Page 4857 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 11 November 2009
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The urban tree replacement program is positive from a climate point of view. The ability of trees to sequester carbon, and their role in the carbon cycle, is crucial. But we are funding the urban tree program for lots of other reasons as well—for urban amenity, for wildlife, for the fact that people just love their trees. There are lots of reasons and it is unfair to put it all down under climate change.
In conclusion, let me stress that the approach we take to street trees over the next decade or two provides a once in a lifetime opportunity for the trees, a once in a century approach. The government has in-principle support from the Greens for the urban forest renewal program. There is seriously a greater good to be gained for Canberrans now and in the future. But we really need to ensure that the program is well done. It will be a tragedy if the government fails on the implementation challenges. (Time expired.)
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Minister for Transport, Minister for Territory and Municipal Services, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs and Minister for the Arts and Heritage) (4.01): I am happy to speak to this motion. I do, I think, have some level of regret in relation to the extent to which a basic management issue such as the removal of dead, dying or dangerous trees has been politicised to the extent that it has and that the concerns within the community on the government’s approach and attitude to the issue have been raised, I think, quite unnecessarily. I must say that I think the innuendo and the charge that members of TAMS, members of Parks, Conservation and Lands, our dedicated rangers—those that actually identify trees that are in decline, dead or dying and then refer their concern to an expert tree assessor within TAMS, one of our most experienced and respected rangers, who then makes an assessment as to whether or not a tree is in decline, dangerous, dying or dead and on the basis of that assessment arranges for its removal—in some way are not doing their job are not justified.
I believe there are 282 trees that are currently being removed in this particular cycle, 282 trees that are part of the annual tree maintenance program, an annual tree maintenance program that was initiated in 1994 and has run and been managed without controversy since 1994. It is the same process, the same program, the same rationale. We are talking about 282 trees across the entire ACT. We have an urban forest of 600,000 and, of the 600,000 trees in the urban forest, 282 have been identified as in decline, dead, dying or dangerous. The 282, after individual inspection and assessment by an expert assessor, were identified as dead, dying, in decline or dangerous and were slated for removal.
Some of the confusion and some of the concern over and above that is, of course, that the government has, for most of this year, raised, in anticipation of a detailed public consultation, its desire to initiate a long-term strategic tree replacement program, acknowledging, on the basis of expert advice from the ANU and the CSIRO, that we face, with our urban forest, something of a tsunami of decline and that we have wanted to be strategic about how we deal with that. So we have appointed an expert panel. And the expert panel has been giving us advice on how to proceed. On the basis of the work of that expert panel, we had intended, anticipated, a major round of
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