Page 4449 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 14 October 2009
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government evaluate whether trees are dead, damaged or in irreversible decline, or are an irreparable hazard, and can you confirm that only trees in one or more of those states are removed?
MR STANHOPE: I thank Ms Le Couteur for the question. Ms Le Couteur, I am aware, of course, of your continuing interest in this issue, and indeed of discussions you and your officers have had with mine in relation to the matter and the deep interest that you have shown in our street trees and in the urban forest renewal program.
The government is also aware of some quite significant media interest in and exposure of issues in relation to the removal of trees by contractors employed by Territory and Municipal Services at a number of locations over the last few weeks. I have sought advice and reassurance from the department in relation to the processes employed in assessing each of those trees. The advice and the assurance that I have from the department is that all of those trees that have been removed were assessed by an experienced, professional arborist for health and for issues around potential risk or danger to the community.
There are running in parallel now—and I think it is creating perhaps some confusion or added anxiety within the community—two TAMS programs, one in relation to an ongoing urban street removal and renewal program, and this particular season’s program does involve the removal of, I think, an identified 282 trees, each one of which has been assessed in relation to its health and the danger that it potentially represents to the community. As a consequence of the identification of those 282 trees and the decision to remove and replace them and to replace other trees that had previously died and been removed, the government proposed through the urban street program in this spring to remove 282 trees and to plant somewhere in the order of 550 trees.
Ms Le Couteur, I have to say the department, in relation to the health of trees and the decision to remove trees, does not take the decision lightly. We contract out to experienced tree surgeons, arborists, experts, the assessment of the health of a tree and the decision to remove it. The department relies on expert advice. The advice received by the department on every single one of those trees is that they are ageing or that they represent a risk to the people of Canberra. They are removed on that basis.
There are 650,000 trees under the care of TAMS in the urban area of the ACT. Of those 650,000 trees, 282 will be removed over this month or two. Each one of those trees removed will be replaced and, in addition, a similar number of additional trees will be planted in other areas where trees have been recently removed. Trees do represent a real hazard, a risk to property and to life, and the government has a responsibility to maintain the health of the trees, the urban amenity and the treescape. That is why, in the context of a rapidly ageing urban forest, the government has moved to develop a policy in relation to a wholesale renewal of our urban forest.
But these trees are part of a process, or project, or program, that has been run by TAMS in its many descriptions since 1992. Every year TAMS removes trees, and in recent years it has been removing between 4,000 and 6,000 trees.
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