IF IT proves nothing else, the Auditor-General’s report on the Forestry Tasmania land swap demonstrates that the thickest whitewash can never cover the size and multitude of holes in the government’s explanation of the affair.

The report leaves us to swallow that Forestry Tasmania has purchased plantation assets worth over $200,000,000 with land which cannot be located or described. Moreover, we are asked to accept that this phantom land was FT’s private property despite being purchased with public money by a government institution, the Forestry Commission, and classified as Crown land.

Underpinning the above are further contortions. One is the Au-G’s unique definition of “land vesting” which adds the notion that vesting confers an “absolute right to title and ownership”. Nonsense: assets are often vested in managers or trustees.

The stated rationale for giving FT freehold, that private investors require it, is another furphy belied by every other situation where there is private investment on public land. Most of the trees on the plantation land deeded to FT were in fact owned by private interests. The swap’s plantation valuation of around $400 per ha is an extreme bargain compared to the industry’s own minimum charge of over $3000 simply for the seedlings on a hectare.

Mr Blake’s big problem is that no plausible explanation of the affair was probably ever foreseen as necessary. The alienation of nearly 1000 km2 of public land, not even hinted at by the Deed of Arrangement, only became known through a leak from an alarmed Land Services employee in 2000. Lacking that, we would likely know nothing about the whole affair . The employee was not given any argument for the legality of withholding the land from the Valuation Roll. He was reportedly just told to keep his mouth shut.

The Au-G also wishes us to believe that the 121,409 ha which disappeared from the State Forest in FT’s 2000-01 annual report is now reserves under the management of Parks & Wildlife. If so, neither P&W or DPIWE seem aware of this, as my FOI on the issue was handballed to the black hole of FT.

The Au-G’s report does dramatise how desperately this state needs a judicial enquiry into the increasingly blatant control of the Tasmanian Government by the woodchip industry on an even greater scale, namely regarding the pulp mill.

Earlier,
No satisfactory explanation (2)