Root & branch reform

Trees of life: a gum forest. Picture: Jouan Rius via Getty Images

As you may recall I campaigned for many years to get trees the vote. As with the crusade for women’s suffrage, it was a long and bitter struggle – finally succeeding when we won that recent referendum. Now trees can be enrolled, and we’re trying hard to get as many as possible signed up for the forthcoming federal election. We hope to defeat this anti-tree government in key electorates and will then join with the Greens in a bid to hold the balance of power in a hung parliament.

I believe 16-year-old humans should get the vote but we don’t have the numbers. Nor did I win this argument in relation to arboreal citizens. Rings will have to be counted and only trees 21 years or older enrolled. A height limit has also been imposed to eliminate voting by shrubs, suckers and saplings.

We will be standing trees in key marginals – avoiding those like oaks and elms that may have dual citizenship issues. We’re running Deciduous for the Reps, Evergreen for the Senate and expect solid support from tree-huggers in inner-city electorates and, yes, from tree-changers. Trees being trees, many with thick branches, we’ve had some problems with branch-stacking. But membership is booming in logging areas, particularly in old-growth forests and near pulp mills.

Trees deserve to participate in our democracy. When not burnt down in their billions because of climate change denialism, trees provide homes for koalas and places for birds to sit. And as I know from childhood, nothing beats a tree for climbing. Forget those metallic gadgets in council playgrounds; when I was six a peppercorn tree was my best friend. Hence my role as an advocate for the world of the wooden.

Even dead trees are great contributors to civilisation. Their corpses provide timber from cradle to coffin, for homes and furniture including front and back benches in parliaments. Plus the wood for the official Commonwealth pencils that dangle from strings in our polling booths. No trees, no pencils, no elections. Ask Antony Green.

I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree. Hence their popularity in the arts. No trees, no handles for paintbrushes, so no Namatjira or Nolan. You’d be left with the dribblers like that pillock Pollock.

Trees are, if you’ll forgive the pun, treemendous. They store nasty carbon and help with photosynthesis, oxygenating the very air we breathe. And how do we thank them? With chainsaw and axe (the latter with its treacherous wooden handle). We encourage their mass murder – arboreal genocide – via climate vandalism and ringbarking. By bulldozing or chopping them down wherever they’re deemed an obstacle to development. No indignity is too great. Behold the mountains of wood pulp, or the way we turn trees into chopsticks. It’s a wonder trees don’t tear themselves out by the roots and march on us, crushing us beneath their weight.

Vote 1 for Trees at the next election. Take your wooden pencil and fight to save trees that are doing their very best to save you. And while you’re at it, plant a few. Or do a Hawkie and plant a billion.

Let me leave you with this thought. Otto von Bismarck, that mightiest of Prussians, used to excuse himself from meetings to go outside and hug a tree. He insisted it was spiritually refreshing. Thus Otto was history’s first recorded tree-hugger.