Page 1306 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 5 April 2011
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MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (11.31): Like the Chief Minister, I am very pleased that the commissioner has completed this report. Members may remember that in 2009 I in fact wrote to the commissioner asking for her to do a report along these lines on the state of urban forest and the maintenance of it. I did that because my letterbox, my emails and my phones were being overwhelmed by people who were really, really concerned about the tree program. It simply was not working.
At the time, Mr Stanhope was very negative about this. In fact we had a motion on the subject in the Assembly and Mr Stanhope was fairly negative about the idea of referring this. But I am very pleased that the government changed its mind and ended up formally requesting this investigation, and I am very pleased that it seems that the government is going to take on board the commissioner’s findings.
The commissioner did, as far as I can see, a very comprehensive analysis of the government’s tree management practices. The commissioner did a lot of community consultation, which is why we have got such a huge appendix 2, because it has got all the results of the community consultations, what everyone thought about it. So I think that one of the very positive things the commissioner has done is give a much greater level of community acceptance and calmness about the program because the community knows that it has been listened to, it knows the experts have been listened to and it knows that we have actually got some sort of coherent report here.
It is clear that the commissioner in her report uncovered some serious issues and practices which must be improved, and I will talk a bit more about those later. But basically the major things it said were the need for complete replacement of the urban forest renewal program with a new program which focuses on care and maintenance, new tree legislation, review of existing tree legislation, a much higher priority on extending the life of trees rather than cutting them down and starting again, a better process around tree removal and replacement and improved decision-making processes, consultation and communication, including establishing the position of the ACT tree curator.
I am very much looking forward to the government’s formal response to this report. I am pleased to see that TAMS has taken on some of the practices already, but we need to see the government’s full response, including of course the government’s formal commitment to actually funding some of this. One of the good things about the report is that at the end of it the commissioner has gone through how much she thinks her ideas would cost, and they are going to be in the order of an extra $4½ million a year. I believe that is a quite affordable and appropriate amount of money for preserving Canberra’s tree landscape, otherwise known as our urban forest.
Moving on to the report itself in more detail, the first thing I would like to highlight is that the early public commentary from TAMS on this was quite—“scary” I think is the only word that can be used. “Scary” was certainly the word that was used to me. I quote from the commissioner on page (vi) who quoted from the TAMS spokesperson saying:
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