Sacred Sydney Covenant Trashed

By Matt Thistlethwaite MP on July 2, 2016 in News

At a recent community rally in Moore Park to save Sydney’s historic fig trees I witnessed a wonderful thing. Away from the crowd, under a dense tree canopy, half a dozen young children were climbing and playing on the outstretched branches of a huge fig tree.

In these times of iPads and computer games it’s an unusual but beautiful thing to see kids laughing and scaling a tree so big. You don’t get trees like that in our backyards or suburban parks. That’s because these are no ordinary trees. They are the main characters in parklands bequeathed to the people 200 years ago by one of our state’s greatest visionaries, Lachlan Macquarie.

Most of the trees in Centennial and Moore Park are over a century old. They speak to the people of Sydney. They let you know you have left the bustle of the city and entered the beautiful green oasis established as a place of enjoyment and respite for all. Just the way Lachlan Macquarie intended.

These trees create a canopy over Anzac Parade. It too is no ordinary street, renamed from Randwick Road to Anzac Parade in 1917 as a tribute to those who marched down its stones and bitumen to Circular Quay to serve our nation in the Great War.

For two hundred years the people of Sydney and their governments have respected Macquarie’s sacred Sydney covenant – to protect and preserve these parklands and their features as green space for all. But bad design and poor planning are seeing century old trees felled to make way for a light rail line to the east. This is unnecessary environmental destruction.

Sydney can have a light rail line to Kingsford and Randwick and preserve these historic trees.
The government is proposing a ludicrous scenario of a light rail stop for Randwick Racecourse that does not stop outside the racecourse, as it should, but across the road in Centennial Park where forty huge trees were cut down to build a platform.

The Centennial Parklands Trust, stacked with business people, has been shockingly silent as its greatest assets are turned into wood chip.

Randwick and Sydney City Councils offered alternatives to the government’s proposed alignment for the light rail line. Both presented detailed submissions that would have allowed the light rail to proceed and protect the fig trees. Their submissions and those of hundreds of members of the public were ignored.

The Environmental Impact Statement for this project did not even indicate which trees were to be removed along the light rail line – so much for transparency and accountability.

The trees that are being removed for this project are located in the federal electorate of Wentworth, the Prime Minister’s electorate.

In 2010 Malcolm Turnbull described these trees and these parklands as “the great green lungs of Sydney”. As the Prime Minister refuses the community’s call to intervene and stop the destruction of the trees it appears he has forgotten his beliefs, and his passion and conviction for Sydney’s premier parklands.

Sydney now has fewer grand old trees, and our kids go back to their iPads.