Arborists near you

When one business both assesses and removes, every assessment carries an incentive it should not have. Most of the time that incentive changes nothing. It matters in exactly the cases where the stakes are highest: a large tree close to a house, a tree a neighbour objects to, a tree that would need council consent to remove, a tree an insurer has asked about, or a tree in a dispute headed for a tribunal.

In those situations an independent written assessment is a cheap piece of insurance. It gives you an opinion with no financial stake in the outcome, it gives the eventual contractor a defined scope to price against, and it gives you a document that carries weight with a third party. In the New South Wales Land and Environment Court's tree jurisdiction, and in Queensland's tribunal process, what persuades is evidence about the tree, and that evidence has more force when the person who produced it is not the person quoting to remove it.

Tree work consistently appears among the higher-risk activities in the construction and outdoor trades, and SafeWork NSW's hazard list explains why: height, falling objects, powerlines, chainsaws, woodchippers, noise and sun, all often at the same time. The regulator publishes a code of practice for tree work, a code of practice for work near overhead power lines and a woodchipper guide, and requires the person conducting the business to manage those risks with documented safe work procedures and proper instruction and training for workers.

As a homeowner you are not the regulator, but you are the person whose property and whose neighbours are exposed. Ask to see the safe work method statement for your job, ask who is supervising, ask what the plan is for the limb over the neighbour's roof, and never engage a crew that proposes to work near powerlines without the specific accreditation that work requires.

Arborist services carry the automatic consumer guarantees that apply to all services in Australia: they must be provided with an acceptable level of care and skill, be fit for any particular purpose you made known, and be supplied within a reasonable time if no time was agreed. The ACCC is clear that these guarantees are automatic and cannot be removed by anything a business says or does.

In arboriculture, the purpose you made known is often the crucial element. If you engaged someone to reduce a tree's risk of failure over a house, or to produce a report a council would accept, say so in writing at the time of engagement. A report that does not do what it was commissioned to do, or pruning that ignores the brief and topples the tree's structure, is measured against that stated purpose rather than against what the contractor felt like doing.