Page 642 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 9 March 2011
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looking at this in Wright, next to the unfortunate pond with the asbestos—hopefully it no longer has asbestos in it.
It is getting known within the government that there is a demand for community gardens, but it is only getting known and it is only really happening from a government point of view in new areas. Of course, most people in Canberra do not live in new areas; they live in existing areas, and there is a lot of space in existing areas for community gardens. There is a lot of space in schools. There is a lot of space in aged care facilities in particular, speaking as someone who has unfortunately spent too much time in those sorts of places.
I have only got four minutes to go, so I need to talk a bit more quickly. It is important that community gardens are generally established near existing facilities because what they need to have in Canberra these days is good access to water by being adjacent to wetlands or stormwater ponds or near to big roofs where rainwater tanks can be installed to collect rainwater. And it is preferable that there are a lot of them so that the community gardens are within easy walking distance of the people who are going to use them.
In paragraph 2(b) I call for the development of a standard licence arrangement for TAMS or private landowners to enter into with the operators of community gardens. I do understand that work has been done by TAMS with COGS on this, but it needs to go further because, as I said, COGS are not the only people who operate community gardens.
Paragraph 2(c) calls on the government to facilitate group insurance provisions for operators of community gardens. The government has done this, I am very pleased to say, for community councils and this saves a lot of money for community councils. If we start having more groups doing community gardens, insurance becomes an important issue and this is somewhere where group insurance could make a big difference to the practicalities of running it.
Paragraph 2(d) calls for funding for a number of things: a support person to help coordinate the expansion of community gardens, a grants program to meet the costs of community gardens and a gardening/food growing training program that is open to all members of the community. What has happened is that COGS has grown from a very small organisation which could basically do it all by itself to a large organisation which is in need of help with its admin. It has gone from economies of scale to diseconomies of scale and this is where I think that a small program of government support could make a major difference. We are not talking about a lot of money; we are talking about a bit of money to help establish the water pipes, establish the fence around the garden, identify where the gardens could be and a training program open to all members of the community.
As I said, we know that there is a big demand for education in gardening. I note that in Queanbeyan the organic gardeners are about to start a short course in organic gardening. There is going to be the Canberra Harvest Festival at the Environment Centre at the end of the month and that is going to have talks about organic gardening.
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