Page 2808 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 13 August 2019
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future. We are also very pleased to see the funding for age-friendly suburbs. All of our suburbs should be age-friendly, and we are not bringing that out quickly enough. The parliamentary agreement had $30 million for active travel infrastructure. I do not know if I should say I am pleased or not pleased, but it is now fully funded; I am pleased with that. I would like to see more and more being spent on this. I would like to see this level of investment continue past this year. Of course, $30 million over four years is less than one major road project.
Moving on to city services, I am very pleased to see that this budget goes some of the way to implementing the better suburbs project. Members may remember a motion I moved in this place a couple of years ago about participatory budgeting and having a participatory budgeting process focusing on city services. I understand that that has significantly influenced the CS part of the TCCS budget.
There is clearly a high demand for expenditure on public open space upgrades, but unfortunately this demand has to be balanced against a very limited amount of funding. Participatory budgeting would seem to be one of the more positive ways of trying to balance these two.
Better suburbs was very good community consultation, but it did not do as much as we would have liked to have seen in terms of actual budgetary decisions. The better suburbs people had, I believe, a notional $1.9 million to play with as far as playgrounds were concerned, rather than looking at the whole TCCS budget.
One thing that the better suburbs process made very clear was that trees are highly valued by the community. The better suburbs process ranked trees as priority No 2, and I sponsored a petition about it earlier this year. Street and park trees in our established suburbs are declining by around 3,000 trees a year. This is only likely to increase, as the drought shows no signs of abating any time soon.
As well as the drought, there is ongoing climate change, old age and redevelopment. We are getting trees knocked down every day because of development in this city. The last report, seven years ago, showed that 40,000 trees were needed to fill the gaps and to replace dying trees. The petition that I sponsored would have asked the government to plant an extra 7,000 trees a year. The budget only referred to 17,000 over four years. That is a good start, and I am very pleased about it, but what I would say very strongly is that it needs to be a start, not an end. The 17,000 figure is ramping up over the four years; in the last year there will be 9,000 trees planted. I would love to see us continue at 9,000 trees from then into the future, because that is the sort of amount we need to plant to keep Canberra a bush capital, to address the urban heat island effect.
The next thing we need to do is set up a tree canopy target. I understand from various comments that that is being looked at by government. The better suburbs people suggested a 30 per cent tree canopy target, and we should look at that as the minimum that we should be aiming for.
Waste is a big issue, made even bigger by the federal government’s comments that they do not want to see any waste being exported. I think that is great, but we have to
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