Jules Schiller: Was it a different process to get the State Government to buy a block of land to save two or three trees, why that much effort?
Thanks so much for covering this it’s nice to have a good news story about trees and my inbox is absolutely flooded this afternoon with people really happy about this. Congratulations to Kate for all of her hard work over many years, but it was a bit tricky!
I looked at a number of different options and went through a number of different possibilities over the last few months but in the end I ended up having a good chat with Nick Champion who gave me the time of day as the Planning Minister and we decided the simplest and easiest way to look after these trees, because they are of great environmental but also historical significance, was to buy the block of land private land which was on the market. Then we’re going to put the back of the block with the two really old trees back into Forest Avenue Reserve, which is the school oval for Black Forest Primary School, and the front of the block is going to be put back on the market.
So hopefully we’ll recoup some costs by doing that and have a fairly minimal impact on taxpayers. I think it’s worth the money. There’s only two of these trees left and if developers got in there I think there were pretty grave fears from my community that they might not be able to be saved.
Once they are gone they are gone!
There’s some amazing stories about these trees as well. Kate and I were standing there talking about them the other day and talking about the bushrangers who used to roam through the old Black Forest.
Jules Schiller: Yeah there were cattle thieves going through there it’s kind of a, weird to think of that area as a bit of the wild west but it was.
Yeah and trees were there before European settlement and the Kaurna people used to have great connection to those trees - and still do!
Jules Schiller: Are you setting a dangerous precedent? I’m all for saving trees but if you’re starting to buy land to protect trees you might get a few other emails?
Absolutely I think there’s a real risk of that (laughs) but I think - I got into politics to help my local community so I’m happy to be held to a high standard I think we should be aiming high to look after our natural environment.