The fight against shot-hole-borer is being hampered by the use of NDAs hiding the location of infected trees, two Perth mayors say.
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00:00In the country's most barren urban canopy, the fight to kill the invasive tree-killing
00:08pest, shot hole borer, continues.
00:13But those most desperate to know exactly where the beetle is in their community are being
00:18sworn to secrecy.
00:20The town of Victoria Park has refused to sign the non-disclosure agreement.
00:24City of Vincent has signed that agreement.
00:26We've signed it because we're desperate to get the information.
00:29It's clearly outlined in the Department of Primary Industries' biosecurity response plan
00:34that local governments will enter NDAs to locate infested trees on private land.
00:41DPIRD says it's standard practice to protect the privacy of residents, but local councils
00:47say it's hindering their response.
00:49We're not going to go and broadcast the names and addresses of private properties where
00:53the borer has been detected.
00:55We do have enough mechanisms in place to deal with that.
00:58Local councils need to have that level of specificity because we need to be able to
01:05work with our communities to make sure that they are also looking out for signs of borer
01:10in immediate vicinities.
01:11Meanwhile, the real impact of the borer on Perth's urban tree canopy is unknown.
01:17The data revealing the percentage of land covered by tree canopy, which is usually published
01:22every two years, hasn't been seen since 2020.
01:26And since then, we've been hit with a shothole borer and continued losses, and you would
01:31have to think that if the numbers were good and going up, they would have been released.
01:35WA Labor has promised to plant one million trees in the metro area over the next decade.
01:41But the borer has already taken more than 4,000 out of that equation.
01:46If we don't know where we are now, we can't set the path forward because we can't manage
01:51what we don't measure.
01:52The Department of Planning, Lands and Heritage says the tree canopy data is expected to be
01:57released this year.