The NSW government has put a scythe through its environment office, cutting 350 jobs and slicing many programs in national parks, animal management and climate change research.
The public service cuts, which amount to nearly 12 per cent of all workers in the Office of Environment and Heritage, mean some national parks will go unstaffed, and visitors will be forced to utilise a ”self service” culture in some regions.
The staff cuts, which will result from a combination of redundancy packages and ”natural attrition”, will save $101 million by 2016, said the Environment Minister, Robyn Parker.
Internal documents circulated among employees said the agency had committed to cutting costs in kangaroo harvesting programs, reducing wilderness and wild river assessments, deregulating wildlife licensing where appropriate, scaling back soil and salinity research and ”reducing effort in our biodiversity programs”.
Many climate change programs had been stopped or scaled back, the government said. They include cuts in soil carbon sequestration programs, energy efficiency programs and greenhouse gas cuts policy development.
”The transport emissions reduction policy and programs including policy work on electric vehicles, national transport sector emissions reduction and heavy vehicle emissions reduction have ceased,” the government said in a statement.
The cuts were partly driven by the national carbon price, ”to avoid duplication with the federal government in a post-carbon tax world”, Ms Parker said.
However, the state government also hopes to see the federal carbon price abolished, as the federal Coalition has pledged to do if it wins next year’s election.
Ms Parker did confirm that the government’s climate change plan, which involves cutting greenhouse emissions by five per cent by 2020, would still be produced, though she declined to name a specific date for its release. The plan is expected to focus on cutting emissions through energy efficiency - encouraging businesses to use less electricity - rather than large-scale deployment of renewable power.
Ms Parker told the Herald the cuts would focus disproportionately on managerial and senior positions, and actually improve front line services, but the Public Service Association said the cuts would decimate front line services to the public in some areas.
”The government keeps saying they won’t cut frontline services and yet here you’ve cut the people who look after national parks, make sure those parks are safe … and help prevent forest fires,” said the union’s assistant general secretary, Steve Turner.
”This government is refusing to meet and refusing to give proper details of its plans.”
The opposition environment spokesman, Luke Foley, said the cuts were particularly concerning in light of the government’s recent decision to allow amateur hunters into some national parks to shoot feral animals.
Mr Foley said it was hypocritical to use the carbon price as an excuse to cut programs.
Widespread cuts across departments were foreshadowed in the recent state budget.
