’‘DOES Tasmania need an intervention?’’ So reads the headline on a recent article or ‘‘provocation’’ by Natasha Cica, director of the centre for civil society at the University of Tasmania, in the online academic magazine The Conversation ( Here ). ( Natasha Cica’s full article, here )
The article comes with this precede: ‘‘Is Tasmania at a tipping point? While it is known to many of us through seductive tourism brochures showcasing the state’s pristine wilderness, gourmet magazine articles celebrating its burgeoning food culture and newspaper stories gasping at a world-leading art museum, the recent devastating bushfires serve as a stark reminder that all is not as it seems. For most Tasmanians, a darker reality lies beneath the glossy surface.’’ (My italics).
I assume Cica did not write the headline or the precede but, in suggesting that a bushfire might alert us to the need for intervention, they illustrate the shallowness of what is to follow.
Cica takes us into the ‘‘darker reality’‘. Having led with a couple of items from Tasmania’s colonial past, she relates an old Tassie folk story about incest at a place called Black Bob’s. No source is given. She then proceeds to detail two of Tasmania’s grislier murders in recent times before moving to Martin Bryant and the Port Arthur massacre.
Imagine an article headlined: ‘‘Does Victoria need an intervention?’’ The precede touches on a couple of the state’s virtues, then says the bushfires of Black Saturday served as a stark reminder that all is not as it seems. Then the ‘‘darker reality’’ - the Hoddle Street massacre, Carl Williams, the fact that in 2010 Melbourne had two more homicides than the whole of New South Wales plus a couple of horror folk tales from the country etc.
Cica’s article is a swirl of near-random connections during which she mentions Tasmania’s low level of school retention and high levels of teenage pregnancy, child abuse, unemployment and welfare dependence before eventually concluding by saying she is sustained in her darkest Tasmanian days by all the ‘‘gentle, crazy and amazing people’’ who live there - at which point, the article moves beyond parody.
By comparison to Cica, Jonathan West, another contributor to the series, is a model of intellectual rigour ( What’s wrong with Tasmania, Australia’s freeloading state? ). He says Tasmania is a mendicant state incapable of change, not only because of its internal politics (upon which his views are reasonable), but also for cultural reasons. He writes: ‘‘A recent study undertaken by an educational foundation unearthed the startling conclusion that a large proportion of Tasmanians specified not being educated as an important aspect of a ‘true Tasmanian’.’‘
Really? I was born in Tasmania and lived there for 28 years; I never encountered this attitude. West continues: ‘‘Educated people were regarded as ‘less Tasmanian’, and probably worse people.’’ Never met that one either.
The Tasmanian middle class, writes West, value education ‘‘up to a point’’ since their aim in life is a safe job in the government. What’s next? An article on ‘‘Tasmania and the case for eugenics’‘?
Tasmania has always been the play within the play as far as Australia is concerned. It’s the place where the dark side of our national origins cannot be ignored in the way it is elsewhere, and the current discussion about Tasmania may well foreshadow our emerging national politics.
Read more: The Age, here
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Comments (26)
The olives are still better in Kalamata.
Before anything else we need to ask “an intervention by whom?”.
The ‘intervention’ into Aboriginal lives started by the Howard government appears to be a costly failure in most/all respects. Furthermore it appears to be more a means of transferring taxpayer monies into the hands of bureaucrats and a whole army of white ‘consultants’ and ‘social workers’, with very little finding its way into the hands of the native peoples themselves.
While it’s easy to see that an ‘intervention’ by a skilled surgeon might be worthwhile, it’s far more difficult to see how a blundering government bureaucratic ‘intervention’ will deliver anything except a new series of woes for the ‘customers’.
Our governments are great at suddenly announcing some ‘disaster’ that has taken decades to develop on their watch(the recent literacy failure in school children is just one example). Smart operators don’t wait for crises to develop, they assess and make minor corrections on the way through to avoid crisis.
If Australia were a ship, we’d be like the Costa Concordia. Appropriate course changes are more useful than trying to refloat a wreck.
The same applies to governance. There are sayings about ounces of prevention…perhaps we need to listen to them.
present pollies attitude
when tassie pollies can loot from the feds ( just as well we had harradine & have got wilkie) & borrow & make unfunded superannuation promises & do special deals with special mates who do dodgy deals (hand out grants & loans which are unsecured) & putting tassie on the hook for other massive contingent liabilities & environmental renovation costs ( be it abt railway, copping tip or closed mining ventures) why should they give a toss.
it is a democracy after all & someone else’s problem after they piss off.
look out for when tassie cannot borrow any more with an implicit guarantee from the feds & the feds, vics & south australians decline to take on the stinking mess.
Thank you Martin Flanagan.
The Tas edition of the Griffith Review was recieved by some as almost definitive biography on Tas. But not so by Martin Flanagan who has beautifully highlighted some of the more self indulgent garbage that should never have made it to print.
Mr Flanagan has hit the nail on the head. Watch the demonisation of Tasmania grow apace under a Federal Liberal regime. It has already started. Tasmania the ‘mendicant’ state. Abbotts recent statement ‘West Australians are the best Australians’, a dog whistle if ever there was one. The states will be pitted against each other in a way Australia has never seen and Tasmania will be the loser.
Heh
Today I did what is a fairly regular search for any new “Science Fiction” books on the State Library catelogue web pages. This publication is one of the results.
So. according to Comment 2, “The ‘intervention’ into Aboriginal lives started by the Howard government appears to be a costly failure in most/all respects”.
And here’s me having attributed most of the blame to academic and other simpletons believing in one or all of the following:
~ outback aborigines were our own ‘noble savages’, and just luuurved sitting around in red dust in the Red Centre;
~ indigenous people can enjoy a Stone Age lifespan without suffering the consequences of a Stone Age lifestyle;
~ creating a situation where each new indigenous outback generation is less literate and numerate than its predecessor is a Good Thing;
~ Very Clever and Highly Credentialled people in the Mel-Syd-ACT triangle knew, and still know, all there is to know about life in the tribal Outback - “We’ve gots lots of degrees to prove it!!”;
~ Gough “Figjam” Whitlam Knew Everything;
~ throwing multi-billions of Other People’s Money at a Big Issue is the way to Address it.
Slipshod criticism doesn’t justify a defence of the appalling Tassie status quo.
While the levels of corruption aren’t quite up there with its new mentor, Ta Ann, they are heading in that direction. The Abt affair is confirmation that the Tas gov is not about to take a forward step, despite the flak.
John Hayward
The stand out 2013 documents from academia on the Tasmanian situation in the recent months conclude that,
1. Foxes are widespread in Tasmania
2. Tasmanians do not trust educated people or have faith in their elected representatives
Let’s test the justification for proposition 2 by the outcome of proposition 1
Interesting commentary by Martin Flanagan about Natasha Cica and some of Jonathan West’s conclusions.
Having read most of the 20 plus contributions to Griffith Review 39, the thing that was most striking was the sheer failure to address the nature of the Tasmanian political culture, to probe even a little into how the Tasmanian political system operates in practice.
Any collection of essays about contemporary Tasmania - especially using the subtitle of “Tipping Point” - which doesn’t bother to examine the role of the political system in its tentacled influences in any real depth of analysis, is hopelessly incomplete.
The closest the collection comes to examining the most divisive political issues which have confronted Tasmania in the last decade is one of the weakest articles in the publication. Cica (presumably) chose Will Bibby (who?) to write about the pulp mill issue, and if she was seeking a shallow analysis she chose extremely well.
Media attention given to Griffith Review 39 has focused on the West and Croome articles to the exclusion of just about everything else - which is a good thing in relation to the Bibby contribution - but Griffith University hasn’t done itself any favours with this flavoured and favoured collection.
This is not to say that there aren’t contributions worth reading in this collection. Most are worth reading for what they say about the contributors than what they say about Tasmania, but then again maybe that is a defining quality about being Tasmanian which these people wish to convey. That being the case, Tasmania is stuffed.
I feel embarrassed for those who contributed to Griffith Review 39 in good faith, and whose contributions are worthy and honest, rather than self-serving. They know who they are.
Griffith Review 39 could have been so much better, so much more courageous, so much more incisive and analytical, so much more focused. What stopped it?
It’s always interesting to see who gets the guernsey to launch these things. That tells the main story more often than not.
The right wing ultra-conservative Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson launched Griffith Review 39.
Read Griffith Review 39 at your leisure, and think carefully about its failure to address most of the most crucial issues facing Tasmanians into the future.
Reading this from afar - very far, in Asia - I am truly puzzled at the personalised, selective and unfair criticism of the contributions by Jonathan West and Natasha Cica, first in Martin Flanagan’s opinion piece and in some of the later comments posted on this site. I read ‘Tasmania The Tipping Point’ online and was impressed by the range of perspectives, voices and opinions it has offered. I have travelled from mainland Australia and now Asia to visit Tasmania a number of times; I would very much like to visit more and also to understand what makes it tick; I do think it is different from much of the rest of Australia. I also hear ‘The Tipping Point’ is the fifth best selling book in Australia through independent booksellers, so West, Cica and all those other writers must be doing something right! Congrats to you all.
Tasmania has been used for years as a political and corrupting testing ground. Good to know we are so important in the bigger scheme of things. If 500,000 people can be so influential on the rest of Australia, as some a portraying we are, then more power to Tassie!
The truth is coming out, that’s why they are so worried and many are trying to keep us under the thumb, trying to make the state feel disempowered. Well bugger ‘em, we’ve got what they want, and if we didn’t, they wouldn’t be trying to so hard to use us for their own advantage.
Of course its the Greece of Australia!
What else could it be?
Its run/sold/raped by vested interests - by both major parties.
Willy will have a go next!
Go WILLIE!!!!!
Greece is the word.
Louise Sampson 11. It must seem strange that an academic like Jonathan West’s writings are being criticised.
Imagine you live on a small island that is genetically modified organisms free? Imagine that one of the most influential academics on the island, a Harvard professor is on the board of the nations leading GMO patent holding company? Imagine he wrote reports for the islands government recommending GMO crops and that he was also an advisor to a federal government minister? Imagine he started to write essays about what was wrong with your GMO-free little island? Thats why there has been a backlash in my view because this seems to be the thin edge of the wedge. West was informed that 900 scientists wrote a report finding GMO crops do not increase yields over time. He failed to respond to that at all. There are other reasons why West’s advice to Tasmania has been negated in my view. West blamed ‘cronyism’ in Tasmania on geography and failed to notice we have an extensive convict history. His views seem to me to be very, very selective.
I’m not sure which Tasmania Martin came from but West and Cicas observations certainly ring true for me.
I too am a Tasmanian, Martin. Born here. Often wondering why. Rarely satisfied with what is written about the place. Endlessly infuriated about the treatment of the Tasmanian Aboriginal People by European settlers up until the present day. This is partly because for many years I thought I was Aboriginal – dark, curly haired great-grandfather hailing from Bruny Island … but no, he was one of three Moors from the Azores who jumped ship on the Friendly Beaches to live as an illegal alien.
I think everyone wants to speak about ‘their Tasmania’.
Here’s my go at it – the top LHS corner of the quilt found on this link. http://tracearchive.ntu.ac.uk/quilt/quilt_1.htm
I understand the trepidation you express in regard to an almost inevitable tide of conservatism in government (caused by some sort of chronic-ALP-rot which can’t quite be cured by an anti-biotic. I think Kevin Rudd’s anger about ‘Brand Rudd being damaged’ and his brazen disregard for the democratic process (expressed in his penultimate or was it the ultimate interview with Kerry O’Brien) was one of the most dreadful ‘disconnects’ I’ve seen in an ALP politician who had seemed (and probably is) such an intelligent man. He was NOT going to govern for much longer … and O’Brien was attempting to engage with him, but he would not. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK3ncaxG308
I was torn, as a woman, between being sad that a woman took over in such a ‘coup-like’ way, and being glad that a female prime minister was finally in power, after only just over a hundred years of Australian Parliaments …
cont ...
cont ...
As a Tasmanian woman, I’m glad that Natasha Cica is at the helm of the Inglis Clark Centre. She’s bold, brazen and has a go. Her article is actually littered with references, even though it doesn’t provide a footnote for every claim. But, hey, sometimes academics can be dreadful bores, and I’m not sure Cica and her co-editor, Julianne Schultz, are aiming for an elite audience in this journal (which is actually now the 5th best selling item in independent bookstores across the nation).
I like the fact that two women edited this edition and that the voices are diverse. I’m also enjoying the litany of responses. David O’Byrne’s response was well argued, and didn’t smack of the routine political jingo-ism. I haven’t finished reading the journal yet, nor have I entered the MONA competition so far, but I did take a bit of offence at Jonathan West’s comments. In the end I decided to attribute his rancor as an attempt to provoke discussion. I am in the government sector, and yes it’s a large workforce here in comparison to other jurisdictions, but without public administration and public services, I’m not sure how the outcomes desired by people living in a democratically governed State would ever be achieved.
As far as education goes, the whole of Australia is SHOT, so I don’t really care what is said about Tasmania. The paradigm has to change. I’m ‘middle class’ and neither of my children benefited from the State Education system in any way. They are ‘creatives’ and ‘intelligent’ but the system only wants a particular child. See Ken Robinson’s comments: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U (And I think our thinking needs to go even further than Robinson’s paradigm – into a space that reviews the economists’ view of ‘productivity’ and allows it be something that doesn’t only result in fiscal results.)
I think it’s hard to stimulate a broad-based discussion about a place, and I think Cica and Schultz are to be congratulated in stirring it up. I remain extraordinarily optimistic about Tasmania …
I hope the Tipping Point debate lingers for a long while yet – I want to see local group, ideas blazing, and partnerships to incubate ideas so they grow. I want Tasmania to become a beacon, not a floundering ancient civilization. Although the IHOS Opera at the 2012 MOFO was ominous … the barbarians are coming …
I want us to DO something, not wait for some saviour or bludgeoning, conservative government.
I’m trying to track down the quote but apparently the Age said recently that Tasmania IS the NEW BLACK.
Well, may we be, but we still have more than our fair share of red tape – a wonderful entrepreneur in Hobart was forced by the Heritage Council to take down a third of his red awnings … (OMG – who cares?). I think, get rid of the red tape (of which Tasmania has had more than ENOUGH), STOP LOATHING the colour ‘green’ (and realise that the world wants our wilderness and our wild places), start recognising that the best economies are multi-faceted, and dive into the sea of ideas that have been unleashed since the Griffith Review as launched.
I’d quite like to hear your ideas, Martin, about how Tasmania can not only survive, but thrive ...
And a little bit more (to add to my comments above), I’m actually sad that the Tasmania Together process (which started in 2000) seems to be taking such a back seat. (Actually, it seems to be in the horse trailer under the straw.) It was a great vision. And, is STILL unique on the planet. The Oregon Shines planning scheme on which TT was based was put into play by the business sector, but in Tasmania, it was driven much more by the PEOPLE. And yes, the old growth logging targets weren’t met. And that was totally crap. But there were other things that we were working towards getting right – drinking water for everyone in Tasmania (Queenstown – rusting waterpipes, many rural areas with regular boil-water alerts); better literacy levels; less accidental death; better mental health services; less child abuse; more tourism etc etc – the list is really comprehensive. The whole thing was used by Government to drive the budget process and ensure Tasmania was going to reach the vast majority of its targets by 2020. But, as I said, things have gone quiet. And this is wrong. The TT process CAN be a vehicle for a better Tasmania if we don’t just let it slide into a muddy grave.
Having recently returned to Tasmania after a 25 year absence- working in Melbourne, Switzerland and Scandinavia in the pharmaceutical, IT and banking industries - I see much truth in the conversations generated by this issue of the Griffith review….and I agree that Tasmania DOES indeed need an intervention.
I agree with you Sarah, the Tasmania of West’s and Cica’s observations certainly ring true for me too.
Perhaps the Tas edition of the Griffith Review is just the sort of strategic intervention needed.
Currently the 5th best-selling book at independent bookstores, nation-wide, it seems many Australian citizens think so.
Certainly, it is an intervention that doesn’t involve ‘blundering bureaucrats’, the paralysis of political cycles, or great cost to taxpayers. And it seems to be stimulating focus on issues and the sorts of conversations that Tasmanians and, more broadly, Australians, need to have. After all, the cultural and economic challenges for Tasmanians are, as ever, a more exaggerated version of those that face our nation.
Margaret Lea Wallace (Tasmanian)
is tassie discriminated against or for by the feds !!!!
could someone give the facts tassie against mainland states
1. house of reps votes per seat
2. senate votes per seat
3. gst payments per head from the “states” gst tax
4. gst collections per head from the “states” gst tax
5. house of assembly votes per member (mha)
6. legislative council votes per member (mlc)
this is for starters
tassie residents & their families if they feel discriminated against & not happy with all the present & expected regulatory red & green tape can sell up & take their wealth, investments & jobs & leave to the mainland (qld or wa) or new zealand or wherever , whenever they choose
until such time as global warming & other climate changes on the mainland & in tassie makes tassie a much more favoured living environment.
tassie residents can choose to invest their wealth in this state or elsewhere & when ever - wherever they feel welcome & are satisfied with the risk/return tradeoff.
if tassie residents expect taxes, fees & charges from the pollies & their quangos are likely to increase unduly ( rates, land tax, motor reg, third party insurance,water & sewerage, electricity,gas, education & training) - the voters should blame themselves for electing labor governments with green prefs & the present lab-green government for the past 15 + years since the libs were thrown out.
tassie is not a reservation or a gaol.
tassie can be left for the “true believers” & the lab-greens pollies & all their special mates - gunns (rip)(& forestry tas, their mis tree farmer punters) , federal hotels (& their pokies punters), fox hunters,railway dreamers, cable car dreamers & all the other special recipients of grants & unsecured non-repayable loans , together with the stinking mess of debt, unfunded superannuation & contingent liabilities.
I think that the Bushfires have indeed highlighted that all is not as rosy in Tasmania as it is starting to appear. We were faced with newly homeless people that do not have any equity, savings or insurance. Right now there is a feeling of us poor folk will band together. Whilst Tasmania is becoming a rosy picture for the rest of the country it is so because of private businesses and investors, yet the process of investment is slow and it is frightening what the government is doing with our budget.
You may not have had the experience of feeling ‘unTasmanian’ for being educated but where did you grow up? I certainly did not feel as though I fit in Glenorchy. Not because my neighbours were not smart or made me feel strange they just did not see the point of tertiary education!
The socio economic issues of Tasmania are either ignored or looked through rose coloured glasses the moment that there is a new investment. I am surprised at the nit-picking of Cica’s article. She has instigated a conversation with her writing that is long overdue for Tasmania.
Is #19 going to “intervene”?
Far from being a random swirl, co-editor Natasha Cica’s provocation struck me as a vivid and muscular piece of writing. Is it not exactly doing its job - provoking us to think and discuss at a broader level?
And as I read through the excellent pieces by Jonathan West, Cassandra Pybus and others, I am grateful for the thought leadership of Cica, the Inglis Clark Centre for Civil Society and her colleagues. Well done the Griffith Review39 and its contributors.
The discussion generated by Griffith Review’s ‘Tasmania, The Tipping Point?’ has been just marvelous. It has locals as well as mainlanders discussing the situation on the ground here in Tasmania and I welcome the disparate points of view. The biggest change, in my view, is that instead of weighing ourselves down in the blood-soaked quagmire of history we are allowing ourselves to examine the present and look into the future.
The more debate the better, the more consideration the better. I welcome each and every article published - and all of the ensuing comment and rants.
“Does Tasmania need an intervention?”
Yes, direct democracy - a Citizens’ Initiated Referenda.