Page 4731 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 31 October 2017
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the lessees of the adjoining land and then, presumably, Transport Canberra and City Services come along with their chainsaws and it is all over.
The first problem with this process is that the tree was registered because it met one or more of the criteria and it may still meet one or more of those criteria, despite the fact that it is dead. Two of the criteria in particular do not require the tree to be alive. Natural or cultural heritage could easily apply to a tree that has died. The scientific value criteria may also apply to a dead tree, particularly a native. The scientific criteria includes “is a significant habitat element for a threatened native species”.
Many native species, including threatened ones, live in hollows of dead trees. Amendment 1 that I will move will address this problem. It is a very simple change. All it does is require that the conservator check against the existing established criteria before they deregister a dead tree. This is a simple, straightforward check on the process. I hope that all members can support it and I sincerely hope that, regardless of whether they do, the conservator actually does this.
Amendment 3 will reinforce this by making the conservator’s decision appealable, so that if a registered tree has died and the conservator uses the new fast-track process to deregister it, the decision would be appealable. Without this amendment, the community will have no recourse if the conservator makes an inappropriate decision.
I clarify here that none of my amendments would stop a tree being pruned or removed if it becomes a safety hazard. Sadly, this does happen occasionally, and there is a process already built into the registration and deregistration criteria that means that safety hazards can be fixed. My amendments would not change that at all.
The second issue my amendments cover is appeal rights for standard registration and deregistration, not just the dead tree process but the standard existing processes. Section 5 of the bill is essentially trying to fix up something that was broken in the existing Tree Protection Act. The current wording of the act means that for the registration decision only the person who nominated the tree can appeal the decision, which excludes a long list of interested parties, including neighbours and even the lessee if the tree is on a private lease. Deregistration is worse: it is not clear that anybody can effectively appeal at all.
My concern and the concern of the many people who have emailed me is that the bill does not go far enough in broadening the categories of interested parties that can make a submission. Critically it excludes people who have made a submission on the registration or deregistration of the tree. What often happens with these types of decisions is that someone hears about a proposed registration or deregistration, they then tell their friends and neighbours, and a community campaign gets up, supported by the National Trust, the community council or the Conservation Council. The government then gets a number of submissions from people who care greatly about the tree, including the supporting community groups. However, the way the bill is written, potentially none of them would have appeal rights.
My amendment 2 expands appeal rights to cover all submitters. I make it clear that that is all submitters; it is not the entire universe of people. It is particularly important
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