Page 4867 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 11 November 2009
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and the expertise that was in that expert tree committee. There was not a person there who was wanting to willy-nilly cut down trees. I do not think there is a person in the territory who wants to willy-nilly cut down trees. But what we have to do now is communicate that and take the community with us, and that will not be easy. We actually have to work together rather than against one another. I hope that we have started that here today, because it will be a problem not just for this government but for the Canberra Liberal government in 2012 and for years and years after that.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Convenor, ACT Greens) (4.33): I rise to support Ms Le Couteur’s motion and to echo some of the comments that have been made here today. I am not clear why there was such an attack on Ms Le Couteur. What was being put forward was a way whereby everybody could be quite clear on how we are going to move forward around the renewal of our trees and a major issue facing this territory that will go on for decades—that is, the urban forest. So the motion is just clearly putting down some of those important principles of how we are going to move forward.
I just want to pick up on a couple of points around what seemed to be quite an attack on the Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment and some suggestion that this was operating outside the parliamentary agreement. It is our right as a party in this Assembly to be writing to commissioners, people who are supposed to be independent, to put forward views and ideas and opinions and, in this case, a request for this issue to be looked at. That is not in any way breaching any sort of arrangement, and it is perfectly within our rights. I think it is important to make that point.
I think it is also incredibly important to understand that this is a major issue. I go back to us visiting and being a part of a presentation from the expert reference group, and it was incredibly impressive. This is an impressive group of people who are putting a lot of rigour, a lot of work, a lot of research into how we might move forward here in the territory with the renewal of our urban forest. Each of the four MLAs were asked what we saw as the biggest issues, and I said to the group that the biggest issue is going to be communication; it is going to be consultation; it is going to be around community engagement. Canberra is well known for its trees; Canberrans do love their trees, and that is where so much work and so much focus have to go in this whole issue.
As Ms Le Couteur has pointed out, there have been a number of trees that have been taken down in suburbs recently that have appeared in our local papers, and it just shows the sort of emotive response that people do have. So we do need to get that community engagement right. What Ms Le Couteur was doing here was not bringing in the politics but simply saying, “This is so important, so let’s get down some principles about how we are going to go about it.” We certainly in no way want to put in place obstacles and difficulties for those workers within TAMS who are part of this tree program. That is not what this is about. But it is about clearly putting down what is a good way to go forward.
I am quite surprised that this has met with such reaction, and I would hope that this afternoon, as Mrs Dunne has just said, we can all move forward. I think that we all
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