After trees along Sydney’s Brighton-Le-Sands beach were hacked down and poisoned by unknown hands in January to open up the view, the local government responded in kind.
Bayside council, home to the industrial precinct around Port Botany, dropped a battered metal shipping container in front of the newly created view, and commissioned a local artist to decorate it with a mural of fairy wrens and native flora. It will remain there until replacement trees have grown, says mayor Edward McDougall.
Shipping containers are just one way Australian councils are responding to illegal tree removals on public land to improve views or boost house prices. Some hang banners or “shame signs” to block views, or spray-paint “POISONED” on the trunks of vandalised trees.
These attempts to fight illegal tree destruction – especially in Sydney suburbs with harbour views – are sometimes called “tree wars”. After a public consultation, the NSW government is expected to introduce new legislation, including bigger fines, later this year.
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Some councils and advocates have called for jail time for serious offences, although others say the emphasis should be on prevention, calling on state and federal governments to give more help to local councils and centralise data in the face of growing threats to Sydney’s urban tree canopy.
The problem
Most Sydney suburbs with water views have some recent history of public tree vandalism. Bayside council commissioned the same artist to paint several shipping containers further along the foreshore when trees were cut down in 2021.
In recent years, vandalised trees have made local news from Hunters Hill and Mosman to Waverley and Woollahra. Others have made international headlines. In Longueville on the lower north shore, Lane Cove council installed a seven-metre long banner after about 300 trees, including mature eucalypts, banksia and casuarina, were destroyed in November 2023.
Two years later, the banner is still there and the council is about to lodge legal action against the alleged perpetrator. Mayor Merri Southwood says the process is “really difficult”, with councils themselves required to meet the burden of proof.
“[They] are ill-equipped to undertake this onerous and costly process, and evidence is difficult to gather.”
It proved too challenging in Castle Cove, which also erected a banner after more than 250 trees were illegally killed or vandalised in an acre of protected bushland in August 2023. Willoughby mayor Tanya Taylor says the council could not meet the burden of proof, although it did identify potential suspects.
Prof Sebastian Pfautsch, an expert in urban heat at Western Sydney University, published a microclimate report in July for the council. He says the cleared area is now as much as three degrees hotter during the day, but cooler at night, affecting food networks, and insect, bird and marsupial habitats.
In Queensland, the Sunshine Coast and Noosa councils have erected signs blocking views after native trees were illegally cleared along beach foreshores in 2023.
In South Australia, Burnside council put up several banners and signs after about 50 native trees were destroyed in a nature reserve in eastern Adelaide in 2023.
Clearing trees to improve water views might be less common in Melbourne, but public tree vandalism is not. In late 2024, vandals ripped out or cut down nearly 200 young trees and shrubs in parks in Glen Eira in the south-east.
The law
In NSW, councils can issue on-the-spot fines for illegal tree removals of $3,000 for individuals and $9,000 for businesses if they prove culpability, although serious offences prosecuted in the courts can face an individual penalty up to $1m.
But in local government areas such as Mosman on Sydney’s north shore, illegally removing trees to create a view or for a development can add significantly more value to a property than the cost of a fine, says Mosman mayor Ann Marie Kimber.
And, it’s hard to identify the perpetrators. Last year, holes were drilled into the trunks of nine historic fig trees on Balmoral beach, leading to fears they had been poisoned. The trees were saved, but it wasn’t clear who would have benefitted from their removal.
Submissions to the NSW department of planning’s public consultation on illegal tree clearing closed in June. The government has proposed doubling on-the-spot fines, although some say this does not go far enough.
Jeff Angel, director of the Total Environment Centre, says he has watched state governments make many unsuccessful attempts to fix the problem through “small scale fines”.
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“Frankly, the only thing that is going to have an impact is a system of fines that are equivalent or more to the improvement of the property value.”
Lane Cove council’s submission called for each tree removed to be treated as a separate offence. It is one of the many councils and tree advocates who told Guardian Australia they supported jail time for serious offences.
A spokesperson for the department of planning would not say whether jail terms would be part of a policy announcement, although the department has previously said it was considering it.
A national solution?
Local governments are used to dealing with neighbours’ disputes about trees. Woollahra mayor Sarah Dixson, for example, has an email folder in her inbox dedicated to them and she says some trees “have their own special sub-folder”.
But she and the other Sydney mayors as well as Glen Eira and Burnside councils, are calling for greater support from state and federal governments to prevent illegal tree removal. “It’s been happening more and more,” says Dixson.
Her council has hung banners before, including when fig trees were poisoned in Darling Point in 2023, and signs have been erected at the site of tree removals along the Hermitage Foreshore track in Vaucluse, which is managed by NSW parks and wildlife. But Dixson thinks banners are “a visual pollutant”.
“I know that that’s sort of the point,” she says. “The problem with that is that it effects absolutely everybody.”
Woollahra has recently joined other Sydney councils in employing a tree enforcement officer. Prof Pfautsch says local governments should be financially supported to employ more officers to enforce guidelines and investigate breaches.
“One person cannot deal with the amount of work that is necessary.”
There are also calls for better data collection. David Eldridge, a professor of ecology at UNSW, says a national register of illegal tree removals should be part of any strategy to address the “almost intractable” problem of tree vandalism.
Jess Abrahams, national nature campaigner at the Australian Conservation Foundation, says Australia is “poorly lacking” when it comes to a national strategy to maintain native vegetation, particularly urban trees, which are as important for humans as for animals.
About 30% of Australia’s more than 2,200 threatened species are in urban environments but a study published last year found Sydney and Melbourne did not reach a “bare minimum” of 30% canopy cover.
“Without national leadership, we have a piecemeal approach,” says Abrahams, while rapid urban development is leading to the “woodchipping” of urban tree cover.
He says Environment Information Australia (EIA), an agency established by the federal government last year to make environmental data more accessible, could be the repository for statistics about illegally removed urban trees.
Asked if EIA could monitor tree removals in urban settings, a spokesperson for the federal environment minister, Murray Watt, said state and territory governments had primary responsibility for unapproved land clearing.
“[EIA] is working hard to detect land clearing that has potentially significant impacts on nationally protected species or ecosystems.”
Abrahams says trees have so many benefits for the public good – for our physical and mental health and for their role in helping cool the urban environment. As for the people who cut down trees, Abrahams is blunt: “They should move somewhere else.”
