Paradise Lost

Charles Wooley Bulletin, Thursday, August 9

Look up in the future from the once pristine river where a boy fished and you’ll see a gigantic, polluting pulp mill.

And if you don’t believe that, then you believe this. To feed the ravenous appetite of this beastly mill, the rate of destruction of Tasmania’s native forests will have to double. Clearfelling of old growth forests will accelerate for the next 20 years and wildlife like the endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle will perish. In the Tamar Valley, air pollution from the mill will destroy the wine industry and increase the rate of death and illness from respiratory diseases. Over its 50-year life the mill will pump more than a billion tonnes of toxic waste into Bass Strait, destroying both aquatic life and the fishing industry. Destruction. Pollution. Ruin.

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TASMANIA often bemuses “mainlanders”, as we call the rest of you, with the ferocity of our domestic squabbles.

For the past 50 years, the argument has always been the same, perhaps not unexpectedly in the poorest but most beautiful state: Nature versus Profit. From Lake Pedder to the Franklin River, Farmhouse Creek to the Styx Valley of the Giants, we have always battled it out in the unseemly glare of the national spotlight.

The latest stoush is not in the wilderness but in the beautiful Tamar Valley in the state’s north. A pleasantly balanced, settled landscape that pleases the eye, here is a happy mix of hobby farms and wooded uplands, B&Bs, rustic retirement villas and vineyards growing the finest pinot noirs.

It is at first sight a most unlikely battleground, but be assured the arguments here are as fierce and divisive as ever.

The pulp mill proposed for this green and pleasant land will, according to its proponents, be the largest-ever private sector investment in Tasmania. When up and running, it will provide 1600 jobs in the state with Australia’s highest unemployment levels. It will, over its life, add $6.7bn to the economy and provide an additional $894m in tax revenue. This in a state hard-pressed to maintain basic standards in hospitals and schools. Jobs. Money. Salvation.

And if you don’t believe that, then you believe this. To feed the ravenous appetite of this beastly mill, the rate of destruction of Tasmania’s native forests will have to double. Clearfelling of old growth forests will accelerate for the next 20 years and wildlife like the endangered Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle will perish. In the Tamar Valley, air pollution from the mill will destroy the wine industry and increase the rate of death and illness from respiratory diseases. Over its 50-year life the mill will pump more than a billion tonnes of toxic waste into Bass Strait, destroying both aquatic life and the fishing industry. Destruction. Pollution. Ruin.

The Tamar was the river of my childhood. It was a broad and beautiful playground enfolded by hills and apple orchards. As a boy I haunted its many jetties. They were, even then, decrepit, barnacle-encrusted and sun-bleached and the mysterious shadowed waters beneath them were home to many fish: cocky-salmon, mullet, bream and flathead. As a sunny 12-year-old, I artfully fished them all.

The jetties are long gone now. There is no longer public money available to indulge the idle pleasures of the present generation of kids. But there is taxpayers’ money in abundance to support Tasmania’s biggest company, Gunns Limited, in its bid to build the gigantic $1.4bn pulp mill on the Tamar 37km downstream from Launceston. Gunns has already been given $2.4m by the federal government with a further $3.1m promised. On top of this, the state government spruiks and pays for Gunns’ case in both print and TV advertising with Tasmania’s less than telegenic Premier Paul Lennon, perhaps unwisely, fronting a $7500 spot on local television.

So committed has Lennon become to this single project that some consider he has lost all objectivity. Due process has been abandoned. The independent government body, the Resource and Planning Development Commission, lost control of the course of the environmental assessment after an unseemly public dispute between the premier and the commission head, a respected former Supreme Court judge, Christopher Wright. The judge claimed Lennon had tried to “pressure” him into “trying to please Gunns”. The premier denied the allegations but the court of public opinion clearly found in the judge’s favour. There is widespread concern in the state that on many fronts the government is too cosy with Gunns.

Last year Lennon, again unwisely, chose the construction company Hinman, Wright and Manser, a Gunns subsidiary, to renovate his recently acquired country seat, a Georgian manor outside Hobart. Curiously, that company doesn’t usually tout for such work and in fact specialises in large construction jobs like bridges and public buildings. There may, of course, be no real impropriety involved but there is certainly plenty of sheer arrogance and insensitivity.

It is the same cast-iron indifference that makes the government not one jot embarrassed that Gunns makes a fortune from state-owned native forests while the husbanding authority, Forestry Tasmania, this year expects merely to break even.

This is the kind of disturbing equation which commonly undermines third world economies but is unusual in Australia.

Husbanding authority – return in 2007: zero. Profiting company – return in 2005: $101.3m.

Only in Tasmania.

Charles Wooley hosts Across Australia out of Hobart on Macquarie Regional Radioworks.