Hansard debates

Mr FINN (Western Metropolitan) (17:36): My adjournment matter is for the attention of the Minister for Energy, Environment and Climate Change. The house may recall—indeed the minister may recall—that in the last sitting week I asked the minister what she was going to do to increase the number of trees in areas of the west such as Wyndham, Brimbank, Melton and even Hobsons Bay, and I have been thinking about that a great deal since I asked that question around two weeks ago. I have long been annoyed at the description of the eastern suburbs as the leafy green suburbs. I know many suburbs in Melbourne’s west that also are green and leafy, but we desperately need to make it more. And as I pointed out in my constituency question a couple of weeks ago, there are a number of areas—particularly new developments, which are going ahead at a great rate of knots in the west—that are hardly treed at all. Their houses are built and they have a road and footpath, and that is about it.

What we need is a comprehensive and intensive program to ensure that more trees are planted throughout the western suburbs of Melbourne, because not only does it enhance the aesthetics of the local area but of course it also, as has been pointed out, does lower the temperature. With summer coming up that would be a very good thing, particularly in the west, because it does get mighty hot in the western suburbs of Melbourne, and this would be something that we could do to assist local people in fighting that heatwave that inevitably comes every summer. So what I am doing is suggesting to the minister that we work together. People say that politicians do not work together from either side. Well, I am suggesting that on this occasion we do work together. I am suggesting that we put together a program which would see the planting of a large number of trees—I would not go as far as Bob Hawke’s billion, I think it was, some years ago, but let us say a substantial number of trees—to be planted in the western suburbs of Melbourne, and that will ensure that the west is a much better place to live. It will ensure that the air is cleaner in the west. That would also be a very good thing, and I know that a number of people have been worried about that for a long time. So I ask the minister to sit down with me to come up with this program and to put it into effect.