SHUTTING OUR SEEDBANK

Last week the local workers who run our native seedbank in Deniliquin were told their jobs are gone, with no public announcement and no plan for what comes next.

This is the largest publicly owned native seedbank in south-western New South Wales. For years the team there has collected, cleaned and stored local native seed that gets used to bring our landscape back to life, and the last few seasons have been some of the biggest on record. At their end-of-season meetings the talk was about new equipment and growing the program, and nobody breathed a word about money being a problem.

The casuals at Deniliquin have been let go, along with another seven or so at Corowa and Albury. Seed collection has stopped. The Government says it will "explore" partnerships and community groups to take the work over down the track but nothing is in place, and nobody can tell these workers or this town what actually happens now.

What walks out the door with them is decades of knowledge about where our local native species grow and how to collect them, so once these people are scattered that knowledge is simply gone and you cannot buy it back.

Here is what makes my blood boil. Twelve days before those workers got the news, Agriculture Minister Tara Moriarty stood in Wagga and opened a brand new $1.1 million seed vault for grain. So the Government can find $1.1 million for crop seed up the road while it strips the people who collect our native seed here in the Murray, and not a word was said about it publicly.

I am writing to Minister Moriarty today to demand answers on why these local jobs have been cut and what the future of our seedbank actually is, because the people of the Murray deserve a straight answer.