All that is left

Ben Spinoza

It is a win-win situation for big business, engineered partially by the Greens, and aided and abetted by the Liberals. Big business must love these political junkies who think they can play in business.

IT’S funny how things work out.

Who would have thought that Kim Booth and the Greens would be working so hard to hand Gunns complete control of the Tasmanian softwood industry — but they are.

Not only that, they are helping one of Australia’s most ruthless timber businessmen (Auspine’s Adrian de Bruin) become even richer.

Ironically, by pushing hard for political intervention to overturn the commercial decision by Taswood Growers to provide Forest Enterprises Australia with a long-term pine log supply contract and instead award it back to Auspine, the Greens may well hand Gunns a monopoly of both the hardwood and softwood industries.

If Auspine is successful in getting the FEA deal overturned and restoring its control over the Taswood Growers resource, and paying below market prices for the logs, then the value of its business will shoot up enormously.

Assuming Gunns proceeds with the takeover of Auspine, then it gets control of the Tasmanian softwood industry and pays a peppercorn price for the logs and de Bruin walks away with a cool $100 million.

It is a win-win situation for big business, engineered partially by the Greens, and aided and abetted by the Liberals.

Big business must love these political junkies who think they can play in business.

In retrospect, Taswood Growers (Rayonier’s) insistence on a proper commercial deal may not only deliver a better return on the investment for its shareholders (Tasmanian people through Forestry Tasmania, and Australian postal worker superannuants through GMO Renewable Resources, but it might also have saved the state from monopoly control of the softwood forest industry.

In the process, it probably also saved hundreds of jobs — from contractors to the mills that would inevitably have been squeezed out of business.

Of course its not over yet. Auspine, the Greens and the Libs may well succeed in delivering the industry to Gunns on a platter!

And a bio, longer than the article!

As a pantheistic monist I, Ben Spinoza, believe that there is no dualism between God and the world; we need not go beyond the immediate present experience to seek a being outside of it.

I believe that God moves and lives in nature; the whole of it, the entire universe is God. Nature, or God, is its own cause and is self-sufficient. Because of this view some people believe that I am a man of appalling wickedness – much like some people view you Mr Tuffin.

You see, I believe that man, in his egotistical way, has imagined God to be like him; to be anthropomorphic in character; and, to imagine that God is created in the image of man (not the other way around) and additionally has a special interest in, and concern for man. But I believe that God does not love or hate or even care less about man. Instead I think that God/Nature is the totality of existence. It is above us and totally indifferent to our desires or aspirations. As for the notions of good and evil — or in the terms of most of your correspondents – conservationists or businessmen; loggers or protesters etc etc — they exist, but only to the extent that they fit our own personal inclinations. The things that please us we denominate as good and those with which we disagree, or which displease us, we call evil.

Because of this basic philosophy I find it difficult to agree with most of the protagonists who plague the Tasmanian Times site. It must be good to see everything so clearly as black or white when, in reality, everything is just shades of grey. Do you know a dog doesn’t see colour. It just sees threat or friend, and reacts accordingly. I would prefer to play the Devil’s Advocate (although when I use that term I use it as rhetoric rather than as a statement of belief).

Humans try to put themselves above nature but we are just part of it a very small part at that. Just as there solution of a plague of locusts or rats is eventually resolved by their own actions, so will man’s be. Can we change our environment? Can we change our ways? Are we mere animals or do we have a soul? The questions of old, Mr Tuffin, that have plagued us throughout time.

My second philosophical position is that nothing is so bad that it can’t be fixed with a good bottle of wine and a little time.

So, who am I. I’m nobody — like the rest of mankind — but feel obliged to step in now and again to try to bring a bit of humility to those who claim perfection; who set themselves up as the judges and juries of others; the smug and the self-satisfied who see themselves as self-appointed intellectuals, who think they are perfect and who think they live without taking something from the world with them.

Ask this — who among your writers does not use paper? Who does not drive a car? Which of our learned conservationists travels least because, as you either know or can find out with a simple google, a person who takes one jet ride from Australia to say, Japan, uses more energy and contributes more greenhouse gases than one ordinary working class person will contribute in a whole year — more than a native African will contribute in their whole life!

On the other hand, which businessman, bureaucrat or politician knows what is best for society? Should all our government endeavours be slaves to the pursuit of a perfect economy? What about people?

At a personal level what are we all prepared to sacrifice? Will we give up books, toilet paper, computers, warmth, coolness in summer, our wine, our women, our song? What would be left.

The answer, of course, is nature — cold, unfeeling, relentless nature.