Page 2190 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 2 August 2022
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habitat where our wildlife live. We need to protect these and make sure Canberra is and remains a biodiversity haven, and we need to honour the work of the volunteers who are looking after the area with such love.
My motion is long. I apologise for that. We seem to write quite long ones in our office. But the measures I have suggested are really simple. The motion sets out a lot of ACT government and Assembly work that is already underway or that has been recently announced. I am happy that I had so much to list.
We are delivering funding to support nature conservation in urban open spaces. We are delivering a one-year pilot rapid mowing response team. We are exploring and enhancing nature in the city, and we are working on biodiversity, connectivity and wildlife corridors, with the enhancement of 20 local sites and the production of habitat and connectivity maps.
We are reviewing the public land management plans for urban spaces, including dryland ovals, like the one in Florey, which has just opened for community consultation, thanks to another motion that I moved last year. We are funding an adopt-a-park program to support community-led initiatives on urban open land. We had a play spaces strategy launched earlier this year, and there is a biodiversity conservation forum that is designed to foster connections between all of our different land managers and all of our community members working on the land. There is a landscape guide to support biodiversity and our climate-resilient capital. Environment Minister Vassarotti’s executive motion last week highlighted the commitment to work collaboratively to protect, connect and restore biodiversity across the territory.
This motion today extends all of these initiatives. It puts an eco lens on all of the work that we are doing, to make sure that we are doing that work in the right way. It is about doing the right mowing in the right places at the right times. It is about adapting urban Landcare management for our changing city and putting an ecological filter on all of our urban land management. It is about listening to the concerns from the community and feeding them in to the way we do things.
This motion is not about road safety. I have done a bit of work on road safety in other capacities in this Assembly. This motion will not affect long grass or lines of sight around traffic. It is also not about bushfire management, which needs a separate, careful approach. My motion will not affect either of those things. It is about protecting Landcare areas that have already been agreed to and marked out by ACT government.
Different members of the public and different members of our community value different aspects of our urban environment. Some people love the neat look of mown grass. That is great in certain areas, but it is not suitable for recognised habitat areas. More education, more signage about what lives in different areas and the benefits we get when we start protecting this habitat in the right way and more conversation on this topic will help us all to work out what we want and where.
As well as providing habitat, having grasslands that are protected provides a huge amount of amenity for the community in terms of cooling and urban conservation. I am also keen to see training, capacity building and other tools for the ACT
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