Page 2197 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 2 August 2022
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planting shrubs under the trees, similar to some of the great examples of bird-scaping in my electorate of Kurrajong, or the texture in the grasses planted around my beloved Dickson wetlands. This motion helps to build our capacity to do this.
The name of the initiative that I spoke of earlier, “Connecting Nature, Connecting People” is a bit of a spoiler, because managing for nature and the environment in the city delivers benefits for people as well. The wellbeing benefits relating to time connected with nature are embedded into our wellbeing framework and hence are central to the decision-making of this government. As this motion shows, sometimes we do not need grand and sweeping “calls on government”. Rather, we can do a lot by tweaks, by strengthening and building our capacity and learning from each other, and by more effectively working together to achieve shared goals. Thank you. I commend this motion to the Assembly.
MS CLAY
(Ginninderra) (4.47), in reply: Madam Speaker, this was a really, really pleasant way to end the day and it was so good to hear so many people being so supportive. The Minister for Transport and City Services has talked us through conservation, mowing and the work that he is doing in the urban space land management plan. He has really embraced the opportunities to better protect our urban environment. I would like to voice my appreciation. He spent a lot of time with our office and with a lot of people working in this field. He is definitely strongly committed to this and it is really, really good that he has such deep commitment to working with our volunteers and to working collaboratively. He has a really detailed understanding. He has taught me quite a lot about things I did not know about how our city services mowing is done, and our conservation mowing, and it is really good to see all of that knowledge and all of that enthusiasm.
It was lovely to hear from Ms Lawder, who is also really, really committed to this. It is great to hear her talking about the natural beauty of our grasslands in Canberra. I think we environmentalists have understood for a long time that it is quite easy to get people interested in trees, or in certain of our charismatic animals. It is actually harder sometimes to get people to appreciate the beauty of our grasslands and some of the smaller creatures and critters around and about. I am also perfectly happy to wear the criticism that this motion is a bit too long, although perhaps it reflects the amount of commitment that we are going to see put into the implementation of it, so that is okay.
It was great to hear from our environment minister, Ms Vassarotti, who has talked us through the Greens’ urban biodiversity platform that we took to the 2020 election. Sometimes that results in quite big funding announcements, like the $10 million for urban biodiversity and wildlife corridors, and sometimes it leads to subtler things, like putting an urban eco lens on all of our land management and looking at what we are doing and working out how we can do it better.
I love hearing that there is no storey without the understorey. I sort of want to see a rap song coming out about that soon. There is a suggestion, in a quiet moment, for you, Ms Vassarotti. It was really good to hear, too, one example of the scientific way that this government likes to do our ecology and our environmental protection, where we trial 12 sites, we look at citizen science and we test different ways of doing things in government. That is absolutely essential. Particularly as we are moving into
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