A Wild West public meeting

Bob McMahon

Broadly speaking this is a map of all the inputs and outputs of the proposed mill presented as gains and losses. Gains are shown in green. Losses are shown in red. The losses far outweigh the gains. An indicative costing of this imbalance means that for every dollar the State Govn’t and Gunns say this proposed pulp mill will make, for someone, Tasmanians will lose at least three dollars through losses to food production, fishing, brand damage, wine, tourism, proper forestry, property values etc. The pulp mill, we are told, will generate $6.7 billion over 30 years. In that time Tasmania will lose something in the order of $20 billion. And that’s not counting the loss of our small and not so small country towns, which will disappear off the map like Preolenna has done. As plantations consume the farms, the countryside is depopulated and the flow of money coming into the towns dries up. North-east Tasmania will end up being a depopulated wasteland. Let me illustrate what being excluded from consideration looks like. The section of the whole picture the RPDC was charged to look at was just under 30%. We thought that was bad. Now lets look at the fast track assessment by SWECO PIC, the you know, that foreign company Gunns decided our govn’t should sub-contract our planning processes out to, so that Gunns could get the result they got us to pay for. Is it any wonder we are unenthusiastic? Less than 8% was looked at by SWECO PIC, the ‘fast track’ assessment!

But wait. There’s more. I should say less …

Also: The Law Report

RESIDENTS of the Tamar valley: WELCOME.

It is not acceptable that several hundred people are locked out of this public meeting. It is not acceptable that more than 250 people are separated from the main body of the meeting and are secluded in another room. Welcome to the hundreds back there. This shoddy, amateurish, obstructionist behaviour rather proves our point about the West Tamar Council whose statutory duty it was to organize this public meeting.

We live in one of the most beautiful and prosperous regions in Australia. Do you think it is unreasonable that we would want to keep it that way?

Tonight you will hear from many aggrieved residents of the Tamar. Why are we aggrieved? Because the impacts of the proposed pulp mill on our businesses, food production, livelihoods, property prices, quality of life, health have been deliberately overlooked, excluded from consideration. The Tamar region has been set up to be the sacrifice zone.

But the situation is much worse than that. The sacrifice zone is not restricted to the Tamar and its 100,000 people. It extends into Bass Strait where the Bass Strait fishery could be wiped out. Who would want to catch, buy, let alone eat fish that is contaminated or perceived to be contaminated. Would you?

And it gets even worse. The sacrifice zone extends to all the farmland of Tasmania, especially the farmland in the north of the state. The area of plantations required to feed this pulp mill, one of the biggest modern pulp mills in the world, will gobble up our farmland. Tasmania will have to sacrifice food production for tree plantations: perhaps all our food production if this dumb project is allowed to run its course. That is not a fair exchange. That is suicide. You cannot eat trees. Tasmania produces 70% of all Australia’s processed vegetables. Already more than 20% of our farms have gone under trees. The pulp mill, if it were to last a hundred years as pulp mills do, requires just about all of our farmland.

What do I mean by deliberately overlooked, excluded from consideration? Take a look at the chart that is pinned up around the hall. The chart was produced by complex systems consultants Paul Wilson and Mike Bolan, to whom this community is deeply indebted. It has taken thousands of hours of work to research and produce. ( The Experts )

Broadly speaking this is a map of all the inputs and outputs of the proposed mill presented as gains and losses. Gains are shown in green. Losses are shown in red. The losses far outweigh the gains. An indicative costing of this imbalance means that for every dollar the State Govn’t and Gunns say this proposed pulp mill will make, for someone, Tasmanians will lose at least three dollars through losses to food production, fishing, brand damage, wine, tourism, proper forestry, property values etc. The pulp mill, we are told, will generate $6.7 billion over 30 years. In that time Tasmania will lose something in the order of $20 billion. And that’s not counting the loss of our small and not so small country towns, which will disappear off the map like Preolenna has done. As plantations consume the farms, the countryside is depopulated and the flow of money coming into the towns dries up. North-east Tasmania will end up being a depopulated wasteland.

Let me illustrate what being excluded from consideration looks like. The section of the whole picture the RPDC was charged to look at was just under 30%. We thought that was bad. Now lets look at the fast track assessment by SWECO PIC, the you know, that foreign company Gunns decided our govn’t should sub-contract our planning processes out to, so that Gunns could get the result they got us to pay for. Is it any wonder we are unenthusiastic? Less than 8% was looked at by SWECO PIC, the ‘fast track’ assessment!

But wait. There’s more. I should say less. I have in my hand the West Tamar Council submission to the RPDC. It addresses the inadequacy of some of the roads in the municipality and what needs to be done to make them better able to cope with the increased volume of trucks the proposed pulp mill will generate. Quite reasonable as far as it goes, which is not very far. About 2 – 3% of the whole picture. If I was marking this as an essay (I have marked tens of thousands in my time) I would probably give it 3 or 4 out of 20. And the reason: Does not address the full topic, only a small part of it. By way of an aside and this a question to the West Tamar Council. “How well have your concerns, represented in this submission to the RPDC, been addressed by the fast track process?” Not at all is my guess. Another question: “What have you done about it?”

What follows is the topic that should have been addressed in the Council’s original submission to the RPDC. Let me frame an essay topic in the words of Section 20 of the Local Government Act.

ESSAY TOPIC “The Local Government Act requires you to provide for the health, safety and welfare of the community, to represent and promote the interests of the community and provide for the peace, order and good government of the municipal area. In your submission to the RPDC please address all these areas in relation to the proposed pulp mill, examining, in particular, inadequacies in the proponent’s Integrated Impact Statement”. That is what the residents of the West Tamar wanted you to do but you failed them.

You did not do that. But we did, the community did, unresourced and at our own expense. We visited pulp mills in New Zealand, Germany, Chile. We did not receive a brass razoo to do so. We weren’t schmoozed by Gunns and we ere able to see precisely what pulp mills are all about. We read the IIS – it was never going to be a best seller. We sought advice from pulp mill scientists. We organized visits and lectures by scientists. We engaged consultants. We researched pulp mills and the damage done to communities all round the world. Conclusion: pulp mills cause trouble wherever they go and the Tamar Valley is emphatically not a place to locate a pulp mill. Nowhere in Australia would be more inappropriate except perhaps the MCG.

WE BECAME INFORMED. Never in Tasmania has there been such a gap between a well informed public, such as here on this basketball court, and an ignorant polity as we have now. When mayor Barry Easther accused the majority of electors of being misinformed following our majority vote against the pulp mill in the elector’s poll of 2005, a result confirmed state wide in subsequent polling, we were insulted. We are here tonight because of you, Mr. Easther. Your actions have created this situation.

Now its time for accountability. Let me quote once again the Local Government Act. “In performing its functions, a council is to consult, involve and be accountable to the community”. Councillors, this is your lesson on what being a representative of the people means. The relationship of elected representatives to the people who elect them is the same as that between employer and employee. It is the public which employs you to be its servants. Power is in the hands of the people not the representatives. Councillors and politicians, you are not elected and paid to represent the interests of any other entity but the people. Councillors, you serve neither premier nor influential businessman, neither vested interest nor idealogy. Councillors, you serve the people. So it is extremely gratifying to see here tonight political representatives who listen to the people and attempt to represent the best interests of the communities they serve. I welcome Kim Booth, Tim Morris, Kerry Finch and the mayor of Flinders Island, Terence Klug to this meeting. Ben Quinn the Liberal candidate for Lyons is also present and they may be others. How would you know because they may be in other room or locked outside.

Here is an example of how out of touch with the people of this municipality the West Tamar Council really is. Recently Peter Kearney, deputy mayor, put the motion that the Council express its extreme concern about the future of the tourist industry in the Tamar Valley if the pulp mill is approved. Only Peter Kearney and Laurie Leaver voted for the motion. The remainder of the councillors opposed the motion. Let me ask you a question: Is that an acceptable response from your council?

Is it too much to expect this Council to make a stand on issues of planning and due process? Is it too much to expect this Council to demand a return to a full and independent assessment of the pulp mill project, a return to due process, to public consultation and the provision of information that has been excluded from consideration?

Yes it is. Council is not up to the job. It is out of its depth. It is sleep walking towards disaster and is about to go over the cliff.

Most of the West Tamar councillors exist on an island of delusion surrounded by a sea of hostility and disaffection. The West Tamar councillors are not alone on that island – the majority of our elected representatives are there with them. The sea of hostility is composed of the people of Tasmania who are resolved not to have this pulp mill. If it means civil unrest on a scale never before seen on this island then that is the way it will be and it will be like that because our elected representatives have failed to do the job for which they are paid. They have abandoned the people and the people will now abandon them. I give notice of a motion of no confidence in this Council. All we can hope from the majority of the Councillors is that they go wandering off into the night and hand over to people who know what they are doing and are willing to do the job for which they are paid.

Text of Bob McMahon’s speech delivered to a public meeting at Beaconsfield Tuesday night.

Read more, COMMENT here

Meanwhile … from Radio National’s Law Report:

And the real concern with Gunns being essentially allowed to throw a tantrum and walk away and then being given… essentially that tantrum being condoned by the state and federal governments, instead of just saying, ‘Look, you’ve chosen to walk away from the process that was agreed upon, that you’d been ordered to follow’ — it just sends a terrible message to other big developers. Essentially the message it sends is, if you’re big and ugly enough, and you are unhappy with the process that you have been given, then you can throw your hands in the air, claim that it’s going to cost all these jobs and lots of money that won’t be invested in the economy, and government will do somersaults to appease you. That seems to be the message that it sends to other developers; it’s a very worrying message from the perspective of good decision-making.

The Law Report.

A ruling by the Federal Court last week has moved the controversial proposed Gunns pulp mill in northern Tasmania one significant step closer to construction.
As with many areas of regulation, we have both state and federal environmental legislation. State laws cover areas like noise and air pollution, while federal laws cover areas like the marine environment, and migratory and threatened species.
Now because the proposed pulp mill is of such significance, an integrated state-federal approval process was created. It was conducted by Tasmania’s Resource Planning and Development Commission, known as the RPDC. But back in March, that process collapsed. Gunns blamed unacceptable delays in the process; the RPDC claimed that information provided by Gunns was insufficient.
Now fearing Gunns might abandon the project entirely, the Tasmanian government passed special legislation setting up a fast-track assessment process. That process gave the go-ahead to the mill. For its part, the federal government chose from a range of assessment options set out in federal legislation. It chose the quickest, easiest option, which involved relying on previously prepared documentation.
The Wilderness Society took the government to court, arguing it had erred in choosing this truncated assessment process. Well last week the Federal Court dismissed the challenge by the Wilderness Society, and it’s now expected that Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, will announce his approval of the mill very soon.
Chris McGrath is a Brisbane-based barrister. He does a lot of environmental work, and early on in the process he was a member of the Wilderness Society’s legal team. I asked him about the unsuccessful challenge to the Minister’s assessment method.
Chris McGrath: The Minister chose a method of assessment called preliminary documentation, which essentially allowed the proponent to just go on what it had already prepared. The process that the Minister chose essentially avoided public hearings. It does allow for public comments, but there’s no independent report prepared, it’s essentially in-house now with the Commonwealth Department of Environment and Water Resources.
Damien Carrick: And what were the Minister’s other options, in terms of the assessment process?
Chris McGrath: Oh well, he could have required a public inquiry, or he could have required an environmental impact statement. And Gunns would say that what they prepared was effectively an environmental impact statement, which is the classic sort of document that proponents of big projects prepare to explain the environmental impacts and ways to mitigate it. Gunns would say that they’ve already done that, and there’s some validity in that argument. But the RPDC had already said that it was very unhappy with the documents that Gunns had prepared. And previously there was going to be a public hearing to allow people to make submissions. And there would have been an independent report, and the RPDC was clearly operating very independently from government. It seemed to be, objectively, a very good process. And the real concern with Gunns being essentially allowed to throw a tantrum and walk away and then being given… essentially that tantrum being condoned by the state and federal governments, instead of just saying, ‘Look, you’ve chosen to walk away from the process that was agreed upon, that you’d been ordered to follow’ — it just sends a terrible message to other big developers. Essentially the message it sends is, if you’re big and ugly enough, and you are unhappy with the process that you have been given, then you can throw your hands in the air, claim that it’s going to cost all these jobs and lots of money that won’t be invested in the economy, and government will do somersaults to appease you. That seems to be the message that it sends to other developers; it’s a very worrying message from the perspective of good decision-making.
Damien Carrick: Well Gunns did argue that the RPDC process was full of delays and they couldn’t hang round incurring the costs of those delays, it was getting out of control.
Chris McGrath: That’s Gunns spin on it. I think that there’s very different perspectives. The RPDC itself was saying a lot of those delays were caused by Gunns not providing the information that the Commission had requested, and taking a huge amount of time to provide that information, so that a lot of the delays were Gunns fault rather than the Commission’s fault.
Damien Carrick: So getting back to the decision last week of Justice Marshall in the Federal Court dismissing the challenge by the Wilderness Society of the assessment process which was chosen by the Minister, what did the judge find?
Chris McGrath: Essentially he found that none of the grounds [on which] the Wilderness Society challenged the process chosen by the Minister were valid, or made out, and in particular he found that there wasn’t apprehended bias, that a well-informed, reasonable observer would not consider there was an apprehension of bias in the Minister. So that’s the guts of it.
Damien Carrick: So clearly the judge found that it was open to the Minister to have the less rigorous approval process of I guess a number on offer, that was within the powers of the Minister to make that decision?
Chris McGrath: Yes, Damien you’re right, because it has to be emphasised with the decision of the court that it’s a judicial review case; it’s not about whether the decision of the Minister to choose that process was right on its merits. Judicial review is really a very strict process where the court only really looks at whether the Minister has followed the correct legal process, not whether the Minister’s decision was right or wrong. So if the Minister ticks all the right boxes, even if the Minister arrives at a decision which factually is stuffed, the decision can’t be challenged on the basis that it’s the wrong decision on the facts or the merits; it can only be challenged on the basis of has the Minister ticked all the right boxes. And essentially what the court found was the Minister had ticked all the right boxes. It didn’t get into the merits of the process that the Minister had chosen, and it doesn’t go to the merits of the pulp mill and whether it should be built or refused or anything like that. It’s very much more a constrained process and the court’s decision really has to be seen in that light.
Damien Carrick: The Minister now has the legal go-ahead to make a decision in accordance with the processes that he’s chosen, and of course everybody’s now awaiting that decision. When he makes that decision, is it possible for opponents of the pulp mill to actually appeal it?
Chris McGrath: In reality it would be very difficult to successfully challenge the Minister’s decision. There is only the judicial review option open for the Minister’s decision whether to approve or refuse the pulp mill. As I’ve said, that’s very limited in its scope of what it can challenge. People can’t challenge whether it’s the right decision to approve it or not, which is fundamentally what people want to challenge. It sort of means that anyone wanting to challenge the federal decision, it’s like they’re in a straitjacket. They can’t actually do what they want to do, which is challenge the Minister and say, ‘Look, that decision stank to high heaven, it was terrible. On the facts you should have refused it; there’s big problems with this pulp mill.’ That’s what you really want, that’s what most environmental litigants want to get into. But they can’t in judicial review.
Damien Carrick: Brisbane barrister, Chris McGrath.
Federal Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, is expected to announce his decision on the Gunns pulp mill some time before the end of the month. And the Tasmanian parliament is expected to pass legislation approving the mill also by the end of the month.
That’s The Law Report for this week. A big thank you to producer Lyn Gallacher, and also to technical producer, Carey Dell.

Presenter
Damien Carrick
Producer
Anita Barraud