A POLICY designed to protect trees on private land could inadvertently spook people into pre-emptively clearing their blocks, a former Vincent city councillor has warned.
Like other suburban councils Vincent has been looking at ways to protect its remaining canopy.
Many trees were felled in recent decades as blocks were converted from single houses to multiple dwellings, and the struggle’s grown more urgent with the arrival of the polyphagous shot-hole borer beetle which has led to the demise of thousands of trees in Perth so far.
Vincent council has a voluntary “Trees of Significance” register that requires planning approval to remove, but those on private land can only be nominated by the property owner.
Owners of listed trees can get up to $2,000 of matched funding every five years, but few have ever taken up the option: In the 23 years since the Trees of Significance register was created, only nine trees on private blocks have been added.
A revised policy drafted up by Vincent staff was put in front of councillors this week which would allow third party nominations of trees on private blocks.
Former councillor Dudley Maier warned that could scare people into pre-emptively removing trees if they feared a listing would hinder their future options for the block.
He told last week’s council briefing that he’d seen it happen before: 20 years ago the merest whisper that a tree might be nominated led to a majestic specimen being cleared from a North Perth block.
Tree hugger
“I’m a tree hugger,” Mr Maier told last week’s council briefing, but said “stuff like this is not going to encourage a single tree to be grown or retained and it may even result in some trees being chopped down prematurely.”
He said “the fact that the current policy does not allow third party nominations was not an oversight; It was deliberately done to stop people nominating someone else’s tree, resulting in the owner chopping down the tree to avoid the listing.”
That fear is real enough that it was recognised in a 2023 paper by the WA Local Government Association, which warned of “a likelihood of trees being preemptively removed at scale when changes are introduced that may impact the ability of landholders to remove trees without approval”.
Mr Maier told councillors: “You’ve got two choices: the carrot or the stick. The carrot is about providing meaningful incentives or education or informing people. The stick is about threatening people, imposing bureaucracy. This proposal is nowhere near being a carrot.”
He suggested consulting with the community about what might encourage them to keep trees on their blocks, suggesting they might prefer incentives like a rates discount for trees of a certain size.
After Mr Maier’s missive at the November 13 briefing, the proposal was withdrawn from the agenda at this week’s full council meeting.
Other nearby councils have also been struggling with the issue of trees disappearing from private land: A Stirling council report from September says “residential land is proportionally the largest area of Stirling and is experiencing the most canopy decline”.
Councillors voted to consider setting aside money for an “incentive-based approach to encourage the retention and growth of large trees on private land” in the next annual budget, but they’re also sending the report on the dire state of suburban trees to the WA government in hopes of swifter state-level policy intervention.
Bayswater council is also in the midst of consulting on a new tree register policy: This version still doesn’t allow listings without the owner’s consent, but it does scrap the old rule that allowed a nomination to be blocked by a neighbour who was affected by “branches, canopy or roots of a significant tree(s) encroaching into their property”. Owners (and neighbours) of listed trees can also access matched funding for tree maintenance.
That idea’s open for comment until December 9 via engage.bayswater.wa.gov.au
by DAVID BELL
Perth Voice Interactive 
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