Page 4931 - Week 13 - Thursday, 2 November 2017
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Canberra has an excellent network of recreational forest trails and they attract thousands of people every year who engage in a variety of sports and activities. We are privileged to have these trails and they have helped Canberra to grow very active sporting communities, who make use of the trails for recreation and for organised events.
The trails are an important factor contributing to some of the great outcomes we are getting in the city. We have high levels of participation in recreational activities, we are the most active city, the healthiest city, a very livable city, and, as we all know, it was recently declared one of the best cities to visit in the world.
An activity like mountain biking is increasingly popular in Canberra, and this is basically attributable to the fact that we have great access to recreational trails. Talk to someone from Sydney or Melbourne, for example, and they will tell you that there is very little opportunity to do something like mountain biking there. You pretty much have to wait until a weekend and then make a special trip out of the city to some distant destination. In fact many Sydney-siders travel to Canberra for a weekend of mountain biking.
Here in Canberra we have a good number of local, accessible, high quality forest trails. That in turn spawns great sporting and social organisations and clubs, such as Canberra Off-road Cyclists—better known as CORC—the Canberra One Gear Society, Stromlo night riders, Kowalski Brothers Trailworks and the Majura Pines Trail Alliance. These are organisations with hundreds of members that support countless events and help get kids and adults into healthy, recreational activities.
Not surprisingly, Canberrans over-perform in off-road cycling competitions. Cyclists such as Caroline Buchanan, the world BMX champion, or Brendan Johnson, the national mountain bike marathon champion, live in Canberra and train on our trails.
The point of my motion today is to draw attention to, firstly, the fact that the recreational trails in Canberra are, unfortunately, being diminished quite severely; and, secondly, to the fact that we need to better value and manage these trails. These are both issues that the government can and should address.
The immediate case in point is Kowen Forest. Kowen Forest is used as a commercial pine plantation. However, over many years volunteers have created over 100 kilometres of high quality mountain bike trails in two particular sections of the forest.
I suspect that not all MLAs here are fans of mountain biking, so I need to clarify that these are not just dirt trails scraped into the ground, like kids might make on a spare block near their house. They are constructed to high standards with thousands of hours of work, signposted, reinforced with rocks, featuring wooden bridges and other features, logs, jumps, berms, climbs; it really is a professional facility, and the kind that people who like mountain biking will travel long distances to use. For people who mountain bike—and there are a lot of them—this is a very valuable asset. We should be thankful to the community of trail builders that spent so long volunteering to construct this asset for Canberra without asking for anything in return.
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