Page 1355 - Week 05 - Thursday, 18 June 2020
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The urban forest strategy will also outline how the government plans to balance and diversify the urban forest to create resilience and support habitat for biodiversity. We are focusing on planting locations that have a lower canopy cover or are more at risk from the urban heat island effect, including protecting our shared paths to encourage more active travel. We are also planting trees in locations nominated by Canberrans through the government’s yoursay page, which is still open and accepting suggestions.
This deliberate, carefully considered and responsible approach contrasts with the approach of the opposition, who have put out a half-baked and uncosted plan to pay for tube stock at a claimed cost of $10 to $20 a tree but without all of the other costs associated with maintenance and planting. Tiny and vulnerable plants require significant levels of maintenance to survive into adulthood if they are not accidentally or deliberately trampled on before then. The small root ball of tube stock needs to be watered very frequently and must be pruned regularly to develop a trunk. Planting tube stock like this in an urban open space will lead to a mass failure of plantings and will not help our urban canopy grow to maturity.
You have to wonder, Madam Deputy Speaker: if Mr Coe cannot even cost a street tree, how could he possibly run a budget? This is a Liberal opposition that is inexperienced and desperate to improve its green credentials. Mr Coe has taken one from his conservative protégés handbook, producing Tony Abbott’s green army 2.0 with even less substance and even less benefit for the environment—a policy that you have when you do not have a policy to actually address and tackle climate change.
If the Canberra Liberals really cared about our environment, we might have seen them stand up to their federal colleagues’ climate policies. Instead, we have seen Mr Hanson ridicule school students protesting to protect the environment. We have Ms Lee saying that the climate has always been changing and that too much discussion on climate change is based on fiction by extremists such as climate change alarmists. We have Mr Parton’s plans to mow down Kowen Forest for development and expand urban sprawl west of the Murrumbidgee River, destroying bushland habitat, including trees.
Five seconds to midnight, or five seconds to the election, we have this conservative Liberal Party’s attempt to greenwash, with Ms Lee’s first motion in the Assembly on the environment since she has been the shadow minister for the environment: a simplistic policy lacking detail, costings and any knowledge of the urban forest, showing the inexperience of this opposition.
Our government will continue our responsible approach to managing our environment and the ACT’s forests, including our urban forest, with our plan to reach our 30 per cent canopy target. We will continue to plant tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of trees to get there and we will properly maintain them, including the existing ones, for the future.
I am moving an amendment to Ms Lee’s one-line motion. It acknowledges this important work which is ongoing and some of the steps that we will need to take in order to get to our target of 30 per cent. I move:
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