Detoxing the public sphere

Kevin Bonham

If anything is toxic in the Tasmanian public sphere, it is the mythmaking and vilification in which differences in opinion and political method are taken by some on both sides to justify comparing opponents to some of the vilest regimes that ever walked the earth. Sure, the Tasmanian polity is rough around the edges, and this condition is created in part by its small, easily monopolised, industrial market, a perception of economic vulnerability, and the ease with which conflicts of interest arise in any small population. However, it is also created by a well-established Tasmanian predilection for leaders who aim to get on with the job even at the expense of sporadic argy-bargy and cutting the odd procedural corner. That predilection can at times create its problems, but likening them to those of fascism will do nothing for the accurate diagnosis or avoidance of them, and will probably make any but the already converted reader switch off to any criticisms of the Lennon regime that actually have any merit.

I normally find a certain toxin, in even quite modest quantities, makes me slightly more receptive to the efforts of those of a somewhat greener bent in the stimulating (if in the most recent case sadly bereft of Coopers Sparkling) atmosphere of TT gatherings upstairs at the Hope and Anchor.

However in this case as I listened to Pete Hay’s raving nonsense about “death squads” and so on (http://oldtt.pixelkey.biz/index.php/weblog/comments/pete/) I wondered if I was trapped in a shrill caricature of a Doctor Who episode, in which at any moment a mob of greenie-hating Daleks marked with Gunns and ALP insignias would burst into the room, crying out “exterminate!” as their blue-green flashes eliminated all who had ever attended a forest protest. It isn’t quite so far-fetched as it sounds. Those who’ve watched the last few years of said series would know the little bastards have finally worked out how to climb stairs.

Yes, here we had a thinker whose understanding of the many different hues of greenish political thought is unparalleled in this state if not this country, laying into the government of the day with all the unsubtlety of a frothy extremist political-debating neophyte who had never received the most basic education on the vital matter of Godwin’s Law. After all, if being part of the C of A was all that was holding Tasmania back from a slide into fascist-style repression, then Tasmania would surely move as far in that direction as being part of said Commonwealth permitted. Yet it has not done so (even though John Howard would surely turn a blind eye if it did). Far more extreme restraints upon democratic nicety were got away with by Queensland under Joh.

It is scarcely worth pointing out the obvious: that not only is there no one classic definition of fascism, but that whether the state identifies or doesn’t with specific companies ranks way below authoritarianism, ultranationalism, militarism and antimodernism as indicators of any fascist tendency. And to suggest that fascist regimes “see their prime allegiance as owed to powerful arms of capital” would normally be a sub-pop-marxist beginner’s blunder in political philosophy that I’m sure would have gone down really well among Jewish business people whose envied success in the market was one of the driving forces behind a racist adaptation of fascism that achieved some small notoriety in some obscure place called Germany. Irrelevant surely; I wouldn’t suggest such European esoterica distract Pete from reformulating the meaning of “fascism” for an audience in the centre of the universe, Tasmania, in the slightest.

If anything is toxic in the Tasmanian public sphere, it is the mythmaking and vilification in which differences in opinion and political method are taken by some on both sides to justify comparing opponents to some of the vilest regimes that ever walked the earth. Sure, the Tasmanian polity is rough around the edges, and this condition is created in part by its small, easily monopolised, industrial market, a perception of economic vulnerability, and the ease with which conflicts of interest arise in any small population. However, it is also created by a well-established Tasmanian predilection for leaders who aim to get on with the job even at the expense of sporadic argy-bargy and cutting the odd procedural corner. That predilection can at times create its problems, but likening them to those of fascism will do nothing for the accurate diagnosis or avoidance of them, and will probably make any but the already converted reader switch off to any criticisms of the Lennon regime that actually have any merit.

Ill-advised, ham-fisted display

Which is not to say that all of Hay’s do, by a long stretch. For instance, consider the Gunns 20 lawsuit (Charges dropped on MPs) as presumably the leading unstated example of the culture of silencing Pete refers to. This ill-advised, ham-fisted display of frustration from the chairman of a company with its share price seemingly in freefall was vented by a private company not in Tasmania but in the state of Victoria. It was done so under company defamation laws which have since been reformed in a manner that would see such a suit, if brought now, thrown out of court immediately in any jurisdiction in the land. Tasmania chose to join in the national push for defamation reform under which companies with more than a certain number of employees can no longer sue. If it was so hell-bent on protecting Gunns from dissent, it would clearly not have done so.

Indeed, the whole idea that the forest industry has such a free hand in this state is total bunkum to anyone who has worked in it and knows to what a great extent its operations are now limited by law. To give a personal example of this, I was recently expecting to survey a coupe in order to determine whether a (very marginally) threatened species existed in it so that that could be taken into account for management purposes if present. It turned out that I was not even allowed to do this survey at this time because an eagle-nest exclusion zone applied to this coupe. An eagle nest had been recorded in it and not yet assessed for activity, and on this account alone it was not permitted for researchers to enter a coupe on foot, just in case there were eagles there and on the off-chance that a human presence hundreds of metres away disturbed them. That is just one personal example of the extent to which the industry is now quite heavily environmentally regulated; any forester could give you dozens more.

Thankfully the second half of Hay’s speech contained a sufficient scattering of material with which I agreed for me to manage a pointedly token level of applause, since I agree that oldtt.pixelkey.biz provides an important niche for a kind of public debate that isn’t adequately fostered by the mainstream outlets, to which I have lately seldom felt inclined to contribute. I also agree that TT is “gloriously democratic” and that accusations of it being just an outlet for a given constituency are completely unfactual and come mainly from those who choose not to use it. However, the real implications of one of Hay’s statements are worth examining in detail.

Detailed and reasonable discussion

Pete says “If there is a certain political flavour to what appears there, what this really tells us is which constituencies of ideas and values are systematically discounted by, excluded from, the island’s narrowly-circumscribed public life.” In fact there are two political flavours very common on TT. One of them is an extreme of the green movement, one that is heavily given to conspiracy theory and frequently implictly (and even at times overtly) anti-science. The other is a mode of essentially centrist contrarianism that seeks to discuss environmental issues in depth and tackle the green side of the debate with detailed and reasonable discussion of evidence, rather than with the crude slogans and myths seen from the dislikes of Eric Abetz. (Oh, and with the odd spot of trolling as well, but that’s only because the standard of argument from the greens is so abysmally low as to encourage and legitimise such sport.) In asking why these two constituencies both seek the same outlet independent of the mass media, we can see what is really going on in Tasmanian public commentary.

Actually, the Bevilacquas, the Crawfords and so on form an overly green-sympathetic, repetitive, insular, backslapping orthodoxy that has come to more or less dominate the local opinion and environmental reporting content in the Mercury in particular. (I repeat a lot of things here too, but I’m not doing it for pay and I’m often doing it because fools who simply will not learn keep on peddling the same old nonsense. It is different when one parts with good money to read often much the same old guff about Tasmanian devils recycled and padded out over and over). Bevilacqua’s articles have become far more scientific, true, to the extent that they are sometimes actually interesting, but the selection of topics covered continues (whether through intention or through an insufficient range of contents) to display an obvious slant towards the idea that the environment is going down the gurgler. I don’t expect, for instance, to read features about the major positive surprises coming out of worldwide plantation biodiversity research in the Sunday Tasmanian anytime soon. I won’t be surprised if I see Pete Hay’s rant cited by Crawford; I’ll be very surprised if my reply to it gets any (at least in-context) mention. To the extent that anti-green opinion features in the Tassie mainstream media, it is usually the opinion of cardboard-cutout diehards like the Abetzes, Ackermans and John Gays of this world, those whose anti-green arguments are the most sensational and polarising rather than those who are the most credible. Expect this to just worsen as dingbats of all colours continue to lay blame over the current bushfires.

And so we see the real condition of oldtt.pixelkey.biz — its two main factions are those who have perceived the errors of the green movement but whose opinions are too subtle, too detailed, too unsensational or simply just too damned accurate to be of much interest to the beat-ups of the mainstream, and those whose movement is actually getting far more mainstream airplay than it scientifically or philosophically deserves, but whose nature is so extreme and perspective so lacking that even too much will never, for them, be enough.

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(Dr) Kevin Bonham is a freelance invertebrate research consultant and electoral and political commentator, who would like to know where the hell the cardboard Santa came from and why the dumb bugger keeps on blowing down.