Page 1359 - Week 05 - Thursday, 18 June 2020
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The Greens have pushed for a long time the idea that getting children involved in nature is very important. Again, there is a lot of community support for that view and a view from educationalists that this is incredibly important. There is a lot of evidence of the benefits of this for children, and in the long term it also helps children grow up attached to the natural environment and therefore wishing to protect it. This is really important because we all need the natural environment to live in. Without that, as a species we cannot survive. So I applaud the concept of getting children involved in this, but it will not take us all the way to a million trees, unfortunately.
As I have also said in the Assembly several times over the last four years, our planning rules allow new homes to cover far too much of the block, leaving very little room for trees or even a decent sized pot plant in some instances. There is basically no backyard in some new houses, and the same applies in many multi-unit apartments. Children could well be growing up in places where there is no green space and no room for trees because developers were not required to provide it.
If there is a balcony or a courtyard in a multi-unit development it has no sun on it so that nothing is going to be able to grow except the artificial grass—and I was shocked to hear at question time that ACTPLA defines artificial grass as being part of living infrastructure. That was a very depressing moment this afternoon.
Front yards and verges in new suburbs often do not have room for any decent sized tree because most of the space is taken up by driveways and infrastructure like pipes and light poles. This is a problem that the Greens have been talking and campaigning about for a long time. If there is not even room for a decent street tree, we will be reduced to using pot plants on our verges. That is not what we want.
This is why the Greens have been pushing so hard for planning changes to make room for trees in redevelopments and new suburbs. This is one of the things we have been very concerned about with the new suburbs in Molonglo and it is one of the reasons we successfully pushed for a review of the Molonglo development.
I look forward to having a chance to read that review because it has to say something about the fact that Molonglo simply does not have the trees that other places in Canberra have, and it is not just because they have not grown. A lot of it is because there simply is not space for them.
The residential development and the estate development codes all need to be fixed. And I am afraid, Mr Coe and Ms Lee, there is no point in giving kids a nursery voucher if they cannot use it to grow anything. I really hope the Liberal Party will in the future support real change so that there is room for trees in our residential areas.
Of course, there is also no point in planting a million baby trees if we allow developers to clear off development sites another million full-size trees. That is why the Greens have been pushing for the last three years to start a review of the Tree Protection Act. Last year we were successful in that push, and the review has commenced. Public consultation started late last year. I am sure the Liberals will be supporting that process, in line with their new pro-tree rules.
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