Mike Bolan
Make no mistake, our parliament has voted NO to all of that. They’ve voted to leave all of that to a consultant somewhere. And they’ve voted to exclude the project in question from the laws that apply to the rest of us. They’ve voted not to represent our needs. They’ve voted to ignore us.
… Yet all of this is as nothing to Tasmania’s parliamentarians. They prefer to believe that a consultancy can somehow reach a useful decision in a few weeks when the combined resources of the RPDC needed years. They’re happy to trash all the person years of work put in by the public and industry to the RPDC, all of which can be ignored by the consultant who has only a few weeks to make a recommendation. They’re happy to forget the guidelines put down and just make them a reference point for the consultant.
TASMANIANS are now beyond the crossroads.
Our parliament has decided to put the future of Tasmanian taxpayers for the next 100 years (the typical life of a pulp mill*) up to a consultant! The needs of the population, existing industries and investments, our health, the impacts on our forests, our water resources, our property values… everything left to a private consultant, most likely sourced offshore!
Unbelievably, our parliamentarians think this is OK, with both Liberal and Labor voting for this grotesque outcome.
In June 2006 The Australian editorialised that, “The limits on spending the states loosely imposed upon themselves before they received the rivers of GST gold went out the window. Tasmania spent 32 per cent more, the ACT blew 21.4 per cent more, Queensland punted 19 per cent more, the NT went over by 15 per cent, NSW by 14.8 per cent, Victoria 13.3 per cent, WA 12.6 per cent and SA 12 per cent.” Tasmania is the top spender of our taxes.
But on what? It’s not hospitals and schools … that’s for sure.
Taxpayers are surely entitled to political representation, to having their needs considered in the planning system, to reasonable protection for their health and safety, to some reasonable security for their futures, to a living and investment environment free of foul odours and hazardous micro particulates.
Make no mistake, our parliament has voted NO to all of that. They’ve voted to leave all of that to a consultant somewhere. And they’ve voted to exclude the project in question from the laws that apply to the rest of us. They’ve voted not to represent our needs. They’ve voted to ignore us.
Tasmania has the fastest growing public service but they are not available to the public to help in determining any risks presented by Gunns ‘world scale’ proposal. It appears that the government doesn’t trust the public service with the job of evaluation, we’re paying for it but we’re not going to use it. Let’s pay extra to an external consultant.
From experts like Dr Raverty, we know there are severe risks of catastrophic leaks of stored chlorine dioxide killing everything within 15 km downwind of the mill, and with God knows what effects outside that area. We know that there will be dreadful smells (rotting seaweed, cabbage and egg) often within a cloud of fog created by steam from the mill. We know that Gunns processes are likely to produce excessive levels of highly toxic and bio accumulative poisons like dioxin which will be pumped into the sea threatening our fishing industry. We know that the mill activities will destroy enormous carbon sinks and release greenhouse gases. We know that the logging will increase by 75% and that hundreds of extra log trucks will be driving around our winding roads.
We know that if we authorise the pulp mill to take so much of our forests, that other industries could be severely impacted.
Tourism is the most obvious loser … who would come to dodge log trucks on our roads (1 every 1.1 minutes in many areas) … or sit in clouds of stinking fog sipping latte thinking about what could happen if there’s a chemical leak … or wonder what effect the particles are having on their lungs … or order fish that could be polluted with toxins like dioxin and other organo chlorines? Yet tourism is an employment rich activity, and one which capitalises on what remains of Tasmania’s ‘natural’ state. Tourism brings nearly a billion dollars a year into Tasmania, if we only lost 20% of that due to a mill that’s around $200 million per year!
Or what about agriculture? Farmers displaced by federal tax driven MIS programs … communities losing cash flow as farms are replaced by tree plantations … catchments dried up by thirsty trees, leaving little or no water for communities and farms? The mill needs another 50,000 ha of plantations. We’ve already lost much of our agricultural capacity to tree plantations, if we lose that much more we’ll lose over $300 million per year in direct and downstream agricultural production, plus thousands of jobs!
We haven’t mentioned fine food and wine production, recreation, diving and the world class restaurants in the Tamar, some of the many other activities that all stand to lose a great deal if this misplaced proposal goes ahead.
And what about our resources? Our rapidly diminishing water supplies that will be used free of charge by plantation operators, who will take more than double that used by all Tasmanian agricultural irrigation. And we’re not allowed to know any of the details of one of the largest government/corporate deals in Australia that didn’t even go to tender … the $4 billion forest supply agreement with Gunns.
And what about the subsidies? It’s been reported by CommSec that the taxpayers will absorb Gunns’ commercial risks by guaranteeing that wood supply income will be driven by rapidly declining world pulp prices, potentially forcing us to pay Gunns to take our trees. Of course, the details are being kept secret from us.
Yet all of this is as nothing to Tasmania’s parliamentarians. They prefer to believe that a consultancy can somehow reach a useful decision in a few weeks when the combined resources of the RPDC needed years. They’re happy to trash all the person years of work put in by the public and industry to the RPDC, all of which can be ignored by the consultant who has only a few weeks to make a recommendation. They’re happy to forget the guidelines put down and just make them a reference point for the consultant.
From their behaviours it is clear that our parliamentarians believe that they have no responsibilities to the taxpayer, no need to seriously consider the impacts of this proposal on our existing industries, no need to check the clearly distorted ‘economic’ case presented for the mill.
Just leave it to the private sector and vote along party lines, that’s good enough for everyone except Terry Martin, four of the northern MLCs — Sue Smith (Montgomery/Ulverstone), Kerry Finch (Rosevears/Launceston), Don Wing (Paterson/Launceston) and Norma Jamieson (Mersey/Devonport) — and the Greens.
All the people have asked is for their needs and the impacts upon them to be properly and completely evaluated before any such massive proposal is approved.
If Australia has devolved into a place where all the rights are with government and all the responsibilities are with the taxpayer, then we no longer have a democracy of any kind.
The federal government must either rectify this issue immediately or face disaster by acknowledging that they have created a totalitarian state in which the needs of taxpayers and future generations are absolutely secondary to the profits of large corporates, the people with no rights or effective representation. The federal opposition must also engage in this process and drive the government with seriousness and conviction in order to correct this monstrous outcome.
This is the state that we are in.
*A figure quoted by Dr Warwick Raverty.
