I think it was the CEO of Scandinavian Airlines who famously said, when shown a hanger filled with aeroplanes and told that these were SAS asssets, “These aren’t assets…they’re liabilities until we have customers who wish to pay to use them”

Gunns plantations were never assets, they were costs (thinning, pruning, harvesting, making safe from fires etc) that couldn’t be recouped unless Gunns also had access to a processing facility, and even that wouldn’t make money unless a whole set of other conditions were true.

Mr Gay has been described as Australia’s most inarticulate CEO. Just listening to him and his various ‘directors’, coupled with the senior management of the various Tasmanian forestry interests, would tell any competent analyst that our forest ‘managers’ had no idea how to produce value in an industry.

It’s time this tedious and unenlightening period was behind us.

Well done John.

Thank you John Lawrence, for mentioning Code Green’s efforts.  What a beautiful bunch they are.  This whole thing is a very big mix.  Tomorrow I’m attending a family wedding.  A very happy occasion.  By the monopoly board games that were played by Gunns, my nephew, who is getting married tomorrow, was ‘bought up’ by Gunns.  He was never given a choice, never was.  I was there when another of the family, was injured on the Gunns land clearance site.  The accident was covered up.  [It did get mentioned here on TT, but that was all.]  and thanks John Lawrence, for showing the Code Green pix.  Of the tense arrest situation.  Of ‘Dee’ with that huge chain around her neck.  [there is another closer-up-pic] She told me she regretted that pic.  That it wasn’t her, the Dee that she thought she was.  Something along those lines.  That she was a person and that was just one thing that happened.  Not rejecting it.  But not wanting to become only ‘that person with the big chain around her neck’. 

I love these people who could – and did - put themselves out there.  I don’t want to beat up on myself, but, I do love them for what they did.

Quite right #2- loving people who realy believe in something-even at great personal cost.

One of the reasons native forest logging was unprofitable was because the absence of reputable certification made the chips unsaleable and the pulp mill impossible.

Gunns hung on to its native forest allocation for a considerable period after it announced that it was exiting that business. Remember, Tas had the OECD’s highest proportional rate of native forest destruction during the woodchip frenzy.

John Hayward

For mine that photo is squarely in the same class to that of the Chinese guy standing in front of the tanks in Tiananmen Square.  Courage beyond words…

Sadly a politically puppet, installed after another’s infidelity, can’t write their own speeches even to the National Press Club.

Best a puppet premier can do is not talk back to their puppeteers and just dish out regurgitated 19th C natural resource agendas, plagiarise big sis in Canberra, and motherhood spiel, cos the pension will happly pay for life after puppeteering, even if it has to be on the mainland to avoid piercing stares in the street.

Lalalalalalala.

I reckon all Gunns’ statements to the ASX about negotiations with prospective partners and financiers ever since January 2011 were all a load of tosh. They should be taken to task for that.

If only Tasmania’s Lib/Lab ministers were paid on the basis of their efforts that will aid Tasmania and its citizens, were I the paymaster a number of these foolishly voted-for ministers would now be displaying the bones of their rib-cage protruding outward from beneath a thin stretched layer of under-nourished skin.
For example, how is it that John Gay and his now ‘bankus-ruptus hollowed out shell empire’ could have in all its forms of its demon-like history of pillaging Tasmania’s State Forest resources, could have warranted all those special financial considerations and given such false prominence by the Tasmanian Lib/Lab government?
I cannot for the life of me comprehend how Gunns Ltd during its ‘Old Growth Forest wood-chipping free-for-all rampages, (especially during the Thuggo Lennon period- commencing as Tasmania’s un-elected Premier,) could rapidly multiply its corrupting influences and collusion’s with both this State government and its ruinous forest-logging business enterprise?
Such was the obsequiousness of Lennon and his lacklustre band of soft-touch Cabinet ministers that this glory was formerly bestowed upon each of the 2 main rogues of Gunns Ltd, (we must never forget that other miscreant greed-squaffling former failed Tasmanian Premier, Robin Gray) that John Gay and his mate could dictate the entire state of affairs throughout this State of Tasmania.

Now try and tell me that all of this phoney baloney patronage given by Lennon and his meglomanic mob of servile nodders was truly justified at any time at all in the past history of Gunns Ltd!
That Paul ‘Thuggo’ Lennon is still given space by any and all of this State’s major media operatives is putrid in its purposes.
In point of fact this in itself is nothing short of a grossly insulting reminder to who the other guilty parties were during this period of nonsensical media adulation.
Yes, the State’s very own News Media Barons and the State’s government employed doctors of spin and misinformation.
Twas they, (along with Lennon and Co) who forever extolled their combined worships and sang their praises toward the now bankrupted and blown Gunns Ltd.

I don’t wish to disagree with the SAS executive too strongly, but a ledger has two sides as we can see from the sale of Gunns underperforming assets.

Their liabilities outweighted their assets the day after they decided to oppose the winds of change embodied in environmentalism, one being they took too long to change from the past to the more modern style of corporate governance.

It was probably impossible for that change to occur under the tyranical leadership of Gay with his big red assett showing how important he was, when indeed he was a liability from day one.