A WAREHOUSE OF MATHS

The government has done some very convenient maths to justify shutting down our native seed bank, and I want you to see the trick in it.

They say the Deniliquin store is holding about 2000 kilograms of native seed and only sells around 86 kilograms a year, so on paper that reads like more than twenty years of supply and no reason to keep collecting. Case closed, walk the workers out.

Here is what that number leaves out. Native seed is alive and it dies, so a kilo sitting in a jar today is not a kilo you can plant in ten years. Some of our local species only set seed once every three or four years, so you cannot simply order more when the shelf runs low. Sue Logie ran that seed bank for about twenty years and she has said it plainly, that having a lot of one thing is not the same as having what the land actually needs, because a mountain of old-man saltbush does you no good when the job in front of you calls for a dozen other species that are nowhere in the store.

So the real picture is a shed slowly filling with the wrong seed as it loses its life, and the only people who knew where to find the right seed have just been sent home. Thirteen of them, four here at Deniliquin and nine up around Corowa and Albury, told on budget day with no public announcement while the biggest publicly owned native seed bank in south-western New South Wales has its collection switched off.

This is the seed that rebuilds our shelterbelts, our nature corridors and the revegetation on farms and public land right across the Murray, and every nursery, Landcare group and farmer doing that work now has to go looking for it somewhere else. What really walks out the door is decades of knowing where each species grows and exactly when it seeds, knowledge you cannot buy back at any price once these people scatter.

Twelve days before these workers were told their jobs were gone, Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty stood in Wagga and opened a brand new 1.1 million dollar seed vault for grain. The government can find that kind of money to store crop seed up the road while it decides the people who collect our native seed here in the Murray are surplus to requirements, so nobody should let them pretend this was ever about a shed that was already full.

I have written to Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty to demand she reverse this cut, fund this year's harvest and bring these workers back, because the people of the Murray deserve a working seed bank, not a warehouse of maths that falls apart the moment someone who actually knows seed looks at it.

Share this so the minister cannot pretend nobody noticed.