Bill Heffernan and the truth

I WOULD like to bring to your readers’ attention quotes from Senator Bill Heffernan during a very recent Department of Environment and Heritage Senate Estimates hearing on 1-11-05 regarding the proposed Tamar Valley pulp mill.

Most of his questions were evaded by members of the Department, but his questions contain vital facts that all Tasmanians must be made aware of.

“When a pulp mill was given support in 2004 in Tasmania, was that based on a commitment that the pulp mill would be chlorine free and plantation based? … Well, I’ve got to say Mr Gunn sat in my office and told me that it would be plantation.’

“What is proposed now, as opposed to what was proposed? Are you familiar with the difference? There is a hell of a difference … John Gay said that they were going to use 2.6 or 2.8 million tonnes of plantation product through this mill … he gave an undertaking that this plant would use 2.6 or 2.8 — or whatever it was — million tonnes of plantation timber and that would come off the sum of the five million tonnes that is currently planned to go into the chip market.”

“That is all changed — you can colour it up as much as you like — and the bulk of this is now going to be made of [native — much of it old growth] forest.”

“Does the Department support — and these are questions that need to be answered — the five million tonnes for pulp mill that is neither chlorine free nor plantation based?”

“My problem with that is poor old Mother Earth down there in Tassie. With the amount of clear felling that is going on, it is just not fair. So I [initially] thought this was a good idea because it is taking, shall I say, a raw product and value adding — taking some of the pressure off the need for further clear-felling. Clear-felling in Tassie was always about getting the land to put the plantation on, rather than getting the yield of the [native] forest.

His points are pungent and simple. We have been lied to. Gunns and the Tasmanian government plan to feed a non-chlorine free mill with massive amounts of our remaining native forest. Once this has occurred of course it may eventually become a plantation based industry — because there will be no accessible native forest left.

The TCCI’s DVD shortly to be distributed to thousands of Tasmanian and all other information force fed to Tasmanians by our government, city councils and Gunns do not make these horrific facts clear.

And, the assessment process by the RPDC will not consider the issue of the impact on the mill on our native forests.

As Tasmanians we cannot let this current mill proposal come to fruition.