If Tastogether had succeeded decisions on many key issues would be straightforward. For example, there would be no question about the need to uphold a moratorium on GMO farming, the number of poker machines in Tasmania would be declining not increasing, and the inappropriateness of canal developments for our coast line would be immediately evident. Whatever credibility the process might have had was diminished more recently when the community benchmarks for logging old growth forests were re-written by the Tasmania Together board to suit new government policy.
TASMANIA Together was a good idea. Any leadership that begins by seeking to understand the aspirations of their people is off to a good start.
But 5 years down the track the Tastogether experiment has not come close to achieving what some of us had imagined it could. Many are already proposing that it is so ineffectual that we should bury it once and for all. That is probably exactly what the political parties would prefer. Opportunities to make all powerful decisions without checking against the interests or benchmarks set by their own people.
Tasmania Together was a brave project. The one question that people most often ask me as a former member of the Community Leaders Group is “What was Jim Bacon thinking when he started it”? It is a question many of us have asked ourselves as we subsequently watched a big bold dream turn into a pile of mush.
The general feeling is, that, like some of us, Jim was starry eyed, and brimming with the sort of idealistic energy that new positions of leadership bring. It wasn’t long however before the aparatchiks reminded him of the ‘reality’ of politics and hosed him clean of this idealism. As consultations revealed that the future aspirations of Tasmanians were centred around a clean and green environment, Tastogether began to feel like a crown of thorns that Jim was going to have to suffer throughout his premiership.
Any potential of Tasmania Together threatening the desired future direction of the political parties was averted when it came time to construct the vision and goals. The rich content from the consultations was reduced to an exercise of cutting and pasting key words. The Community Leaders Group, keen to develop something that all political parties would approve of, effectively developed a vision that stood for nothing and everything.
Give it the guts to make it real
Tasmania Together failed to articulate an identity that defines who we are, what we stand for and how we are going to move forward. There are many positive benchmarks that guide the micro details of Tasmanian life but overall this project does not capture a big picture of what will make this island distinctive by the year 2020. As a consequence it has failed to capture the imaginations and ownership of the people. It has failed in guiding policy.
If Tastogether had succeeded decisions on many key issues would be straightforward. For example, there would be no question about the need to uphold a moratorium on GMO farming, the number of poker machines in Tasmania would be declining not increasing, and the inappropriateness of canal developments for our coast line would be immediately evident. Whatever credibility the process might have had was diminished more recently when the community benchmarks for logging old growth forests were re-written by the Tasmania Together board to suit new government policy.
Despite these significant failings Tasmania Together still stands as the only hope we, the public, have in making our voice heard. The five year review has begun and the bus is doing the rounds to all the communities on the island.
I encourage Tasmanians to jam the bus and the website with comments about what this place means to them and the kind of place they want it to be for the future. Demand that this project start working as it should. Become a part of creating that culture of participative democracy that Tasmania Together offered. We want a strong social, environmental and economic plan that leaves us in no doubt about the sort of place we are going to grow into.
Don’t give the political parties the very excuse they want to pretend this never happened. A consultation process of this magnitude is unlikely to happen again in our lifetime, it is a potentially powerful body of information. Give it the guts to make it real in a way that future governments can’t ignore or fudge it.
Anna Pafitis is a former member of the Tasmania Together Community Leaders Group.
Geoffrey Hills
October 16, 2005 at 03:18
Refreshing political innocence, Anna.
The strangest thing about Tasmania Together was the number of people proposing Honours and Masters topics on it at the University of Tasmania, when it should have been obvious to anyone with an ounce of political nous that the whole thing was a faddish window-dressing exercise that would be quickly subordinated to the legislative programme of an elected government.
But no, TasTogether was destined to reshape democracy itself, a sort of Dryzekian discursive democracy utopia (cf. Dryzek http://polsc.anu.edu.au/dirs.php)
It was this kind of thinking – about the potential for the project to transcend politics altogether – that was typical of this sort of vision: (Pafitis) “Tasmania Together still stands as the only hope we, the public, have in making our voice heard.”
What about elections? Lobbying? Writing letters to the paper? TasTogether is far from being the only avenue for the public to make its voice heard. All the usual avenues for participation are still there, and they always will be; not even TasTogether can change that.
And then, there was the problem of bias in your self-selecting sample of public opinion. How democratic is that? You assume that the “clean, green vision” that TasTogether’s town hall consultations came up with is democratically reflective of the wishes of Tasmanians, yet those Tasmanians still overwhelmingly re-elected the Bacon/Lennon government in 2001 and will likely do so again next year. Could it be that a vast number of ordinary Tasmanians (I hesitate to call them the forgotten people) simply wouldn’t have been interested to go within 5 miles of a TasTogether meeting and that, perhaps, those people had rather different views?
It was only ever going to be a lowest-common-denominator process and as a result, most of the benchmarks are banal: Guess what, Tasmanians would like to live in safe, clean, affluent communities! What the eff were they going to say: we’d like to live in crime-ridden squalor, choking on air pollution?
And how democratic is it to outline a grand, 20-year vision anyway? Surely, democratic politics is about flexibility in responding to the vicissitudes of social and economic fortune.
So, I conclude by returning to Benchmark 4.2.1 – the proportion of postgraduate research students coming to Tasmania from interstate and overseas. The 2005 report sadly tells us that this figure is “showing consistent movement away from the targets”. Well, you could knock me over with a feather. Perhaps, it’s related to the University of Tasmania persisting in promotion of an insular research focus – supporting research projects mostly on various aspects of Tasmania itself – that prospective postgrads outside Tasmania couldn’t care less about.
Ah yes, insularity. TasTogether might come and go, but some things about Tasmania always remain the same.
Debox
October 16, 2005 at 06:16
Maybe Tasmanuia Together IS actually the plan for a parallel government where there is room for only one. If the musty old extant governmental continuum isn’t following TT principles, why not. It’s because it’s just that, musty. The fresh newness of TT can only be brought about, probably not by coup, but by continual air freshening and weeding.
The issue with this is the same as it has always been; it’s an uphill battle, becomes a war, doen’t pay wages and drives the bulk of ideal underground. TT is a bit of air freshener. There’s been some rub off.
The quandary is coming to a head slowly but surely, as money rules more and more.
Tasmanian kids aren’t the luckiest in the world. The kids in the post card i saw the other day are. They were beaming brighter than day itself, in wildflowers and grass and holding a young antelope with its feet off the ground. Such abundant health and joy is sat upon by the musty head that is growingly multinational and horribly singley corporate.
Choo choo. The train is coming.
Mont
Justa Bloke
October 16, 2005 at 15:12
Was anybody ever stupid enough to believe that Tasmania Together was intended to have any effect?
It was entirely predictable that if benchmarks got in the way of profits they would be changed or abandoned.
What were the benchmarks on sex industry legislation? What did TT have to say about the state components of so-called anti-terrorism laws?
Did we ever, through TT, say anything about keeping the railways without massive government subsidy as a response to blackmailing by private enterprise? About de facto (rather than de jure) phasing out of atrazine in our streams?
Kevin Bonham
October 17, 2005 at 15:38
I have been a TT-sceptic since probably the day the farce began, and in 2001 asked whether it was turning Tasmanians into “guinea pigs in a government-structure lab class for trendy academics hooked on too much Habermas”.
I totally agree with Geoffrey Hills’ comments above, and find Anna Pafitis’ attempt to reinvent the Bacon legacy as one of some kind of naive sub-student-politics idealism rather more amusing than the average Sunday Tasmanian Joke of the Week segment.
At least the continual carping from the idealistic left about this project’s “failure” provides reassuring evidence that it has merely been a total waste of time and money. Had the same people hailed it as a success it would doubtless be something much dafter.
Obviously consultations did not reveal anything about the aspirations of the vast majority of Tasmanians, for the simple reason that the vast majority were not interested in the project and had nothing to do with it.
By nonetheless including a benchmark on old-growth logging in spite of the lack of anything near consensus in either the community or its own ranks on the issue, the original Community Leaders Group destroyed any small credibility the process might have ever developed and condemned it to henceforth be selectively used and ignored by politicians at their whim.
Critics like Pafitis continue with the idea that TT can be used to impose a certain view of the government of the day based on the feedback of people sharing this view.
One of the few interesting documents produced in the largely soporific history of this travelling bureaucratic circus was the review of the process written by consultant Mike Salvaris. Although also weighed down by the silly social theory referred to by Hills above, Salvaris’ report made telling points against the kind of use of TT envisaged by Pafitis.
In Salvaris’ opinion, TT could only succeed as a new form of democracy if it encouraged citizens to negotiate new understandings through exposure to each others’ views and experience. Salvaris argued that “to use participation simply to register ill-informed views or put ticks in pre-defined boxes, actually harms the democratic process” yet too many in the Left just want TT to be a place where people put a big tick in the box marked “stop old-growth logging”, without furthering their understanding of the issue in the process.