many of you know, we are facing  an increase from 4 million hectares to about 838 million hectares of farmland lost to dry land salinity.  In addition, 2 million hectares of native vegetation will be lost to salanisation resulting in the disappearance of a range of ecosystems and plant communities such as the red moral woodland in the WA wheatbelt.  I am a bit biased as I grew up there which is why I am talking to you about it.   Salinisation has also impacted on infrastructure in towns and it is adding enormous economic and social pressures to communities that are already experiencing a range of other stresses.  So this creeping natural disaster (is a natural disaster but its creeping) represents a considerable threat to our unique biodiversity which is the essential natural capital for this generation but in particular for future generations.  The situation is made even more compelling when we realise that many plant communities occur primarily on private land and that they are poorly represented in the conservation estate.  In the Avon wheatbelt region less that 2% of the original vegetation exists in the conservation reserve system.  So governments alone, cannot address this loss of bio-diversity and the ongoing damage to hydrological function that is still occurring in these areas.  Only be working cooperatively with all sectors of the community can we start to tackle this problem and hope to avoid or limit some of the outcomes that are predicted.  It is clear therefore that private land conversation has an important to role play in addressing these major environmental problems and this national forum has provided a very sharp focus to look at the work that has been done to date but probably more important to shape the future that we are all working towards.  I know I can’t imagine that this forum would have happened a decade ago, five years ago perhaps even a couple of years ago and it is a tribute to the work that you are doing and to the organisers who have brought people together that we have been able to discuss these issues.

So this challenge that we face can only be met through the combined action of the landowners, all levels of government, the non government sector and the business sector.  There is also an extremely important role that I know in Western Australia  that we have sometimes overlooked for indigenous communities in land conservation’s.

In Australia nearly 1 million hectare of private land has been committed to conservation through covenants or equivalent legal arrangements excluding land manager in programs like the land for wild life scheme.  The fact that such a large area has been put to this purpose in the last 10 years shows there is an increase in willingness to undertake this and I commend the efforts of the non-government organisations in particular, the Australian bush heritage fund which has been very exciting, organisations like the National Trust here in Western Australia, Greening Australia.  Other ones (the list is rather long) local government and individuals who have helped facilitate this change and I also do commend to you the Peruna and Coracumia sanctuaries which some of you will have the opportunity to visit later on today. 

This interest in private land conservation has coincided or possibly resulted from a change in emphasis away from a lock up in what is valuable to a more holistic view where we look outwards and see how we preserve it but continue to look into the future.  We are now seeing a greater strategic use of private land conservation tools to address the common goal of bio-diversity conservation. 

The range of topics that you have been though is absolutely fascinating reading and I am delighted to have met some of the presenters and participants but you have gone through every conceivable aspect of nature conservation on private land from facilitating philanthropathy.  I think an opportunity is there but we have to work out mechanisms that make sure that we deliver in both getting the money and then communicating and getting the outcomes.  We have also seen in Western Australia for example how work has been done to engage in the real estate sector again a really important sector in achieving our common goals.  I have also been pleased to hear of the work of indigenous and non indigenous communities looking at land conservation.  I give us an example the workshop conducting by Carl Binning on non-government trusts.  That is something that I look forward to having further discussions with Carl about and I think that Judy’s suggestion from the last idea of another forum in another year is an excellent idea to pressure on all of us in government to be moving towards the goals that you are showing we should be setting.

Many of the items mentioned in the program talk about incentives.  The incentives that need to be provided for private land owners to be conserving their land but I also think that government needs to pay more attention to the disincentives and that we need to remove those so I will be having those discussions with my colleagues.

All of the issues that have been erased are appreciated by government and we look forward to working with all of you through all the orgnisations and communities that you represent to then talking to our government colleagues across Australia to make sure that we start to implement what you are putting forward.  This is a very big challenge, but it is a challenge we have to front, if we are to leave the children and their children who follow us the bio-diversity heritage that they deserve.

So in conclusion, I wish you all the best for today, good luck and I hope you find very exciting in Western Australia that we are to show you. In conclusion, happy spotlighting in the way that spotlighting should be done.

Thank you.

Close

Host

Throughout the conference we have been talking about personal knowledge, personal commitment and personal vision and I thank Dr Edwards for indicating to us this morning that she shares with us that personal commitment in those key areas and that also within her ministerial responsibilities she will be talking with her government colleagues in furthering the processes in which we have been discussing this morning.  So once again please join me in thanking Dr Edwards for her conclusion again.

Could I now call upon Mr Tom Perigo The CEO of the National Trust for some concluding remarks.

Mr Tom Perigo

Thank you Robert.  Honorable Dr Judy Edwards, Minister for the Environment and Heritage and distinguished guests and I do notice that there is a few distinguished guests here and of course colleagues.  As CEO of the host organisation, it is indeed my pleasure to give thanks to all participants here.  Firstly to the Minister, it is delightful for us to have environment and heritage to come together under one portfolio.  I have a personal passion for the conservation and interpretation of our cultural landscapes and it is such an exciting future that we have and we look forward to working with your government.  There are so many people to thank and it is hard but I will be short.  First of all thank you for all of you for coming.  I know a lot of you have other priorities different things it is a rush in 2 ½ days we could have taken a week easily and nothing should be underwritten about how important your people are so thank you.  Thank you of course to our sponsors in putting an event of this nature on at very short notice and some of my team would like to kill me when I made the decision in November to do it, it really is important to thank sponsors and there are so many. 

Not in any order or priority the WA  Landcare Trust, Environment Australia, Ministry of Planning, the State Ministry of Planning the Department of Conservation and Land Management, the Lotteries Commission of Western Australia, Land and Waters Australia, Peruna and Coracomia sanctuaries, Berry Wilson and  your wines and other wineries.  This thing happened very quickly and we are delighted with it.  For those of you that know there is some cash involved in running these things and I must say to the good nature of all our sponsors in excess of $70,000 was raised in a very short time by the good will of these sponsors so thank you and of course we hope that your investment will be returned many times over and it certainly will by the sounds of it on the web.   Next again is all the speakers, chairs and facilitators from Keith who seemed to get the Guernsey for the most presentations to Korma who rescued me in philanthropy, thank you so much for all of you people who voluntarily and others gave a lot of very good advice.  Dr Colin Walker one of the board members of the National Trust who gave up his time thank you.  To all the land owners, who have really allowed us to share their vision and of course use of their properties,  Mitch Richardson, Mark Angeloni, ___ Hitchcock, Mark Coppley, Mike and Jenny  McIntosh and of course the Shire of Serpentine Jarradale.  We can’t say thanks enough.  In the National Trust we have measurements of things like we measure peoples knowledge, their understanding, their appreciation and their commitment and when people in organisations get to the level of commitment we know that our goals have been achieved and certainly all those landowners who have voluntarily made the commitment to conserve our heritage nothing could be short of thank you for very much for both this generation and future generations to come.  It is really quite fantastic.

I would also like to thank particularly to those in the team.  The team in the National Trust and the team surrounding the National Trust.  I am not just talking about Trust member either as many of you in here know who you and you have been nothing short of fantastic.  The covenanting team Dianna and Anne-Marie, wherever you are you guys have been fantastic and it is amazing to see such a small team within the National Trust one of our many programs but to have the results I have it is not just due to good staff it is due to commitment, perseverance.  In the main group of people and I would like all of those people just briefly to come up as I mention you names:  Mark Rounds – Environment Australia, Kim Ramsay, Mark Agar, Kim Smith, Paul Smith, Stuart Jackson, Carl Hayne, Leslie Thomas, Ian Robert Mitchell could you all just come up to the stage. 

Just briefly if you people come to my left.  I would like to identify you as you might have to do this again.  It is a good investment to give them a reward.  First of all I just can’t say enough.  We are a team of the National Trust and of course there are several people that aren’t here today that are behind the scenes what I call the nuts and bolts of this whole thing she has put together and many of you have been on the opposite end of an email to her and it has just been absolutely fantastic.  Mark , where is Mark, Mark has voluntarily been doing all the photographs and has for a couple of days before has been in Kim’s office to work behind the scenes, thank you.  Kim Smith, Kim has been what I call behind the scenes just sweeping up generally and sweeping up generally after me to and the mess that I leave, thank you.  Paul Smith, Paul is the web man.  He is behind the scenes with the web and this really has been a very interesting exercise to produce the National forum without a brochure has been a very interesting result.  Everything went over the web and has been networked through and I think that someone said today that we had 6,000 hits at the just from the start of this forum and I will speak briefly about that.  Stuart Jackson,  Stuart has also been behind the scenes and I call him the troubleshooter.  He really has done a lot of work.  Carl Hayne, Carl is a very essential part of my team back there and you know when you are up here in front of a crowd trying to fix IT every two seconds feels like 20 minutes.  It was quite interesting Carl did a wonderful job everything worked and of course grabbed Paul to help him in case it didn’t.  So both of them would be blamed so well done it is a lot of hard work. 

Finally two people that are both Managers with the National Trust and are really excellent members of the team, both Leslie Thomas manager of the Trust covenanting program.  Leslie has been outstanding in setting this up and she was responsible for the program content and her network and others that made the thing work and then finally Robert Mitchell.  Robert has a gift, I won’t tell you what that gift is but Robert is the Manager of membership and volunteer services and simply is outstanding.  Ladies and gentleman I would like you to again help me in thanking the behind the scenes team.  Well done.

Finally there are a couple of things I would like to say in closing.  First of all an evaluation form will go up on the web.  We haven’t circulated an evaluation form for those of you who are like me and have been to many conferences and you are rushed at the end to trying to fill these things out or trying to do it during the time.  We are not going to do it that way we are going to put it up on the web.  My friend Ray from Kings park suggested yesterday to me that I think is a very good idea, that we will also put comment space up on the web so as well as ticking the boxes we will ask people to comment .  Those comments can be passed on to the presenter electronically and we will keep tab of that.  So in other words this thing will keep going and the networking will keep going through the web. 

We also have been requested especially from a group of landowners but unfortunately we didn’t have enough time to talk about our issues as landowners and I acknowledge that. I think that the whole thing was a real buzz in the audience and a real excitement and probably we didn’t have time but this is only the beginning and again those landowners we would like to set something up for you on the web, and we will and for the landowners in the session that they want to also add comments about their particular needs so we will do that and then we will pass that on somehow and Carl and Robert will figure all that out, pass it along to the land owners so again we can get some circulation of landowners who have the special requirement.

Finally last night during the sort of house party.  I had an opportunity to meet with a couple of colleagues a good friend Mike from Trust for Nature and Doug from Australian Bush Heritage Fund.  We spent about an hour in my room obviously over a drink or two, we talked about how do we keep this thing going.  Well first of all we said we would keep it going.  That is a commitment that all three of us made on behalf of you and many others here I certainly spoke to Mark Rounds this morning and he said that he would keep it going as well.  Again on the web and on the evaluation form we will ask you for your comments.  I mean if you want to come back here next year fantastic, we will organise it.  If you want to go somewhere else we can organise that too.  Mike and I last year and Doug the year before had the pleasure of attending a conference in the US, Land Trust Rally last year in Portland there were 2,000 land trust who came together in Portland and this whole concept they call it the land trust alliance and what Mike and I talked about in particular is we really have got an alliance started now and we are all about outcomes.  We are not about territory or keeping things in, in fact everything we do you can have.  This is about outcomes and making a difference and we will keep that going and again we want your input into this thing and we will keep it going and we will definitely have a forum next year some where in Australia.  It will be easy to do with the excitement around here, of course as CEO I don’t do anything, but it is still easy to do.  You can see why my staff don’t like me at times.  I think one of my nick names (I don’t know all of them of course) is “say no Perigo” so I have got to be careful.

In closing, Minister thank you.  We are very excited about working with your government and I think that the initiatives that you have already shown in the short time are very very exciting.  One of the disappointments, a very minor one Minister is that we haven’t had enough decision makers here from government bureaucracy but I don’t want  to dwell on that because it is a very small thing and I think that the energy from the group will overtake that quite easily.  We are a trust for government as well as for the community and I am sure that they will wake up to the fact of how useful we can be and the same with other states.  In closing again I want to state a couple of facts.  There are far more members of conservation organisations than all of the political parties put together in this country – it is a fact.  I think that it is time to turn this brown country into green.  Within the energy in this room and the extended energy throughout Australia I think we will make a difference. 

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much we will see you next year.