About time we heard from the trees

There has been too much recently about trivial matters like the erosion of democracy and it is timely that the most important things in the land resume centre stage.



The pohutukawa gets himself not one but two stories in Granny this morning. The deference we accord trees never ceases to amaze me. The stories of people getting fined telephone numbers for making even a mental association between a Husqvarna and a rimu regularly appear on the same page as those chronicling a spot of community service for mugging old ladies. A tree is a deity in New Zealand with the same place in the bureaucratic firmament as the cow holds in India. All thoughts of pragmatism disappear when a tree hoves into view. The only way around a tree that is in the way is years of bureaucratic nonsense involving resource consent hearings and submissions from stakeholders. As an aside I am yet to run across these bands of people carrying pointed sticks.



First we have Marc Ellis. He is a harmless enough buffoon. Smart though and I'm sure he gets into the 39% tax bracket by the second week of the financial year by judicious use of his 'ladism'. The bluff eruption of Rangitoto was a great success yesterday in that it got Ellis's new business venture on the Six O'clock news. That was all it was meant to achieve. Many years ago Dick Smith towed polystyrene icebergs up Sydney Harbour for the same purpose. But instead of being regarded as the harmless prank it patently was we have to have a DoC official wearing his 'seriously concerned' face telling us all of the danger to the largest pohutukawa forest in the universe. This is after the event of course when nothing has happened to even a leaf on one of these weeds.



Then we have a picture of Murray Deaker standing next to a pohutukawa outside his house. There is a bit of history to this as Deaks has been having a running battle over these trees and their surroundings with the North Shore City Council for years. Apparently a branch fell off one of these arboreal gods yesterday narrowly missing sixteen people. They must have been standing very close together or it was a very large branch - no matter. The crux of this story is that these trees were declared dangerous some time ago with collapse of all or part of them a very high possibility. Some part of the council then start to remove them under 'emergency provisions'. Another part of the council say it is not an emergency, stop the work and start resource consent hearings. First part of council get out the chainsaws again waving OSH concerns and Department of Labour regulations. The tree lovers parry with more resource consent. And so it goes on - for years.

This is what New Zealand is good at - wasting time and money over things that don't matter.

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