Page 1039 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 20 April 1994
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My advice on this matter from the Department of Urban Services landscape area, which I obtained some time ago, indicated that usually the department waits until the new area is about 80 per cent settled before the completion of the landscaping occurs. That has been to protect the trees from dying or vandalism, as the case may be. I recall last year being taken to some parts of McKellar and Evatt, I think when we were considering the Territory Plan, where it was obvious that the residents had very different ideas from each other as to the type of landscaping they wanted in the area. With each resident removing the street trees that were planned for that particular area, the area ended up with no treescape or streetscape at all. I think it is a great shame when things go to that extent.
I would also like to repeat a comment that was made to me about the attempts by the Department of the Environment, Land and Planning and the Department of Urban Services to encourage developers to use landscaping of a new area as a selling point. This has been a neglected part of the sales area in the past and, given that we have a small number of developers in the market in Canberra, there is more emphasis these days on ensuring that the end product is one that will attract people and therefore give the developers a good name with potential home buyers. That may mean, as Ms Ellis has indicated, that landscaping is completed at an earlier stage, before local residents move in.
Ms Ellis mentioned some of the areas interstate that members of the Planning, Development and Infrastructure Committee visited last year in particular. The one that came to my mind was the Robina development in Queensland, behind the Gold Coast, where a new community is being established with the landscaping largely in place. It really does have a magnificent settled feel. I returned to the ACT from that visit and went out to Palmerston and contrasted the two developments. The contrast between the very advanced landscaping plans for Robina and the very new landscaping in Palmerston was stark. I made a comment at the time that Palmerston looked more like a construction site that local residents were living in than a settled community, with a degree of landscaping having been developed.
In conclusion, Mr Deputy Speaker, I have listened with interest to the remarks that various speakers have made about this issue. I do take on board Mr Humphries's call on the Government to solicit the views of local residents, where possible, before deciding on tree planting in streets in newly developed suburbs. At this stage, I will support the motion, but in the context of all the preparatory work that is done by many people in this city to ensure that we have a high-quality landscape that everyone can enjoy.
MR LAMONT (Minister for Urban Services, Minister for Housing and Community Services, Minister for Industrial Relations and Minister for Sport) (11.54): I rise mainly to address a couple of points raised by Ms Szuty. In general, the difficulty associated with Mr Humphries's motion is not in agreeing with or acknowledging the sentiment, which I think is broadly supported by everybody in the Assembly, but in being able to implement such a sentiment in a way that is workable. We live in a city which demands many things from its government, and quite rightly so, as far as public amenity is concerned. We saw for the period of Mr Kaine's stewardship that that was not achieved and we have seen the remarkable change since.
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