SVP criticises free garden consultations

As part of the “Nature Kur” initiative, Cham, Hünenberg, and the City of Zug are offering free consultations to help people design more natural gardens. The Swiss People's Party (SVP) is critical of this.
 

Anyone who wants to make his or her garden more natural can currently receive free advice in Cham, Hünenberg and the City of Zug. Many people are unsure how best to approach such a project, wrote the city recently, with regard to the joint project of the three municipalities, which was launched in 2017.

It’s often small measures that have a significant impact on bio-diversity, such as leaving a pile of branches in a rarely visited corner of the garden, or supplementing the plant population with native species that are adapted to the site. Master gardener Alex Neulist offers this kind of advice in Zug, and carries out the consultations on behalf of the city. The service is limited to 15 consultations per year, while it's limited to five in Cham and Hünenberg.

What sounds like an innocuous and environmentally-friendly project is encountering political resistance, however. The Swiss People's Party (SVP) faction in the Zug City Council (GGR: Grossen Gemeinderat der Stadt Zug) recently submitted an interpellation, calling this offer a case of "state overreach" and seeing the project as "another step towards an all-encompassing, subsidising city."

The “Nature Cure” project aims to promote biodiversity.                 Photo: Andrea Lim
 

One thing is clear from the perspective of the SVP: it's not the job of the state to "subsidise" the maintenance and design of private gardens. "In a free market economy, it's the responsibility of the owner to consult a private professional when needed, and to pay them a market-rate fee for their expertise," the motion continues.

Competition for businesses?
The SVP parliamentary group is convinced that, with this service, the city is "torpedoing" the personal responsibility of owners, is depriving businesses of potential contracts, and is ultimately destroying "the awareness of the value of professional advice." The "unrelenting growth of the state apparatus" is also viewed critically: the administration is extending itself into areas that were previously "sovereign and independently managed by the citizenry and private businesses."

The parliamentary group is therefore posing several questions to the city council, such as the legal basis for the garden consultation service (Gartenberatungen). They also want to know whether the city council considers this a "core sovereign task of the public sector" and whether it is aware that this service puts them in competition with private companies and gardeners.

Furthermore, they want to find out how high the costs of the project are, and whether raising awareness could have been better achieved with "cost-neutrally" through associations, private nature conservation organisations, or informational brochures.