Scratch Tasmania’s premier Paul Lennon and the union firebrand who used to enjoy starting fights up the back of Trades Hall shows through.
In fact, you hardly need scratch at all – just mention the timber industry.
“We’ve been through a 20-year debate here on our forests,” he tells Richard Guilliatt in Good Weekend.
“In that time our national parks have gone from 200,000 hectares to 2.7 million hectares and we’ve still got people claiming the last tree is about to be harvested here.”
What Lennon says is true, but there’s more to the picture. Tasmania protects more than 80% of its old growth forests from logging, says Guilliatt, but it’s also the only state to clearfell rainforest, and it exports more woodchips than all other states combined – some 5 million tonnes a year.
But Lennon doesn’t want to debate the matter. “What’s this – more of the same is it?” he says, his carbuncular countenance turning an alarming shade of puce.
“You’ve come to Tasmania to rubbish us again?”
But if you really want to rattle Lennon’s cage, ask about Labor and the timber company Gunns, which has taken over 85% of Tasmania’s timber industry since the party came to power.
Gunns’s chairman Edmund Rouse was jailed in 1990 for offering a Labor MP $110,000 to cross the floor of parliament, and a subsequent Royal Commission concluded he had offered the money to advance his business interests.
Isn’t it reasonable, then, for people to be wary of corruption? “Corruption where?” demands Lennon. The corruption uncovered by the Royal Commission. “What’s that got to do with forestry?” Well, Edmund Rouse was the chairman of Gunns … “Chairman of Gunns? Are you sure?” Guilliatt says that’s what he understood to be the case. Having failed to bluster his way through the argument, Lennon decides to pick up his ball and go home. “I think we’ve just about had enough, haven’t we?” he says. “Give us a break.”
When Labor came to power in Tasmania in 1996, it was led by a formidable troika.
“I always said Jim Bacon was the mouth, David Crean was the brains and Paul Lennon was the foot for kicking people around,” says former Tasmanian Liberal leader Bob Cheek.
“Now all they’ve got left is the foot.”
This extract from Richard Guilliatt’s profile of Paul Lennon (The Age Good Weekend, March 12, 2005), is taken from, The Reader. tasmaniantimes has had numerous requests to post the link to Guilliatt’s article, but it is not floating in the ether. So in the interests of objectivity …! this extract is the superb Reader’s pithy reduction …
lhayward
March 27, 2005 at 15:13
It isn’t that Paul Lennon doesn’t have time for the niceties of argument.
It is the fact that he finds himself running a state where the Opposition, the media, and most of the electorate don’t require him to to explain or justify anything, a huge boon when you don’t have the cerebral equipment anyway.
You’d think Tasmanians would be interested in the State Policies and Projects Amendment Bill 2005 currently before Parliament.
This Bill will amend the fast-track Act of the same name, the “Project of State Significance Order of 2004, which applies to Gunns’ pulp mill, and the Water Management Act.
One Amendment will expand the scope of such an Order to take in any matter which is merely “convenient for the implementation of the project”, which means to remove it from the reach of existing regulations. It would doubtless be “convenient” for Gunns to be free of any constraints.
Another will allow the proponents of an approved fast-track project to transfer it to new proponents without affecting the agreement, meaning that a foreign entrepreneur, such as Halliburton, could end up with the medieval powers over Tasmania the project order confers.
Think that the mill’s plans for the Pipers River will trip over the Water Management Act? Forget it, since that Act, and any other legislative or planning scheme provision in conflict with the mill proponents’ commercial convenience will lose effect the day the mill plan is approved.
The idea that Gunns might sell the whole project once it has been approved does not seem wholly paranoid in light of its announcement last week that it plans to bump up its 6 million tonne p.a. woodchip production to 7 M by 2010. Why squander your resource base before the pulp mill is even up and running? One plausible reason is that the added volume will come from the frenzied clearfelling of public land for plantations. Gunns will own the trees in those plantations, and can toss them into any sale of the pulp mill and/or itself. An attractive proposition for the lucky loggers, and any pollies on the payroll.
You may ask “why not just deed the whole state to Gunns”? Just don’t bother asking Rough Red.
John Hayward
Weegena
Brenda Rosser
March 28, 2005 at 08:41
Essentially, the amendment as proposed by Paul Lennon (below) effectively means that the Water Management Act will be accommodating to whatever the so-called ‘independent’ Resource Planning and Development Commission say.
It is timely to remember that this ‘independent’ commission stated that ‘there will be no overt protection for rural residents from pesticide spray drift’ when residents requested the Waratah-Wynyard Planning Scheme altered to ban aerial spraying to protect human health and the environment.
And then one has to ask why the RPDC has overseen the massive destruction of wildlife, native flora and the long history of widespread air and drinking water contamination. The incessant systematic breaches of even the ‘soft’ Regional Forest Agreement. One can only conclude that the RPDC is a selection of individuals prepared to kowtow to whatever the Lib-Lab line of the day is. Is it any wonder that the forest Premier Lennon is happy for the RPDC to be the key decision-maker for the pre-empted Gunns Ltd pulpmill?
It’s not just the wishes of the Tasmanian people that have got in the Government’s way now. It’s any remnant of weak laws to protect the environment and health.
Brenda Rosser
adriana lefleur
April 19, 2005 at 06:24
this is the most redicules thing somebody could ever do because it may cause some difficulties in the near distant future.