Page 4866 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 11 November 2009
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reflection on anyone in particular. I understand and have experienced at first hand the work of the tree advisory committee. The Chief Minister afforded members of this place the opportunity to meet with the tree advisory committee, and it is an impressive group. It is a very large group. They are very aware of the issues, and I was really gratified at the extent of the thinking and the understanding and the preparedness to be flexible about issues that was demonstrated by that group when Mr Seselja and Ms Le Couteur and, I think, Ms Hunter and I had an opportunity to meet with that group. There is no-one who thought that this was an easy task.
The thing that I am concerned about is that it seems to me that the level of thinking that is going on in the tree advisory group is not being reflected in the on-the-ground policy work and the on-ground implementation through urban services. I heard an official from TAMS only the other day opining the view that perhaps TAMS needs to be better at articulating and getting its message out. Without being able to get the message out there clearly and without taking communities with them and without dealing intimately with communities on these subjects, this will be forever a fraught subject.
Even with the best will in the world it will be a fraught subject, because eventually, in certain suburbs around the ACT, the treescape that people have come to know and love and accept as part of their suburb and the place that they live—and it is about their identity—will be changed not irrevocably but for many years, possibly decades. This will have a huge impact on people’s perception of where they live. It will have a huge impact on the values of their properties and the amenity of their properties. All of these things will change, because inevitably we will have to cut down substantial old trees. Cutting down a substantial old tree in a streetscape will scar that streetscape for many years to come. If we have to cut down a third of the trees in a streetscape, it will have a substantial impact.
What we are saying here today, and what the clear message is, is that this has to be done in a thorough way, in an evidence-based way, to coin the Chief Minister’s phrase which he is so fond of, and in a way that takes the community with us and does not alienate the community. Especially on that last part, we have not yet succeeded in doing that. The Chief Minister may bemoan the fact that everyone wants to be forensic about the tree outside their house and say, “It’s not dead yet. It’s really quite alive, really.” They don’t want to see their streetscapes changed, because they will be ruined for some time to come. They do not want to see that, and they want to work through that process. It will be an onerous task for us all for many years to come.
At the end of today, the combined motions and amendments put forward by the parties will actually get us to a place where we will be better able to achieve that, but that will not be the end of the process. We cannot say the commissioner for the environment has done her work and we do not need to do anything more, because house by house, street by street, suburb by suburb in affected areas, we are going to have to communicate and discuss with individual communities about how we take that forward. They have to have confidence in what we do.
It would be good for the confidence of the community to have the experience that Mr Seselja and Ms Le Couteur and Ms Hunter and I had of seeing the commitment
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