Page 3440 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 14 November 2006
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the planting of trees, we cover our own fleet exhaust emissions. But because these trees are exotics, they are unequal trees that should not be planted and should not actually sully the vista of the suburbs of Canberra. It is nonsense, absolute confected nonsense!
The arboretum potentially serves a whole range of purposes in the context of the city, tourism and amenity. It will provide a significant legacy for this community for the future, for our children and grandchildren. Of course, because they are exotics, they attract the opposition and the ire of some. But let us put these 6,000 trees in context. In the last three to four years, we have planted four and a half million trees and we have this confected nonsense over 6,000 of them. Let me say now that these trees will be using bore water or recycled water.
MR SPEAKER: The member’s time has expired.
MR SPEAKER: Do you have a supplementary question, Dr Foskey?
DR FOSKEY: Yes, thank you, Mr Speaker. Could the Chief Minister then please outline the measures that will be taken to protect these seedlings from wind and exposure to sunlight so that we do not lose the benefits of this considerable investment in money and labour?
MR STANHOPE: Wind and sunlight and trees. One of the reasons we are planting those trees and planting them now is that they were ordered and acquired over a year ago at a time when we had some expectation that we might, or hope that we might, have a reasonable season; that we would not slip from a good year of rainfall and climate back into a bad year, as we have. To that extent our crystal ball failed us and we had acquired these 6,000 trees. If we had our druthers, if we had our time again, I would suggest that we would not be planting these trees now. But they were acquired in anticipation that we would not run from an El Nino drought into a good year of above-average rain into another El Nino drought. It is quite a remarkable climatic circumstance we find ourselves in—in El Nino, out and back in so quickly. It is an unusual circumstance to have an El Nino separated by one good year.
To the extent that we, perhaps in hope and expectation that we might have a second season, acquired, as one does, trees of this sort, of this type, one has to order these trees, particularly in the quantities that we were purchasing them. They have been sitting out at the Yarralumla nursery awaiting the weather, which never arose, as we waited through September, as we waited through the driest October on record, as we waited for a change in circumstance that did not arrive—until now; we have had our 40 millimetres this month as we head perhaps towards average rainfall for the month of November. If the time is right at any time in this particular season, it is probably now, if it is ever going to be right.
Those experts that were utilised, and the experts we utilised in relation to this project, are the experts at the Yarralumla nursery, first and foremost in the ACT for expertise in trees and the planting of them. Their advice to us—the advice on which we relied—was that these 6,000 trees will to the best of our human capacity be maintained, and we hope will survive, over this summer with the addition of somewhere over a thousand millilitres, I think—that amount of water that four or five households utilise
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