YOU may have heard the great new that Recherche Bay will be protected from logging. After a long struggle, countless talks and books sales, it is a great win for the environment and for our history.
What a treat to have a win like that!
Yet it is fascinating to see how the story has been written up.
The last minute scramble from the Lennon Government to join the campaign and announce it as a positive win, when all along they had said the area could be logged without harming it. Indeed, they had continually ridiculed the Greens — and Bob Brown in particular — in his efforts to save it.
The Lennon PR machine was in overdrive to spin the story as a loss for the Greens and an embarrassment for Bob Brown because he wasn’t there at Lennon’s press conference. I guess that’s not surprising, but what was interesting was how gullible some journalists were — including the supposedly politically savvy Crikey — swallowing the Lennon PR flunky’s lines. Gulp. Gulp. They were like fish desperate to be on the Government take.
How anyone can believe that forcing the Government to contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to saving an area the Greens have campaigned for is ‘a political loss for the Greens’ is beyond me.
Is that all that counts?
Politics today seems to be more about who does the opening, who cuts the ribbon than achieving change. Is that all that counts? But it does make me think about the whole other issue of how much an individual can achieve if they are prepared not to take credit for it. But that is a topic for another day.
Turning an area of less than 200 hectares of remote Tasmania from obscurity into a national icon is no mean feat — and it was Bob Brown and a hell of a lot of others who helped achieve this despite the efforts of the Tasmanian Government and the logging company Gunns Ltd desperate attempts to resist .
And while we are apportioning credit I’d like to give a fair share of it to Byron Bay. I am currently in Northern NSW and recollecting on a visit earlier this year when Bob and I traveled up the North Coast promoting the Recherche Bay issue and selling Bob’s little book about Recherche Bay.
The biggest audience was at Byron Bay where a packed group of 300 plus flocked to hear Bob tell his great story about this magical piece of Tasmania, where the French visited for their peaceful encounters with the Aboriginal people 200 years ago.
And it was someone in the enthused audience who suggested to Bob that we should just raise the money and buy it. And while Bob had thought of that before, it was that that got him going on that track with new zeal. Ringing friends and colleagues across the country until finally he — somewhat reluctantly — rang Dick Smith.
The rest, as they say, is history.
The credit wars … What Barns wrote:
THE MERCURY
Credit to whom it’s due
By Greg Barns
13 February 2006Just as it took one of the most notorious red baiters of the Cold War to forge a détente with China, so it took a perceived anti-green to forge a deal to save Recherché Bay from logging.
And just as others, such as the foreign policy establishment of the US State Department like to rewrite history to take away from Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to China, so Bob Brown will seek to claim credit for the Recherché Bay deal. The reality is that neither moment in history would have happened without the leader’s intervention.
To extend the Nixon-Lennon comparison a little further, history records that it was Nixon, a Republican, who poured millions into pollution control and conservation through the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Air Act. And Paul Lennon, the forestry industry’s champion has locked away from that industry hectare after hectare of Tasmania’s wilderness.
Nonsense
Some in the media last week suggested that Paul Lennon had little to do with what was a Brown-Dick Smith deal. That the Premier’s involvement, such as it was, was icing on the cake.
This is nonsense.
Originally Dick Smith agreed to provide a donation of $100,000 and a $1.9 million loan to cover the purchase cost of $2 million.
It was agreed that if the $1.9 million could not be raised the land at Recherche Bay would be sold to repay the loan money.
This was not acceptable to the owners of the land, the Vernon brothers, as they could see that if the money could not be raised, the land might be sold and developed, rather than preserved.
It was after discussions between Mr. Smith and Mr. Lennon that Mr. Smith agreed to guarantee the full $2 million.
Those discussions commenced on Tuesday 31 January. Smith, unexpectedly, rang Mr. Lennon’s office seeking the Premier’s assistance in putting the Recherché Bay deal together. One the major sticking points was that the Vernon brothers weren’t happy with the deal as put together by Smith and Brown.
After all, as noted earlier, this was a deal dependent on successful fund raising – always a risky proposition. If the funds weren’t secured the Vernons would see their land sold.
After Smith’s call, Mr Lennon’s office held discussions with the relevant parties – the Tasmanian Land Conservancy, the Vernon’s and Smith. As a result, Smith lifted his offer from $100,000 plus the fund raising to offer to underwrite the full $2 million.
Weren’t happy
Smith asked the Tasmanian Government to pay the stamp duty for the TLC. Lennon’s office agreed.
Meanwhile, the Vernons weren’t happy with the $2 million. They wanted $2.21 million. So the Tasmanian government chipped in the $210,000 and provided $84,000 for the TLC.
The facts speak for themselves. Without the Premier’s intervention and reworking the deal, Recherché Bay would not have been saved from logging. The Vernons in particular, wanted Mr. Lennon’s support and help- they trusted him. Sure, Bob Brown had a role to play in getting the parties together, but the deal belongs to the Lennon government.
There are a couple of observations that can be drawn from the Recherché Bay saga.
If I was a local Green I would be furious with Senator Brown. Where was Tasmanian Greens leader Peg Putt in all this? Nowhere to be seen. Brown seemed to want the glory for himself, despite Putt’s work on the issue in the past, including a trip to France. Given it’s an election year, why wasn’t Brown standing shoulder to shoulder with Putt?
Paul Lennon, the supposed redneck and friend of the big end of town, has delivered for the conservationists yet again. Lennon, in the agreement he announced with Prime Minister Howard last year, announced a timetable for the end of clear felling old growth forest, the end of the use of the poison 1080 and preservation of icon forest areas like the Tarkine and the Styx.
Heckler
In the same way that the anti-communist heckler, Richard Nixon opened relations with China and struck arms limitation treaties with the Soviet Union.
And while Recherché Bay was being stitched up, the Tasmanian Greens began their shift to the political middle with a back flip on selling Sprit of Tasmania 111 and toughening up on illicit drugs. This columnist has predicted on a number of occasions that the Tasmanian Greens would begin to fragment into fundamentalist hardliners and pragmatists. It is now happening.
The ambitious Greens MP Nick McKim was unashamed last week in telling the media that the Greens were chasing votes in back flipping on drugs.
How many more back flips will there be before the state election?
The Tasmanian Greens sneeringly refer to the ALP and the Liberals as the ‘laborials’ to emphasise the supposed policy sameness of those parties. Perhaps it should now be the LAGREENBORIALS.
