Skeletons in the cupboard …

John Hayward

VERY disappointing about the Federal Court judgment on the pulp mill hijack, but there could be a few shots still lying about on the bottom of the locker.

We should remember that Lennon’s Pulp Mill Assessment Act exempts the project from almost everything – except corruption.
It is an appropriate time to go back and see what ammo is still live. Even if the mill fizzles, we still have a government keen to hand over the state to its mates in some form, whether it be MIS rorts, POSS hijacks, or some other forms of quasi-legal banditry.

Some of the deals remain as redolent as the day they were uncovered.

In the land “swap” between Forestry Tasmania and the Crown, for instance, over 77,000 ha of State Forest (Crown land) plantation was secretly deeded to FT as private (freehold) land in 1999-2000. The deal was leaked by a Land Services employee.

Under a Deed of Arrangement , FT was supposed to surrender freehold land of equal value, which would have amounted to far more than 77,000 ha, back to the crown. FT has never had anything close to that much freehold land. Both FT and The Government offered a variety of disparate but equally implausible explanations, none of which could explain where the vast area of land across Northern Tasmania had disappeared to. Ditto for the Auditor-General’s reluctant investigation.

At this point, evidence suggests FT acquired over $200,000,000 in public property without paying for it which it can quietly dispose of at a price of its choosing, rather than at market value, as required for the sale of Crown land.

(For the background: Read more here )

Another lingeringly strange affair is that of Ex-Pulp Mill Assessment Panel chair Julian Green, who resigned in public anger at the Government’s blatantly improper interference in the process.

Despite the public rancour of his departure, Green, a staffer to former Premier (now Gunns director) Premier Robin Gray, departed in public rancour with Paul Lennon, yet was awarded a parting ex gratia payment of over $400,000.

The amount tallies interestingly with the amount due to Green if he had been sacked, and Green has subsequently maintained silence about his departure despite leaving Government employ. An article in the Mercury later cited an unidentified source as alleging Green had been forced to resign, a proposition in no way inconsistent with the character of the Government or the mill project.

The grave implications of the allegation is something which cries out for investigation under oath.

There are numerous other potential time bombs ticking away in the archives, from murky home renovations to tied grants for well-placed consultants; they are worth looking into. It would be a pity if such potentially lurid copy went to waste as the mill is knocked over by information as mundane as last weekend’s analysis in the AFR, which pondered how a project of such dubious economic feasibility as the mill could be pulled off by a management of Gunns’ quality.