Page 436 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 13 February 2013
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This coincided with the CIT in Weston, which had wonderful grounds and an arboretum, also closing its horticulture school. This site is now known as Featherstone Gardens and I am pleased to observe that the Weston Creek community have taken on nurturing and fostering the gardens. They have a busy job at the start, simply getting them back to a usable state, but they are doing that for community use and it is a great community project.
These losses to Canberra’s horticultural sector were of serious concern to the Greens. Happily, I can now say that the Bruce CIT has a new $14 million state-of-the-art horticultural facility which is a great training centre for budding horticulturists.
Another issue the Greens raised was the badging of the arboretum as a climate change measure and the subsequent allocation of resources to it under the banner of climate mitigation. We mentioned this specifically in the ACT budget in 2009. At that time the government had allocated $60 million of its $100 million climate change budget towards a range of tree planting projects, all badged as the one million trees project. Of course, planting trees can certainly assist with climate mitigation, and it is a good thing in its own right from a range of perspectives, but the amount of money that was being considered for the amount of mitigation was rather absurd, as I recall. While the majority of funding was coming from so-called climate change expenditure, climate change was not even mentioned on the arboretum website. I think it is fair to say that the government were not really clear that the arboretum was a climate change project, even though it was certainly part of the one million trees project funded from the climate change budget.
I think it is much more honest and a much better proposition to see the arboretum for what it is and to fund it as such. That is what the government moved to, and I welcome that change in perspective. As we move forward, it is important to note that the arboretum is also not a biodiversity project, does not replace or compensate for the efforts that we need to make to continue to manage our own biodiversity well, and should not become a diversion for funding away from biodiversity management in the ACT. We have an extensive network of nature parks and national parks in the ACT. When you look at discussions like time to talk, on how Canberrans see what is important to Canberra in the future, those are the areas that frequently come up as being highly important to Canberrans. We do need to resource those because they do need to be cared for, just as the arboretum does.
In 2013, with the arboretum now open to the public, I think it is time to move the discussion on. There were concerns. They were valid at the time, but there is no point persisting in criticising when the concerns have either been addressed or in some cases are simply in the past. We now need to move on to a conversation where we can ensure that the arboretum’s future development is enhanced and that it becomes a key feature of the Canberra recreational and tourist landscape.
As I said earlier, I attended the opening a couple of weeks back, and was pleased to discover that many of the trees planted in the arboretum were sourced and supplied from Yarralumla Nursery. Since it was established by Charles Weston in 1914, Yarralumla Nursery has been the point of origin for most of the shrubs, trees and
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