Editorial: Much more at stake than trees

Opinion

It has become tiresome and cliched, but the catchcry "just move on" shows no sign of fading from popular use. Usually, it is uttered by people for whom the topic at hand is inconvenient or embarrassing or simply too detailed for them to dignify with any more attention.

Predictably, it is now being aimed and fired at this newspaper and those who have bothered to question the Auckland City Council's plans to remove exotic trees from the city's premier thoroughfare, Queen St. The council has paused briefly for breath after a substantial public reaction and will now proceed to take out the first trees much as originally intended.

Apologists for the council and those simply jaded by such civic scrutiny affect to believe that the public condemnation of the Queen St plan was all about 20 trees only, between Wellesley St and Mayoral Drive. Now that 17 of those trees will go to meet their maker, the "storm-in-a-teacup" and "just-move-on" brigade complain that nothing was at stake and nothing was achieved.

They are wrong, of course.

Auckland City's plan for Queen St is a multi-stage reform. Phase one involved the 20 exotic trees; further phases over the next decade or so were to see the progressive removal of all exotic trees down the length of the Golden Mile, and their replacement with natives. For instance, the area of the original shoreline between Fort St and Customs St was to have nikau palms and flax.

These wider schemes were always of more concern than the smaller number of exotics which the council wanted to chainsaw in the height of the holiday season two weeks ago. Having challenged and ameliorated that aspect of the works, the opposition by campaigner Lesley Max and her supporters to the no-tree or native-tree future for Queen St must continue.

Yet the aesthetics of that shopping strip are only part of the problem. This controversy has again shown the city to be ineffective in communicating (rather than its pro forma "consulting") with ratepayers on its plans. It has revealed woolly and politically correct thinking behind proposed changes. It has brought to the surface deep ratepayer resentment at the perceived difference between the way the council controls its own actions and the way it controls change on individual residential properties. One complainant to the Herald told of a council refusal of a request to remove an unloved, shade-throwing Norfolk pine (an exotic tree) and replace it with pohutukawa and nikau palms (lately so favoured for Queen St) because it would affect the neighbourhood treescape.

The row has succeeded, also, in making more ratepayers question the spending programmes of their local body. Many Herald readers who joined the chorus against the removal of exotics from Queen St related tales of Auckland City projects of dubious merit and high cost. One was the near $1 million "upgrade" of the Remuera shopping strip, including two park benches angled precariously on a downhill footpath and invented, metalworked coats of arms for the Remuera business centre. Some trees will soon be cut down in Queen St. The future of many fine specimens further up and down the road, the redevelopment of the shopping strip itself and myriad other public projects must remain the subject of careful public examination. Now is the time to "keep on", not "move on".