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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 4 Hansard (29 March) . . Page.. 1157 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

I put a motion on the notice paper last month which basically was meant to address this concern. I asked in that motion that the government speed up its development of a significant tree register, and, secondly, to prepare a bill for presentation which would give interim protection. The government made the point to me that they were working on the tree register. They acknowledged the concerns about trees that were going meanwhile and that they were prepared to work with me and Labor, but with me in particular at that time, to come up with something cooperatively with this Assembly which could be tabled and debated in one day.

That was a reasonable proposal and I accepted because there is a danger that the imminent introduction of tree protection laws can lead to a greater increase in tree removal as developers and other landholders rush to take action to cut down trees so as to avoid future legislative control. It has to be remembered, Mr Speaker, that once a tree is cut down it is gone; it cannot be restored. The replacement of a mature tree with a new tree seedling somewhere else is not an equal replacement. It would be decades before the new tree grows to the same proportions as the old tree, and in the interim the community has lost all the aesthetic and environmental benefits of the old tree.

I am pleased to be able to work with the government and Labor on this legislation. We did have a briefing with the government on the legislation that has been tabled today and that we will be debating further later on today. This is just the in-principle stage and we will adjourn the debate after the in-principle stage because I am trying to get an amendment drafted. It has not got back to my office yet.

This was a good process because we were all involved. There was agreement on a number of the propositions in the government's draft interim protection legislation. It was good in many ways. Some comments that I made and that Simon Corbell made were picked up by government, which I appreciate, but we are left with a couple of sticking points still and they will be dealt with in the detail stage.

Mr Corbell has spoken of the concern we have about the criteria: the fact that there are different criteria for exotics and eucalypts, and that there is a discrimination against eucalypts. Basically it appears that in the government's view the only pre-settlement trees that would be listed as significant would be eucalypts. That is a problem.

It is similar to the debate we had yesterday on ACTCode which the majority of members did support by supporting Mr Corbell's motion. The key point there is that government cannot say to the community that they care about what the community thinks but put something into effect before they know what the community thinks. With ACTCode it was a situation of giving that code effect and then saying they would engage in consultation. It is obviously a fairly insulting thing to say to the community, and it is no wonder the community gets cynical about consultation.

The situation here is that this is interim protection for trees while we decide what trees should be listed as significant. Now, the criterion used in the current interim protection legislation as the government put it is 2.5 metres circumference. That is a very large tree. It is a pre-settlement tree. We know, because we are rung so often by people in the community who are extremely distressed about a tree being cut, that trees of a smaller size than that are considered by the community to be very significant. So you cannot say in the interim period that you will allow many more trees to be cut than the community

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