Page 3903 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 25 September 2019
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turn into trees. That is for a number of reasons, the most basic of which is that, generally speaking, they are not big enough for a large tree to actually grow on.
In some cases the trees that have been planted, unfortunately, are actively destroyed by the residents because the amount of house development is such that they feel there are inadequate amounts of parking, or they have been destroyed by the builders during the building process, because it was the easiest place to park their stuff.
Even if the trees do survive, an unfortunate number of them are what I understand are known in the trade as lollipop trees; in other words, they are long and skinny and have a little bit of canopy at the top. They are the only sorts of trees that can be fitted in where there is not a lot of space, but they do not provide the beautiful tree coverage that we see in the older suburbs of Canberra, some of which have over 30 per cent tree canopy. As Canberra gets hotter and hotter, this is the sort of thing that we will want to see.
Fixing this will require significant changes to the planning rules for the design of new suburbs, the planning rules for building new homes and the infrastructure standards for road design. Currently, our planning rules say nothing about permeable surfaces. This is something I was banging on about in the Seventh Assembly. It is something that the Greens put in our submission to the housing choices process. It is something that we think the government needs to act on. I am very pleased to see that the living infrastructure plan commits the government to act on it, and I hope that will happen very soon.
On that note, one thing I would like to see the living infrastructure plan have is interim targets. We have interim targets as far as the climate change strategy as a whole is concerned, and I think that is really good. Some of us may still be around as members of this place in 2045, but I hazard a guess that I am not the only person who will be gone by that point in time. We need to make plans before that, and particularly if we are making plans for tree canopy cover. Trees have wonderful points, but one of their points which maybe is not so wonderful is that they take a long time to grow. It will do no good if we plant all of our trees in 2045. We have to start planting them now; then we have to start looking after them. It is not just about planting trees; it is about looking after them.
I think the government can make a lot more use of the considerable enthusiasm of the people of Canberra for trees, when it comes to looking after them. I am very pleased about the government’s new adopt a park grants system. I understand that it will enable small community groups, or potentially even individuals, to get small grants of up to $5,000 for positive works in a park near them. I imagine that an awful lot of those will involve tree planting and maintenance of existing tree planting.
Near me, in Hughes, a group called Tree-mendous got a small amount of money with Greening Australia. It planted trees and it is now incredibly well organised. On the tree guards around the trees, there is a ziplock bag, and that contains information for the next person as to when it was last watered, so that people can water in a reasonable time span. They are trying to get a couple of litres every fortnight to the young trees. If we can do that, our trees will survive.
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