Bob McMahon

Gunns, the Labor party and the Liberal party have sown the wind and now they shall reap the whirlwind.
FRANKLIN SQUARE anti-PULP MILL RALLY Nov 17th
Speech by Bob McMahon TAP (Tasmanians Against the Pulpmill)

Join with me in acknowledging the traditional owners of the proposed Longreach pulp mill site.

Welcome to democracy. These are our public places. It is in such places that our democracy currently operates. It operates in the streets and parks of our state because there is precious room for it in the parliament.

At a time when the common wealth of this island has been alienated from the people, stolen from the people, it is appropriate that here today we demand our island and our democracy back from those who would rob us of our birthright.

Everyone here shares my revulsion at the betrayal of the community interest by politicians whom we pay to represent us but they fail to do so. We are taxed but we are not represented. Taxation without representation was the reason for the American Revolution against the British crown.

Everyone here shares my revulsion at the poor government that we have had to endure.

You and I are revolted by the wilful destruction of democratic and due process.

We reject the corporate land grab, the facilitation of which the state and federal governments have cast themselves as the corporate pimps, a land grab, social engineering on a massive and sinister scale, that is fast rendering our island unproductive and uninhabitable. The plantations, fuelled by taxpayer funded MIS schemes, swallow up our farms and forests. The loss of our landscape and our productive forests and farmland is accompanied by an impoverishment of our lives.

You and I are opposed to the proposed pulp mill. It is the symptom of the cancer eating away at our society. The pulp mill is the scab on a large cancerous sore.

A quarter of a billion dollars is paid in subsidies annually to the logging industry and Gunns, so that the industry can rip the lungs out of this island, and by extension, rip the lungs out of this planet.

At what cost to our community are these subsidies paid? A failing public health system. A resource starved public education system. Public housing all but ignored.

At a time when people in pain are lying on trolleys in hospital corridors, while others wait years for operations and public dentistry patients have to pull out their own teeth with pliers because they cannot get an appointment, while nurses, doctors and support staff are worked to the point of collapse, when wards are closed and country hospitals run down, the Lennon and Howard governments are transferring hundreds of millions of dollars a year, your money, to the Tasmanian logging industry.

People of Tasmania, join with TAP and demand that the massive subsidies paid to the unsustainable logging industry be immediately stopped. The equation is simple. We either have a pulp mill or a decent health system. One or the other. We cannot afford both. Which would you prefer?

If the proposed pulp mill is as good a business as it is touted, let it stand on its merits and do without massive subsidies. If the logging industry, in its present form, is as sustainable as it is touted, let it operate without subsidies in a competitive environment like the businesses that we operate.

Corporate welfare comes at the expense of essential services like public health, public education, public housing.

Corporate welfare is destroying the social fabric of Tasmania. We cannot go on like this.

We are here today because we intend to do something about it. The two party system, well it’s really a one party system, especially in Tasmania, is iniquitous. Ben Quin, former Liberal, now Independent Lyons, represents the disaffection from the tired, old, corrupted, dictatorial, ossified, uninspiring, weak, malicious, lazy major political parties – I’m sure I haven’t exhausted all the adjectives I could use. Ben Quin did a Terry Martin and therefore he deserves our support.

The movement of Independents and the so called minor parties which are not creatures of the major parties, must take root across this country, because the two party system has got us into a terrible mess and must be done away with.

The Greens, born out of a past social upheaval, which continues, and from which the Labor and Liberal parties have learned precisely nothing of value, have been a light in a very dark place for a very long time now.

These are the people you vote for in the coming elections. Green and Independent. Put the sitting members last in every electorate because they have sold out the community. Punish the incumbents.

They have stolen the common wealth of Tasmania and given it to a rapacious industry or stood weakly by and allowed it to happen. They have betrayed the communities they were paid to represent. Why? Because the industry purchased itself the government some time back, and whether the two major parties are in or out of government here in Tasmania, they are of one mind when it comes to servicing the owner.

Two days ago we launched our register of potential litigants against Gunns and the political parties. An encrypted website linked to the tapvision website is currently being established.

This class action is a two-fold community response to our abandonment. Firstly, the risks and impacts of the proposed pulp mill were deliberately excluded from consideration during the defilement of the pulp mill assessment process. This class action is the peoples’ response to being told they do not matter, that only the interest of one company matters. The people are seeking restitution from both the company and the major political parties which are complicit in this crime against the people.

Secondly, the class action is the community response to the Gunns’ 20. This is the peoples’ 1000, 2000, 3000…..

Gunns, the Labor party and the Liberal party have sown the wind and now they shall reap the whirlwind.