Comments
A well put together article Paul. Don’t forget that Orwell learnt a lot from Goebells, who was intrinsic in dumbing down the population, whilst speaking up the great efforts and promises of the regime.
One of the great initial moves by the Lennon government on the Pulp mill was to prevent public meetings from forming to discuss the pulp mill.
That’s why he offered only one-on-one face to face interviews with concerned residents from some of his suited heavyweights.
It is a subtle but yet affrontive form of intimidation.
The people rejected his move to stifle public debate, and will no doubt vote that way come July next year.
Keep up the good work.
Les.
Posted by Les Rochester on 02/08/05 at 07:10 AMColour Blindness
In Robert a Heinlein’s masterpiece, ‘Friday’, (Well worth a read) he sets his scene in the not too distant future.
Here the world has been divided up into warring states of three types; the Imperial, the Territorial and the Corporate. Of all these the Corporate is the most powerful and the most difficult to attack, as it has no particular base and operates from offices and buildings anywhere in the world. However, it controls most things because it owns the purse strings.
Governments and armies and citizens are all under the sway of these massive corporations, and everybody is virtually a puppet dancing to their tune. Heads of State, politicians and bureaucracy bow to their wishes. It is not quite as pessimistic as 1984 and has a great deal of humour in it, as the Heroine, ‘Friday’, an enhanced female, bounces her way through all the chicanery.
But the very real inference is there. Corporations are taking over the world and the ruling force is money. They are not quite as advanced as in the novel — yet! However, the local scene fits in very well with this plot. The propaganda and the control of government bodies that should not be under their influence, and their obvious keenness to support private industry from public funds smacks of this fictional world.
A missed point in the above article is the sacred nature of timber workers’ jobs. When a wool mill was recently teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the ninety odd workers were told by a government minister that there were plenty of jobs in Tasmania and the government would do nothing to rescue them. Contrast this with Paul Lennon’s bellicose statement that ‘Not one Forestry job would be lost,’ when Mark Latham was contemplating saving the old growth forests.
It must also be noted the if it is Green, and it represents the colour of a party, then it must be vilified. If, on the other hand, the implication is useful, steal it and use it. Once this used to be known as larceny.
Barnaby Drake
Posted by Gerry Mander on 02/08/05 at 10:55 AMRegardless of what you call it, a dumb pulpmill will always be a dumb pulpmill.
Putting it just down the road from Gay’s office, under an inversion layer only makes dumb dumber. Cleanest, greenest, WBP would see the scrubbing clean of the ‘smokestack’ discharge so only air was released to the air.
Perhaps cheap and tawdry should be added to the descriptive term dumb.
In the light of the knowledge that a closed loop TCF mill with smokestack scrubbing is not beyond the capacity of the stupid monkey smarten up with, this mill could be described as world’s worst practice because they will miss the opportunity to build the best.
If the ACCC requires proof that the advertising is false then the showing of better pulp mills [closed loop, TCF] operating elsewhere should be enough to show the falsity of the claim.
Clearly, in the eyes of Gay and Gunns Tasmania does not deserve the best.
Posted by phill Parsons on 02/08/05 at 08:59 PMWe hear about the ‘World’s Best Practice’ over the pulp mill.
The same thing is said about our Forestry, and yet neither can stand up to the light of day. I watched a timber truck haul its load of split myrtle out of a coupe the other day, destined for the chippers, and I remembered a fine timber worker telling me how he was finding it difficult to get the wood he needed for his business, as forestry were charging such exorbitant prices, and burning the stuff on the ground.
They were excluded from salvaging any of this by locked forestry gates.
They actually prefer to burn it than sell it.
It then struck me why they are doing this, when they purport to be supporting the fine timber industry.
If they were to properly harvest all the fine timber and store it, there would be a glut — probably already enough to keep the industry going for a couple of hundred years. But if they did this, they would not then have the excuse and spin that they needed to continue clearfelling, based on the myth of supplying the fine wood trade with good quality timber, so it is better, from their point of view, to destroy the stuff at source and retain their current modus operandi.
In this way, they can continue with their more profitable lines of chipping and transforming old growth to plantation.
Of course, they are unaware of this.
Posted by Gerry Mander on 05/08/05 at 05:21 AMGerald the thing is, we don’t hear anything about the oxymoron “world’s best practice” anymore, because they know they can’t deliver a champagne mill on a beer budget.
The RPDC has had Gunns documents for nearly 3 months now and I reckon they are still shuffling the paper around with Gunns having no idea what they are doing, changing their mind each time the sun comes up.
Does the RPDC’s jurisdiction cover New Zealand or China?
I have another great idea!
Maybe the proponent could snaffle a bargain on e-bay?
I hear the world’s best pulp mill in Valdivia Chile that opened in February 2004 is not up to much these days, except gathering cobwebs.
“Second hand pulp mill, only pulped a few thousand tonnes, first to see will buy, owner leaving country, smells like a pulp mill, good for getting rid of pesky native swans and other marine life.
Comes with a rear view vision mirror guarantee, buy now and the community will pay later”
Posted by Dave Groves on 06/08/05 at 01:49 AMI remain baffled that critics of the pulp mill continue to oppose it in terms appropriate to a legitimate democracy, rather than the kleptocracy that is Your Natural State.
People continue to discuss the mill in trms of the 3 million tonnes of chips, and 26 gl of water that the govt uses, rather than something much closer to the 5.2 million tonnes of chips, and 36 gl it would use at full capacity.
They forget that Gunns announced earlier this year that they would be continuing to export chips, and would be lifting their chip production to an outlandish 7 million tonnes by 2010. Above all, they seem to forget that the state’s oligarchy lie to us as if it’s a matter of policy.
On form, there are no public interest or environmental issues that will carry any weight at all against any commercial advantage to Gunns. To regard the RPDC as the honest broker of the mill proposal is likewise to strike out the past.
if this state is to attract the external reaction we need to stop this caper, we need to treat it for what it is, a heist.
John Hayward
Posted by lhayward on 06/08/05 at 06:44 AM
