Dr. James Moran:

Yes. To be honest, I am trying to be optimistic now, but when we look at the situation from a national level we can be overwhelmed by the complexity. I am seriously bloody annoyed at the carry-on at national level when we try to scale up any of these local initiatives. We often do not have the institutional capacity to do this now, so institutional reform is needed to make local action possible.

As scientists, we are always trained to break down complex problems into manageable units. In this context, I get overwhelmed when I look at this subject in national and international perspectives in respect of climate change, biodiversity loss, food security and the population globally hitting more than 8 billion at the start of this week. What I have seen from working in this area for more than 20 years, though, is that it is not as complex when working at local level. There are fewer vested interests in place, though there are vested interests and people. At local level generally, though, people have the best interests of their places and communities in mind because they have to live there and cannot move away.

If we can do this on a community-by-community and catchment-by-catchment basis, then the State will have to create this integrated land use framework. It should set targets for what we need, recognise the capacity of each individual bit of land and put the right incentives in place. It is not, however, just a question of incentives. We need good laws and regulations that put a backstop in place that we can build on and that will prevent any more environmental or societal deterioration. The economic situation has to be bent to the will of serving society and to work within the capacity of the environment. It should not be the other way round, which is the set-up now.

We need this fundamental change, but my plea to committee members, as the legislators and leaders in the country across political parties and as the representatives of our local communities, is that they must create the enabling environment that will lead to local action that will collectively solve these issues. This means better regulation, sorting out our State agencies, sorting out our EIA regulations, getting down to the nitty-gritty of this endeavour, promoting peatland restoration and better land use in general and sorting out our forestry strategy and not having a situation where we are going to continue to lock-in a great deal of monoculture forestry over the next several years, despite the greenwashing and things we say at national level in respect of having a whole new forestry strategy.

An awful lot of the stuff we are doing now talks the big game and has targets for major aspirations. When we look at the actions, though, these are tweaking and fiddling around the edges of the problems and not going headlong towards achieving these goals. When these goals are set, I think an awful lot of people in the administrative systems fundamentally believe them to be unachievable anyway and so we will just continue on with what we know. This is a call for there to be leadership, a strategic approach and enabling of action at local community level.

We can get bogged down in the complexity of the situation and be defeatist regarding the task at hand. The alternative is to struggle on and to make things happen. I do not care what the political party people are in or what social side of things they are on. It makes no difference whether people are left, right or centre. Fundamentally, we are all in this together. If the environment deteriorates, then society will be gone and who will give a damn about the economy when there is no one around to need it?