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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 9 Hansard (27 August) . . Page.. 3236 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

quite a few places we went past that row after row after row of trees had been planted. They wouldn't have been anything more than 30 centimetres high.

Clearly, there's a movement right across the country for people to just put their labour into putting trees back where, over the 200 years that we've occupied this bit of ground, we've actually mowed the things down.

The other occasion, Mr Speaker, was-I would have only been in this place about 12 months and Mr Smyth might have been Minister for Urban Services at the time-when we had this stouch over Templestowe Avenue at Conder. He would remember that one. I wanted to have Mentone View continued and completed. The government of the day said, "No, we're not going to do that. Blah, blah, blah."We had some discussions about what is now Conder 4A. We talked about some land at the back of Templestowe Avenue, which has now been developed.

But, I have to say, you've got to give credit where it's due in these sorts of subjects. There are a pair of creeks that come together in a V, and in there were some remnants of old growth woodland. If my memory serves me correctly, they were yellow box. There might have been some red gum, but I think it was yellow box. When we pointed this out to Mr Smyth, he readily took that off the plan for residential development.

What that did was actually create a sort of mindset. The Conder Landcare group-and this is the relevance of it-decided to take on the idea of developing the wetlands there. I confess, Mr Speaker, I had never heard of Landcare before I came across the Conder Landcare group; I'd seen the product of their labour with what looked like plastic tree factories all over the place-not understanding, of course, that there was a little sapling in each one of them.

But what they actually did was agitate and badger the then government, badger us and badger everybody to have a seamless piece of the environment go from Tom Roberts Avenue right up into the hill. It meant that the government of the day, instead of putting a road right through the middle of this, actually turned the road to the left and joined up Templestowe Avenue with Tom Roberts Avenue, allowing, I have to say, the progression of the wetlands at the bottom of the hill, through grasslands and into the forestry and the nature park.

You have to congratulate the government for actually doing it, which I do quite readily. But of course the major amount of credit has to go to the Conder Landcare group, because without them saying this is what it should be like, this is what it was like, this is what we want to put it back to, even if it means re-creating it, it would possibly have never have happened.

Mr Speaker, the Landcare awards provide an ideal opportunity to recognise and celebrate the great work done by those involved in the Landcare movement to address serious environmental challenges facing our region. I had the great pleasure of presenting the 2003 ACT Landcare awards on behalf of the Chief Minister and Minister for Environment at a ceremony last week at the Brassey Hotel.

For the entertainment of guests, Mark Carmody was the MC. I did have a discussion with him about when you plant your tomatoes. We are agreed, in fact, that Melbourne Cup

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