Lennon’s State of Shame

Tony McCall

Influence peddlers in Tasmania have direct access to legislation prior to Cabinet. Indeed they draft it to their satisfaction. Can we expect they will select or endorse the consultant to ‘assess’ their project? Such is the state of public administration under the Lennon government, a state of shame.

WITH the passage of the Pulp Mill Assessment Bill 2007 through the government controlled House of Assembly, Paul Lennon has certainly followed through on one component of his 2006 State of the State pledge to ensure that ‘the community has every right to expect the highest levels of accountability, transparency, responsibility and governance from their elected representatives.’ Transparency we now have in bucket loads.

Influence peddlers in Tasmania have direct access to legislation prior to Cabinet. Indeed they draft it to their satisfaction. Can we expect they will select or endorse the consultant to ‘assess’ their project? Such is the state of public administration under the Lennon government, a state of shame.

Whilst in some quarters the self-interested cheer-leaders of ‘government getting on with the job of governing’ rejoice, those of us anxious about the implications for good governance and legitimate public administration continue to hold our meetings under the cover of darkness and in telephone boxes. Right now the mood in the north of the state is such that we might fill York Park if the meetings were open to the public.

Next week the Legislative Council will be asked to support a piece of legislation stripped bare of the principle of sustainable development that for 15 years has guided and shaped our deliberations around resource management in Tasmania. Implicit in this appalling piece of approvals legislation dressed up as an assessment process is that sustainable development — just as it was with the passage of the 2003 Meander Dam Project Act — has been replaced by the self-interest of political and fiscal expediency, largely driven by what appears to have been the proponent’s failure in relation to commercial risk management. Why does this matter?

It is clear now, following the staging of this public administration and governance pantomime, that Gunns took the view that the preparation of a $11m document of some 7,500 pages backed by the shrill endorsement of the government sponsored Pulp Mill Taskforce constituted a sufficient response to the IIS guidelines. Full stop. After all, their hired experts told them so.

What was missing in their calculation was a recognition that their weighty tome needed to be assessed around a range of stringent IIS guidelines that reflected the principles of sustainable development underpinning a range of legislative Acts. Ticking off against a series of guideline boxes, does not by itself constitute a sustainable project. In essence, the role of the RPDC was to determine how this project would comply with the following sustainable development outcomes:
a)Sustaining the potential of natural and physical resources to meet the foreseeable needs of future generations; and
b)Safeguarding the life-long supporting capacity of air, water, soil and ecosystems; and
c)Avoiding, remedying or mitigating any adverse effects of activities on the environment.

By contrast what the Legislative Council will be deliberating is a narrow (environmental emissions) component of a vast industrial enterprise where there is no legislative guarantee that social, economic and community impacts will be tested against any other evidence than that supplied by the proponent. This is an approval process, not an assessment process. It is a public administration failure that cannot be allowed to pass without amendment or extended public scrutiny. It would be rejected as an assessment project under any independent determination or analysis.

One component of the environmental emissions guidelines that might attract the attention of the independent members of the Legislative Council relates to air pollution, monitoring and compliance. The irony attached to this issue is that Gunns’ supplementary information — a far superior document to their IIS response — provided to the RPDC, sheds light on the complexity of this issue and what, on the face of it, appears to be another serious breach of accountability in relation to air pollution monitoring in the Tamar Valley.

Gunns’ supplementary information appears to suggest that one of the reasons it was unable to link the emissions of its proposed mill to the existing air shed — including existing industry activity in its modelling — was that the existing regulator or monitoring agency, DPIW, was either unwilling or unable to supply the data. Does DPIW hold the data or not? If not, why not? If DPIW does hold the data what reason can justify withholding that information when the capacity of the existing air shed to absorb another industrial pollutant would be obviously critical to an assessment of the project’s suitability to be located in the Tamar Valley airshed? Are we simply relying on industry ‘guesstimates’? Is ambient data only collected when the wind is blowing the ‘ right’ way? Why not take emissions from the point of emission? What happens to our guidelines if standards in relation to particulate measurement are changed – raised – as they will be next year? Perhaps this issue can be cleared up through the new assessment process? Who ultimately is responsible for monitoring and compliance under licence? It cannot be the proponent.

The elephant in the corner in this pantomime was to have been the Federal government. How would they respond, having been told by the Premier that they would need to assess the mill independently? Would the Federal government bring some principles of legitimate public administrative processes to the stage and close the curtains on this performance? John Howard might be Michael Ferguson’s hero but what stance will the member for Bass take on issues of administrative propriety around an assessment process for a project that is now a Federal election issue? Labor’s Bass candidate, Jodi Campbell has gone to ground and can’t manage to tell either the electorate or her party where she stands on the project.

On Thursday, Federal Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull indicated (Mercury, March 23) that the Federal government would be ‘… very happy to deal with the matter quickly but we will need a quick response from Gunns’. Presumably, to meet the proponent’s commercial imperatives. Why is everyone focusing on appeasing the proponent? Why not tell the proponent what the requirements are under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act and ask it to respond so an assessment of its claims can be made, especially in relation to effluent impact on the marine environment. Responsible government is immersed in an unfortunate case of schizophrenic governance. No Mr Turnbull, you’re the Minister, not the proponent.

If this project proceeds beyond the scrutiny of the independent members of the Legislative Council and the Federal government and is approved without reference to due processes of assessment, the pantomime in public administration will enter a new performance mode: the machinations of a gambling den called the competitive global economy. Performing with an undifferentiated commodity like pulp in the global economy could turn a pantomime into a tragedy.

Tasmanians were encouraged by the proponent and the cheerleaders in the community to embrace this project and be proud of it. Right now what we feel is collective shame. This is no longer just about a pulp mill project. Our political representatives at all levels of government need to deliberate on the governance and public administration legacy of this blatantly political exercise.

Dr Tony McCall lives in Trevallyn in the Tamar Valley. He is a senior lecturer at the University of Tasmania. He is not and never has been a member of any political party but he has advised all parties in Tasmania on issues of regional development. In a paid capacity he briefly worked for the Green Independents during the Labor Green Accord (1989-91).