John Dengate's speech at the CANRI launch

Thank you, Minister. I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of trouble thinking about what I did yesterday, or remembering that.

But I’d like you to cast your minds back to 1985, if you would. And picture yourself watching television, on Tuesday night or some other night. There’s a fundamental difference between what you were looking at then, and what you’re seeing now. And the difference is, for better or worse, lifestyle television.

And while this contributes to my bank balance, I think it’s an interesting phenomenon. There is a wide range of programs like Burke’s Backyard, Live This, Great Outdoors, Healthy Wealthy and Wise, Better Homes …the list goes on. The point I’d like to make about this is that it’s one of the biggest revolutions in the style of programming in television in the last decade, and it was missed by every single television executive. It took a reformed gardener, Don Burke, to get the first program up, and once that happened everyone said, "Oh, it’s actually working, and we should do one of those," and there’s now a lot of them, to the point where perhaps we’ve got a kind of lifestyle overload.

But the point I’m going to make about that is that what it says about society is that people want information. They want to know about what’s going on, and they might not necessarily trust what you might call the mainstream information providers. So, at the moment lifestyle TV, which is to one side of the media picture, is clearly a growing area.

There’s an EPA program that is also relevant to this; it’s attitude surveys. We used to call it Skills, Knowledge, Attitudes and Behaviours, but we thought the acronym wasn’t so good. So we now publish the reports under the title of Who Cares about the Environment? And in our survey work over a decade what we find is that while people want the environment protected, and they want honest bureaucrats, and so forth, the main thing they want is information. Again, they want to know what’s going on. It’s a thing that comes out time and time again, both from what we’re doing and from the way television’s changing.

And I guess what that means for this program is that it’s got an extremely useful market. Everybody wants to know what us bureaucrats are sitting on. And, hopefully, CANRI is the way of explaining to people what the actual databases look like, what’s in there. The great thing about it is that, for the first time in the history of the State, it’s a publicly accessible thing that’s user friendly - or at least user driven, and you can look at maps, tables, graphs. You can find out where mallee fowls live. You can find out where the air’s fit to breathe, or possibly otherwise, there’s a whole lot of things that you can do.

And, to me, the great thing about this is that it contributes to the quality of the environment debate in New South Wales. And while it doesn’t always make it fun to be in any of our shoes, it is a great recipe for saving the planet.

So I’ll just leave those points with you. And it’s my great pleasure to introduce Kathy Ridge who’s the Executive Officer of the Nature Conservation Council. Thank you.