In the mean time, keep a lookout for stories about neighbours chopping down someone else’s tree. I’ll give it till summer for the first story to surface.

“Thanks for your email regarding the removal of tree protection proposed in the National-led Government’s Resource Management (Simplifying and Streamlining) Amendment Bill. The bill seeks to ban blanket tree protection rules, leaving diverse and valued trees defenceless. This is particularly relevant to Auckland, where six of the seven city councils use general tree protection rules, but also to other parts of New Zealand where authorities use general tree protection rules to some extent.

As you probably know, the Green Party was the only party to oppose this Bill at its First Reading, we have campaigned in the community to encourage people to have their say, and we have advocated strongly against its worst aspects in Parliament and the Select Committee. With the help of huge numbers of community members who made excellent submissions, the Greens were able to remove some of the worst proposals from the Bill in Select Committee.

However, the Government has refused to budge on the issue of tree protection.

Green Party MPs fought hard in the Select Committee to remove or change the clauses that would ban blanket tree protection rules, but lacked majority support from other committee members. Even a compromise solution was rejected, for political reasons, despite support amongst many on the committee. Please see our Minority Report for more information: http://www.greens.org.nz/misc-documents/green-party-minority-report-resource-management-simplifying-and-streamlining-amendmen
I also recommend our podcast audio discussion on the Bill featuring Jeanette Fitzsimons who sat through most of the Select Committee process: http://www.greens.org.nz/audio/people-push-back

The Green Party is currently working on amendments to the Bill to remove the ban on tree protection (Clause 52), or form a compromise amendment that protects our trees while simplifying procedures. We remain hopeful that we can persuade Parliament to support these.
Please feel free to pass this response on to others who might be interested. Thank you for caring about trees, and the contribution they make to our urban environment. We’ll do our best to get the Government to see sense on this issue.

Cheers,
Anne Heins
Executive Assistant, Office of Dr Russel Norman MP
Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand”

Or, to develop your ‘dwindling fish stocks” analogy… Should a person require RMA approval to dispose of a fish in their back yard fish pond? Or to fill in that fish pond and replace it with a tree? Should we employ public servants to process fish pond RMA approvals? No government has required that, so does that mean that Labour and the Greens hate fish? In fact, a recreational fisher doesn’t need RMA approval in order to go out and catch fish that are in the sea and therefore either un-owned or owned by the government.

I’m with you on the forestry blitz under Labour – that was grossly mis-managed – although I certainly don’t think that anyone thought that farmers would be so cruel, cynical, and un-thinking as to cut down their forests. But then I think that farmers are just businessmen/women and so therefore just as likely to be cruel, cynical and unthinking as anyone else.

If the tree is one of the few that is notable in some way, then the council can still get it listed. But if someone wants to chop down a rotten old tree in their backyard, possibly to replace it with a new and healthy tree or a vege patch or maybe just some lawn, then it doesn’t effect me in the slighest and I don’t see why some council employees need to get involved.

If you want to worry about tree loss, look no further than Labour and their ETS scheme. Their act essentially nationalised the carbon credits in forests, and so that the value in these credits wouldn’t be lost to the government they included restrictions on cutting down trees. Forest owners and farmers, faced with being stuck with trees that they’d never be able to cut down, went on a blitz of deforestation before the restrictions came in to force. I believe that this caused the first net loss in forests in NZ since the 1930s, and it was all caused by “environmental” legislation.