Clean, green Tasmania

Barnaby Drake

In yesterday’s Examiner the lead article is about a miracle cure for MS and states that Tasmania has been chosen for this trial because it has the highest rate of MS in Australia. The rate is between 150 – 200 cases per 100 000 – ten times the average for the rest of the country.

Coupled with this, we have a 36% higher cancer rate, highest diabetes, heart disease, asthma and several other chronic illnesses. Most of this, according to the AMA, has come about in the last twenty years since the Regional Forest Agreement that allowed clearfelling of forests and the establishment of plantations, with the subsequent over-spraying of toxic and carcinogenic and endocrine disrupting chemicals in the triazine family and other concoctions.
We are now facing a wipe-out of the Tasmanian devil, the platypus is affected, we have lost huge oyster beds to pollution and the human population is suffering, yet no-one is permitted to make a connection between this and the spraying carried out by Forestry Tasmania and Gunns.

In the last week, David Llewellyn has admitted that there is a high risk to the drinking water in the Launceston area due to the presence of atrizine and other chemicals.

Western Creek and Brumby Creek have also been polluted by run-off above the safe limits, even though Tasmania sets these limits 40 times greater than in America, where these chemicals are manufactured.

In Europe they are banned completely. In Dairy Plains, huge amounts of organic grazing land has been destroyed by forestry run-offs and the government is now investigating this three months after the event as well – presumably to follow the usual practice of preventing the blame going to Forestry or the MIS timber companies who have plantations next door.

This is the current state of the art in the ‘Clean, Green Tasmania’!

Dr Alison Bleaney’s advice: Here