Trees - a Topping Topic

Last week the Mayor of Lower Hutt was surprised to see a 150 year old Pohutakawa disappear to make way for a church building. No doubt the community group who did it thought it was in a good cause but maybe a large portion of Lower Hutt's citizens were sad to see it go.

Even sadder is the fact they had no say in the matter. The Government has removed the need for landowners to consult with their communities on the fate of heritage trees. Now it is up to individual councils to protect those irreplaceable assets. Unfortunately they don't have to if they don't think it is important enough - or like Lower Hutt haven't got round to it.

Trees will only be protected it enough members of a Council think defending the public interest is important - more important than some sort of idea that says you should have the right to do what you like with your land and damn everybody else.

When I was a law student there was still a vestige of the old concept that the State owned the land. People held rights in it - freehold or leasehold or riparian. The right to use it was limited to what the Crown acknowledged was in the public interest. The concept was not widely known then and now it has completely disappeared from our law.

Sometimes Society doesn't moved forward. It reminds me of a cartoon I once saw of the evolution of human kind from monkeys. The last drawing was of a rabbit.