Letters to the Editor on park lands’ trees
This week, InDaily readers have their say on a controversial new golf course development and the fight to keep an historic hall open for business.
Responding to Vigil for 585 trees facing the chop as $45m golf course work starts
What does the Premier mean when he says that the “economic metrics” stack up for his plan to bring major long-term destruction to a 100-year-old park in return for hosting perhaps six golf tournaments in North Adelaide from 2028-2034, when there are other beautiful courses around Adelaide that can already hold the Australian Open? Golf Australia is reported as saying that the “split with another state is yet to be determined”. It is not even a deal.
It looks like hubris and waste. Taxpayer dollars are needed elsewhere.
In other Australian cities, golf courses in urban areas are being turned into parks to increase green amenity for residents. Stubborn SA is going in the opposite direction. And in Washington, D.C., according to the New York Times last week, the Golfer-in-Chief’s attempt to take community golf courses away from the parks to turn them into expensive pro-golf domains is heading to the courts for a legal and environmental challenge. Can Trump and Malinauskas be working from the same playbook?
Meanwhile, the public looks like losing Possum Park indefinitely. Vale! It is, well, pathetic. – Nicholas Jose
Shame on our Premier, who ignores the rights of the people to freely access our park lands heritage. No wonder, with this arrogant attack on heritage and official cultural ignorance regarding the need to protect large, beautiful trees in the current climate issues, it is causing levels of social depression in public health. No wonder GPs are inundated lately.
As if we do not already have golf courses that could be used for LIV Golf if it happens? I’m sick of seeing the destruction of large trees and other heritage, built and natural, on a daily basis by this state government and developers who do not give a toss for our future generations – Dr Iris Iwanicki
Premier Malinauskas has a huge blind spot. He cannot seem to see park lands and trees and open green space as having their own intrinsic value. Instead, their only value is how they can be monetised.
In this, he is typical of that mindset that assesses everything from only one bottom line – the financial. In my opinion, all development projects should satisfy a triple bottom line; do they make economic sense, environmental sense and social sense?
Putting in 45 million dollars of our money and cutting down 585 mature trees for the sake of golf tournaments fails at least one of these criteria, and maybe, in the end, all three. For those who love international golf, we already have a perfectly good course at Kooyonga.
Malinauskas’s promise to plant three trees for every one he cuts down is a cynical con. A few saplings are no replacement for trees that often take 100 years to be mature enough to provide nesting hollows for birds and other animals. I cannot help but wonder if Malinauskas were around 189 years ago, whether he would have been in the camp of those colonists who objected to Colonel William Light’s original park lands vision on the basis that it would deny them a place to graze livestock and then later profits from prime real estate. Or would he have been on the side of the progressives who backed the creation of a unique city plan and the first public parks in the world? – Michael Ladd
In reviewing this week’s media coverage of the North Adelaide Golf Course project and the Premier’s responses, one key fact has received no mention. The Greg Norman design master plan for the work has never been publicly released.
It has been kept secret and remains so. It would not only reveal the chainsaw pathway for the removal of specifically identified trees, but also the site and size of new buildings to be constructed. Labor does not want these details made public ahead of time.
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Remember that last December, when the Park 1 fairways map was released, it showed nothing about the tree locations and nothing about the new buildings, likely to be a large, new club room, and a large, new, multi-storey car park. The media management approach has been worse than Labor’s traditional “announce and defend” approach. It is a “reveal nothing until the works commence” policy: an “ambush” approach. We are seeing this right now regarding the tree destruction. Just wait until the new buildings begin to go up. The public will be appalled. – John Bridgland
Responding to Protest action grows as trees fall in park lands
Your reporting on the North Adelaide Golf Course redevelopment contained important facts, but its framing normalised what is in reality an extraordinary ecological and democratic event.
The issue is not simply that “protest action grows” while “trees fall”. Trees are being deliberately removed under special legislation designed to bypass the normal planning and significant tree protections that apply elsewhere in South Australia. That should be the central frame of the story.
Repeated emphasis on the government’s claimed “six per cent of trees” also risks obscuring the reality of what is occurring. Five hundred and eighty-five trees are not an abstraction. These include mature river red gums, blue gums and sugar gums embedded within one of Adelaide’s internationally distinctive public landscapes.
Nor is the government’s “three trees planted for every one removed” argument adequately interrogated. A newly planted sapling is not ecologically equivalent to a mature tree that has taken decades to establish canopy, cooling, habitat and biodiversity value. This is particularly significant in a heating city increasingly confronting climate stress.
There is also an imbalance in language. Protesters “claim”, “fear” and “lobby”, while government figures are “confirmed” and “committed”. Yet the protesters’ concerns about biodiversity loss, democratic process and precedent are substantial and increasingly shared across the community.
Most importantly, this is not just an environmental dispute. It is a governance issue. Parliament passed legislation granting planning approval before the public had even seen the final plans. That reversal of the normal democratic process deserves far more scrutiny than it has received.
Adelaide’s park lands are not vacant development space waiting for activation. They are part of the city’s civic, ecological and historical inheritance. Once the mature canopy is removed, it cannot simply be politically replanted back into existence. – Stewart Sweeney
Better spending time and money to finish off projects already happening, like South Road or the Women’s and Children’s Hospital. We are already paying for the much-needed infrastructure; this is not one of them.
What’s wrong with the Grange golf course? Not every sport has to happen in the city. – Gini Hobson
Who does Malinauskas think he is to have the authority to remove so many significant trees?
How did he get approval to remove six or 60, let alone nearly 600 trees from our park lands?
Planting three trees for every one destroyed does not make up for the loss of significant trees. Where are the 900 trees to be planted anyway?
It is all because of another “ball game”.
I’m nearly 88 years old, and I do not have the capacity to join the protesters, but I hope there is someone out there who can stop the decimation of this park land. My grandchildren and great-grandchildren will never see trees like these in their lifetimes.
There are too many significant trees destroyed in this country. – Mariet (surname withheld)
Responding to Council backs ‘last possible’ bid to halt tree felling for golf course
Golf is a boring waste of time and space from my perspective.
I had free golf lessons as a promising golfer at Kooyonga after fronting up with an older sibling when I was 13 (in 1956) and being given free lessons by the local coach, who saw me as a promising golfer to start with. I gave it up after a few months.
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I occasionally played a round with friends two or three times a year until the mid 1970s, but I mainly moved on to hockey, wrestling, archery and eventually fencing at university.
Leave the park lands available to all and do not commit them to money earning. – Ray Taylor
Responding to This is Adelaide – ‘Stay or Go’
My heart is very sad at the thought of all these wonderful trees being marked for destruction. The years they have been alive and such shelter in this hot, dry land. Please do not destroy them.0 – Belinda Meyers
Responding to ‘History erased’: Fight to keep landmark graduation hall open for business
If I were a student on the North Terrace campus of the former University of Adelaide and now had to graduate in the hall of the former University of South Australia, I would get my degree in absentia. One hundred and fifty years of tradition and heritage thrown out the window. – Geoff Sauer
Responding to Higher penalties for speeding on SA roads signed off
Once again, the focus is not on road safety. With the exception of the 40kph zones around schools, it is simply about revenue raising on behaviour that people will not change. One simple example is the new fine for following too closely – tailgating. It is lower than a speeding fine for doing less than 10kp/h over the limit. That one behaviour causes more carnage, to both people and property, than almost any other offence.
If the state is really serious about improving road safety, it will look at serious education programs and not just a logbook and P plate regime. What is happening on the roads is criminal in itself because it has become surveillance on steroids and a revenue-raising exercise. Fines are obviously not a deterrent for bad driving; the road casualty count has not changed substantially in the past several years.
The state needs to get serious about real road safety measures, not just trying to control with a digitally driven iron rod. – Bob Sibson
Responding Federal Budget will take ‘hard road of reform’
My thoughts are, this budget is nothing more (or less) than a tax grab to help support hugely excessive spending by the Commonwealth on pet projects, using invented phrases such as “intergenerational inequity” to disguise the real purpose.
The proposed changes to Capital Gains Tax (CGT) and negative gearing have no chance of achieving their claimed objective of allowing more first-time buyers to enter the market or reducing house prices. For the latter to happen, there needs to be an increase in supply combined with a reduction in the real cost of building a house (i.e. release more land, simplify planning processes and stop the constant increase in building regulations).
In the case of the negative gearing and CGT changes, the almost inevitable result will be an increase in rental costs combined with less investment in rental properties, unless the corporate sector takes up the slack, which will also further drive up rents. The young may think the budget will benefit them, but it will not.
In summary, it is an attempt to emulate a strategy Paul Keating introduced years ago and had to reverse out of one year later because of the negative unintended consequences; and the result will be no different this time around. – Paul Venables
Responding to Indigenous leader slams push to repeal SA Voice as ‘racism’
We are being urged to consider the Indigenous Voice to Parliament a failure and not wanted because only 11 per cent of eligible voters cast a ballot.
Should we apply the same argument to local councils, then? I believe that at the last election in my council area, the turnout was only around 20 per cent.
I look forward to the Liberal Party proposing a vote of no confidence in local governments. – Andrew Lord
Responding to Call to get more tourism spend into city as major conference rolls into town
Tourists will come and stay overnight in Adelaide if there’s a good reason to do so – that is, if Adelaide is different. Not the same as other high-rise cities. A unique city surrounded by parkland and ancient trees. A city where the arts flourish. A city where you can walk around and admire beautiful and interesting buildings. A city that recognises and celebrates its heritage. A city that feasts on its fantastic hospitality and wine industry. A real city where people feel good and can follow their interests without being overwhelmed by commercial gloss.
Adelaide – the city of acclaimed and celebrated difference and charm –this will bring the tourists. – Barbara Fergusson
Ironically, this is the opposite of what we should be doing to support regions. Local coffee shops, restaurants, cellar doors and accommodation are all struggling with the increased cost-of-fuel and cost-of-living pressures. Tourism is declining outside of Adelaide. Families and holiday makers are choosing not to travel, and as a result, regional South Australia needs urgent help.
Increasing funding to promote tourism in Adelaide is akin to shooting fish in a barrel, by adding more fish … why? – Alex Trescowthick
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