Editorial: Arrogance, not trees, blights city

Twenty trees on central Auckland's main shopping thoroughfare, Queen St, are listed for removal at the quietest time of the year and members of the public are in uproar. It does not matter that some of these specimens are ailing and that they are exotic, or more precisely "non-native".

News of the culling is producing hundreds of emails to this newspaper, including some entitled "the Queen St chainsaw massacre". Their authors are serious. A prominent Auckland writer and advocate for children, Lesley Max, threatens to chain herself to a tree in protest, and there are murmurings of a wider group willing to follow her to the trunks of the liquidambars.

So why the fuss?

It can be taken as read that many people think verdant trees of any description are better visually, for tidiness and for shade than spindly, sensitive natives like nikau palms and cabbage trees. And there is the thrifty view that "if Queen Street's trees ain't broke, don't fix them".

But as always, the reaction is prompted by far broader and much deeper issues.

First, there is near universal agreement around the barbecues and dinner tables and bars of Auckland that the central business district is becoming an eyesore. Cheap, ugly apartments, cheap shops, tacky amusements and expensive carparking.

Second, the city council feigns consultation, as it must, but appears to force predetermined change upon the huddled retailers, commuters and ratepayers who make up the CBD's daily foot traffic. This council has consistently failed to bring the central city community aboard for even its most minor plans, despite or because of its petulant protests that the people have been consulted, even if they do not know it.

In the case of the Queen St trees it does not help that the council denies residents the right even to prune trees above a certain height, let alone beg its favour to cut them down. And while insisting on punitive fees and resource management applications and hearings for others, it plans to take to Queen St's unfortunate trees without public notification. All the while, its tree management in public reserves and roadsides has the non-accountability of the autocracy of which it is part.

A third and broader frustration sits behind the public disquiet over Queen St. Any change in 2005 which seeks to dictate native or indigenous anything over counterparts from across the sea - be they trees, values or the language in a verse of the national anthem - meets a new resistance. It might be a carry-over from the Orewa speech by National leader Dr Don Brash, but the council's policy to cut out trees from a city street has become an easy target for the anti-PC backlash.

Why, people ask, are indigenous components of society more valued than those of a European, North American or Asian heritage?

These wider concerns, however relevant, are real. It is true that the current lush foliage up much of Queen St is its only saving grace, hiding a jerry-built jumble of buildings, awnings and signage. That the council has lost public trust on such redevelopments because of past arrogance and its own, exempt actions. And that there is a weariness about any view that native should automatically be preferred over imported.

Surely the city will not wade further into this controversy without insisting that its thinking be publicly tested. No tree, however sick, should fall before hearings are held and true accountability is restored. Then, perhaps, we will all be able to see the wood for the trees.