Keeping the lid on

CYNICISM is a trait in journalism cultivated over a career.

I started mine with much naivety believing that nobody elected to represent us, would set out deliberately to do harm to our natural heritage for the sake of political expedience.

I ended my career, more cynical than most of my colleagues.

It was as though deception was the fundamental driving force of Party-based politicians. During the Wesley Vale pulp mill debate our Government was assuring the electorate that the mill was so modern that we could virtually sell its effluent to the world as drinking water. At a Taroona media conference with proponents of the mill the same message was being driven home.

The ABC camera crew and I approached the main man after the show and with cameras rolling asked him if he could give a personal and public guarantee that the proposed Wesley Vale mill would not contain harmful dioxins. At last I had found one man with integrity in the debate and he without hesitation spoke to the people through our camera lens.

“No,” he replied, “I cannot give that guarantee.” I asked him why he didn’t tell the media conference that and he replied, “nobody asked”.

He is probably dead today, two decades later and I daresay, if so, he would have gone to his grave knowing that his truth spared us a heritage of vomiting poisons into our ecology.

Was the ABC 7.30 report, the first to ask of dioxins in Sydney Harbour?

Has the lid been kept on this for decades because of political expedience? Would that iconic stretch of water have to have turned into green slime before our elected came clean? How many scientific reports have been made and buried?

Sydney Harbour, the Tamar River and Tassie’s North Eastern forests share the common denominators of political expedience and surreptition.

Now the NSW government acts in the immediate wake of ABC revelations.

Gullible Tasmanians were persuaded by advertising! to ensure stable government ensues.

Stable government will rip my beautiful North East forests to shreds, and further silt the little creeks that run through it and destroy the habitat of the Darlie Yarlie.

Stable government will secretly poison the waters of the Tamar and perhaps in the dead of night exhale foul breath into the air.

I simply do not trust those who get their rocks off with the symphony of chainsaws and growling log trucks, running as a line of summer pissants to the mill.

Sadly cynicism eventually becomes a chronic ailment.

Earlier: A North-East tragedy