Rough Red

Paul Lennon looks like a brickie’s labourer stuffed into an expensive business suit: his barrel-shaped girth betrays a lifetime of beer-drinking, his jowls spill over his shirt collar, and his bristling ginger moustache and thunderously red complexion make him look perpetually on the brink of either rage or heart attack. So it’s easy to imagine how startled Alistair Graham was, back in 1989, when the future premier of Tasmanian grabbed him by the shirt front and shoved him up against an office wall during a meeting in Hobart.

Graham is a genteel chap with an Oxbridge accent who has been a longstanding environmentalist in the island state, and to this day he can’t remember what he said that caused Lennon- then a senior trade union official- to shirtfront him. But the meeting had been called to discuss an issue that is still the state’s most divisive cause celebre- the logging of trees in Tasmania’s wilderness.

“ He literally just grabbed me and stuck me up against the wall,” recalls Graham mildly.” You probably haven’t seen him angry, but when he goes puce it’s a very alarming sight, I can tell you. It was in full view of about a dozen professional people from Hobart… Everyone was rooted to the spot, gobsmacked.”

Tasmania is a small place, and you don’t have to travel far to come across someone who has faced the wrath of the man locals call Big Red. At least one other environmentalist recalls a similar physical exchange with Lennon, while novelist Richard Flanagan was effectively invited to leave the state for daring to criticise the government. At last October’s Labor Party state conference Lennon heckled one unionist who got up to criticise him, then got into a verbal altercation in the toilets with a young delegate from a union that donates money to the environmental movement.

Underpinning much of this aggression is Lennon’s deep and abiding animosity towards environmentalists of every stripe. “ If he had his way,” says Bob Cheek, a former Liberal Party leader in Tasmania, “he’d be glad to get in a bulldozer and run over the lot of them, then go to the casino and have a few beers to celebrate”. To Lennon, Green activism is a blight on Tasmania, and a year into his reign as premier, the state is headed into one of the most confrontational eras since the Franklin River protests turned the Greens into a significant political force 20 years ago.

When I first set eyes on Lennon, he’s standing next to his government car in an airport car park outside Hobart on a summer morning, applying hair spray to his blow-waved ginger thatch. It’s an odd sight, because no amount of grooming could transform Lennon into one of the silky metrosexuals so favoured as Labor leaders these days. At 49, he has the vocabulary and persona of the hard-knuckled union boss he once was. Decades of smoking have yellowed his teeth and put a gravely bite into his voice, and the sagging pouches under his eyes could qualify as carry-on baggage. Before circumstances and tragedy threw him into the job a year ago, hardly anyone in Tasmania- least of all Lennon himself- had envisaged he’d become premier.

Hair in place, Lennon walks over and offers a diffident handshake while glancing at the ground. Small talk is not his strong suit, and journalists generally find themselves at the rough end of his aggression- an experience we’ll get to soon enough. For the moment, though, we’re on our way across the state in a light plane to attend a high-school prize ceremony, and all is civil. It’s an overcast day and, as our plane cruises above the cloud cover, Lennon laments that can’t look down on the state’s vast swathes of wilderness. “What you’d have seen is endless green,” he says above the engine roar. This is Lennon’s recurring theme, that Tasmania has one of the most enviable environmental records in the world, and those who criticise its forestry industry are either political opportunists or hypocrites. The state does indeed protect more than 80 per cent of its old-growth forests from logging, thanks to the Regional Forests Agreement of 1997. Yet it also exports more woodchips- more than five million tonnes a year-than all the other states combined, and is the only state that still clear-fells rainforest.

Resolutely pro-logging all his life

Like many Tasmanians, Lennon has been resolutely pro-logging all his life. This is a state where protecting worker’s jobs is the shared mantra of Labor and Liberal alike, as Mark Latham discovered to his great cost during last years’ federal election, when he flew to Hobart to announce he would end the clear-felling of old-growth forests if elected prime minister. A furious Lennon publicly repudiated his leader’s policy, and John Howard swept in to announce he would let the logging continue, earning a backslapping ovation from a crowd of unionised workers. In the wash-up, Howard stole two Tasmanian seats from Labor and romped home.

Latham’s defeat doesn’t seem to have caused Lennon much chagrin- he and the Howard Government are now negotiating a revised forests policy which will introduce only modest changes. “ We seem to get on better with the Liberals than we do with Labor at the moment,” he remarks casually after we’ve landed.

Lennon makes no bones about being a reluctant premier. Until 12 months ago, he was happy playing a loyal deputy to Jim Bacon, the moustachioed charmer who had transformed himself from Maoist building union official to populist pro-business Labor premier. Bacon was voted in during the state’s terrible late 1990s slump, and rallied the populace with feelgood projects such as new Bass Strait ferries and Tasmania Together forums, just as mainlanders began heading south to avoid spiralling property prices and fears of terrorism. Seven years later, unemployment in Tasmania is at a two-decade low and the population is rising rather than falling. More symbolically, the state’s redneck population- which reached its nadir in 1995 when people marched to keep homosexuality illegal- has been reversed by highly progressive same-sex and Aboriginal land rights policies.

“F….’n useless”

Bacon was fortunate to have had not just a fearsome deputy in Lennon, but a clever treasurer in David Crean. They were a formidable troika until last year, when Crean quit because of kidney disease and Bacon announced he had inoperable lung cancer. By mid-2004 Lennon was delivering a eulogy at Bacon’s funeral and facing the difficult task of carrying on alone, as both treasurer and premier.

“It’s been a character-building year,” he notes phlegmatically.

Bacon’s death inspired Lennon to give up smoking, but it soon became clear he wasn’t about to develop a charm offensive. When Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan published a critique of the Bacon years in The Age last July, Lennon went ballistic. “Richard Flanagan and his fiction,” he announced during a door-step interview, “is not welcome in the new Tasmania.” Admittedly, Flanagan may have provoked the florid-faced Lennon by referring to him previously as “the burst sav of the union movement”, But the novelist’s principal offence was his vehement opposition to logging of old-growth forests, and his argument that Bacon had sold Tasmania out to corporate interests like Gunns timber company, a generous donor to the state Labor Party.

The logging debate has big-stakes ramifications for Lennon’s government, not least because of the money the state earns from its forests, but because of the potential damage to tourism caused by bad publicity in the international media. Horror stories about devastated forests, many featuring Flanagan’s views, have now appeared across the UK, Europe, and the US, and more than 60 British MPs have called for a boycott of Tasmania until old-growth logging stops. The mere mention of Flanagan’s name makes Lennon visibly sour.

“There’s a lot of propaganda and lies being told about the state of Tasmania’s forests, and Flanagan has been among those who’ve been at it,” he says. “And that’s part of the reason why we don’t tolerate much of him any more…I mean, who is Richard Flanagan?”

Well, he’s Tasmania’s most famous writer.

“That’s exactly what he is- he’s a fictional writer and that’s what he should stick to.”

The enmity between Lennon and Flanagan symbolises a long-running debate in Tasmania, between those who champion resource industries like forestry and those who want a Green future built on tourism and sustainability. Under Lennon, the debate has become more polarised with every passing month. To him, opponents of logging are “doctors’ wives in Toorak and Double Bay, sitting around in twinsets, sipping chardonnay and playing tennis and designing peoples lives for them”. The award-winning Tasmanian Times website? “F…in’ useless.” Greens leader Bob Brown? “Some political junkie waiting to get elected again.”

Turbulent recent history

Last year, after Lennon became premier, Bob Brown sent him a letter suggesting they meet. “ I’m still awaiting a response,” Brown says.

On a balmy summer morning, Lennon arrives at Hobart’s Government House, a sandstone neo-Gothic mansion overlooking the Derwent River, for the swearing-in of the new governor, former chief justice William Cox. Gathered in the grand ballroom is a crowd of dignitaries who embody much of Tasmania’s turbulent recent history: a few rows back is Doug Lowe, the former Labor premier who opposed the damming of the Franklin River in 1980, triggering his own political demise and helping cement the rise of the Greens; across from him is Peg Putt, the Tasmanian Greens leader who joined the party just as logging was replacing dams as the state’s biggest political issue; nearby is Michael Field, the former Labor premier who vainly tried to form an alliance with the Greens in the early 1990s.

Also here is Tony Rundle, the Liberal premier who tried to end the forests debate by signing a Regional Forests Agreement with the Howard Government in 1997. As if to demonstrate how quixotic Rundle’s plan was, only the previous day the timber company Gunns had sued Peg Putt and 19 other conservationists for millions of dollars in compensation, alleging their anti-logging activities were jeopardising its business.

The Government House function is not without its symbolism for Lennon, either, because 50 years ago his parents lived in the staff quarters here, when his father, Charles, was one of the resident gardeners. That was before the Lennons moved to a house in Mount Stuart, in Hobart’s northern suburbs, to accommodate their growing brood of seven kids. It’s a rough-and-ready background that Lennon often harks back to, by way of establishing his working-class credentials. Unlike the left-wing intellectuals he despises, Lennon lasted only a year at university before getting a storeman’s job.

Although he rose through the ranks of the Storeman and Packers’ Union, Lennon was barred from the Labor Party for many years because of his early support for Brian Harradine, the local Hobart Union leader who was expelled from the ALP because of his alleged links with the anti-communist National Civic Council. With Harradine’s patronage, Lennon became secretary of the Tasmanian Trades and Labor Council in 1984. He recalls those years as a great training ground for public speaking and tactics; others remember it as a lamentably thuggish world in which right and left unions fought for control of Trades Hall, often literally.

“Paul Lennon has actually boasted- and I have heard this with my own ears- that he would climb in the back of the Trades and Labor Council and start a fight up the back,” recalls Austra Maddox, a former union official who became president of the council. “Paul likes a drink and gets a bit expansive after a drink or three. He’s told that story not once but a number of times.”

Lennon still retains vestiges of his old Catholic right belief- when an abortion bill came before state parliament a few years ago, Peg Putt recalls seeing him huddled in discussion with Senator Brian Harradine. But as Trades Hall Secretary, he showed a pragmatic side by allowing left-wing unions to join and by forging a friendship with future premier Jim Bacon, a leftie from the Builders’ Labourers Federation. Some of Lennon’s old foes from the left, including ex-unionist Mike Grey and former senator John Devereux now count him as a mate.

“I’ve never seen a selfish bone in his body,” says Grey, who once opposed Lennon’s ALP membership but years later invited him to be best man at his wedding. “He was a doer and a worker. He’d stand out there in the blithering bloody cold and snow helping workers, whereas some unionists would be gone by 4 o’clock.”

For nearly two decades Lennon and his family-wife Margaret and daughters Danielle and Nicki, now in their early 20s- lived in unprepossessing Glenorchy. More recently he’s bought a stone farmhouse outside Hobart which he and his wife are renovating, but his personal style has never really changed.

For those on the progressive left side of Tasmanian politics, however, Lennon’s unreconstructed nature is a polarising force. “He’s extremely belligerent and he really is a crash-through or crash politician,” says Green leader Peg Putt. “Obviously he’s got that headkicker reputation, and even when he’s being civil, there’s an edgy undertone.”

Lennon says he cannot recall the incident

Putt first encountered Lennon in the late 1980s, when she was trying to stop a woodchipping mill being built in her Huon Valley community. Lennon strongly supported the mill and ran in the 1989 state election vowing to get it approved, encountering a strong campaign against him from the Greens. When the smoke cleared, Lennon had failed to muster enough votes and the Greens had won a historic five seats in the Tasmanian parliament, giving them the balance of power. It was shortly after this that Alistair Graham, Peg Putt’s partner, had his close-up encounter with Lennon during a meeting of the Forests and Forest Industry Council in Hobart. (For his part, Lennon says he cannot recall the incident.)

These were dramatic years in Tasmanian politics-in June 1990, the state’s most prominent businessman, Edmund Rouse, was jailed for offering a Labor MP $110,000 to cross the floor of parliament and destabilise the Labor/Green alliance. But for Lennon it was a lucky year- Labor stalwart Ken Wriedt retired, and his vacant seat was awarded to Lennon under Tasmania’s arcane voting system. Within a few years, his old mate Jim Bacon had become leader of the party and led Labor to a victory at the 1998 poll.

Bacon and Lennon became the quintessential good-cop/bad-cop. Despite Bacon’s prickly egotism- his office dartboard featured the face of Ian Mc Causland, editor of the Hobart Mercury- he had a soft spot for the arts and a smooth manner. Lennon got the hard yakka- dealing with the forests issue, negotiating a gas pipeline deal with Duke Energy, establishing new ferry services to the mainland, taking on the knockers in parliament. “He’s not popular with people because he looks like an unmade bed,” says Bob Cheek, Tasmanian Liberal leader from 2000 to 2001. “ He’s got high blood pressure, a florid face, looks like he could drop dead any minute, tie half hanging off…sort of like Les Patterson, really. But people do underestimate his intellect. He was by far Labor’s best parliamentary performer and hardest worker in my time in parliament.”

As forestry minister, Lennon was finally able to pursue the pro-industry policies he had long advocated, a particularly happy development for the timber company Gunns. Since Labor came to power, Gunns has taken over 85% of Tasmania’s timber industry, experienced a massive increase in share price and become a billion-dollar company. How much toll this has taken on the state’s forests is a matter of fierce dispute. Lennon argues that many mainland Australians who wring their hands about Tasmania’s forests have little actual knowledge of the state.

“ We’ve been through a 20-year debate here on our forests, “ he says. “ 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. We have a million hectares of old-growth forest protected in Tasmania, which is more than the states of West Australia, South Australia and Victoria combined- combined- and yet we’ve still got people complaining…The rhetorical question we ask is: why do people in Victoria and NSW tolerate the clear-felling of their own forests and demand that all the forests in Tasmania be protected? You know what the answer is? Protecting our forests doesn’t affect their lifestyle; protecting their own does.”

Discussing these issues with Lennon is difficult, however, because of his short fuse. About half an hour into our interview at his home outside Hobart, he gets visibly irritated at another question on the topic of trees. “ What’s this- more of the same, is it?” he says with a sniff. “ You’ve come to Tasmania just to rubbish us again?” Soon we’re into his favourite rant about mainland journalists from the left-wing broadsheets peddling Greens propaganda. He’s particularly aggrieved at a Four Corners episode last year, which won a Eureka prize for science journalism but was later criticised as biased and inaccurate by the ABC’s internal review panel. “ And you want us to take you seriously,“ he snorts. “You’re joking. There comes a time when you just get sick of it.”

If there’s one thing that really pushes Lennon’s buttons, however, it’s the suggestion that there is anything improper about the government’s relationship with big companies like Gunns. The Edmund Rouse scandal casts a large shadow in Tasmania, because Rouse was the chairman of Gunns at the time he offered his $110,000 bribe to destroy the Labor/Green accord. Evidence in the subsequent Royal Commission showed that his main motivation was protecting his $6 million timber investments. Bizarrely, however, Lennon now seems to deny all of this.

Corruption where?

Aren’t Tasmanians, I ask, entitled to be wary, given that there’s a history of corruption involving politicians and the forestry issue?

“ Corruption where? Lennon shoots back.

Well, you had a Royal Commission here 10 or 12 years ago….

“ What’s that got to do with forestry?” he challenges. Well, Edmund Rouse was the chairman of Gunns.

“ Chairman of Gunns?” Lennon’s eyes narrow. “ Are you sure?”
Erm, that was my understanding.

“ Aw, give us a break, mate.” He throws up his hands. “ I think we’ve just about had enough, haven’t we? Give us a break!”

Things go downhill from here, with Lennon threatening to call off the interview unless we switch topics, and offering a few more diatribes about the left-wing intelligentsia. By the time I leave, the atmosphere chez Lennon has turned decidedly overcast. The premier is out in the garden, tending to his flowers, but looking thunderous.

Union head-kickers have a poor track record as Labor premiers, and opinion polls suggest Labor’s popularity has slipped 8% since Lennon became premier. Ironically, this working-class boy may well face his next state election battling his image as a millionaire’s friend. Last December, Lennon’s critics got some more ammunition when the National Competition Council criticised the 20-year poker-machine monopoly Labor awarded to Federal Hotels in 2003. And Lennon’s chumminess with Gunns’ senior management may prove a liability now that Gunns has sooled its high-priced lawyers onto a bunch of hirsute greenies.

“ I think the frustration among Tasmanians is growing and I think the cork will pop, “ predicts Greens leader Bob Brown. “ And I don’t think Paul Lennon understands that. He’s an isolated character who doesn’t relate well to the average Tasmanian. He relates much better to the big-business coterie and I think that will be his downfall.”

Yet the Tasmanian Liberals are moribund, and Mark Latham’s disastrous save-the-forests policy is such a recent memory that Lennon may well have gained the upper hand in that debate. As for being popular, that’s never been a priority for Big Red.

“ I always said Jim Bacon was the mouth, David Crean was the brains and Paul Lennon was the foot for kicking people around,” says Bob Cheek. “Now all they’ve got left is the foot.”

(Reproduced from The Age Good Weekend Magazine of 12 March 2005)