Environment

A pipeline too far

Editor

Posted on

23 March 2008

Bob McMahon

Could the government’s management of the pro pulp mill bordello get any more naked and bent? You bet. When I began predicting in the columns of the online newspaper, Tasmanian Times, ( What the hell is going on? ) that the government would flog off public assets to finance pulp mill construction in the guise of providing “essential state infrastructure”, to help Gunns out because they couldn’t get finance, I was accused by logging industry apologist, George Harris (alias Woodworker), of having a brain the size of a grey pea. As it turned I didn’t need a brain even that big to see this one coming, and the colour was not a critical issue.

George Harris has been silent since the premier, in response to a question put to him by Mercury reporter Sue Neales, agreed that the government would ‘examine’ financing the construction of the water and effluent pipelines for the pulp mill. The use of the word ‘examine’ is government doublespeak for “we have already decided to help Gunns out with the pipelines and are now getting the spin unit to manufacture some bullshit benefits with which to hoodwink the people.” The premier denied that the government was intending to finance the port and the power plant.

This is taking the plundering of the public purse to a level that only the lunatic fringe would support. Thank you Paul Lennon. The anti-mill cause is deeply indebted to you in finally finding the level of your supporters. When there aren’t enough hospital beds and seriously ill patients are lying on trolleys in hospital corridors or being sent home to suffer untreated, you want to spend more than $100 million that should be spent on the health system, on a pulp mill pipeline instead. This is a pipeline too far. You have a rebellion on your hands premier, and you created it.

IT’S GREAT to have a state government we can trust. We can trust our government to steer the bus in the direction of the cliff and despite all the signs warning the driver to slow down and take another road, the foot hits the accelerator hard, the bus crashes through the boom gate and hurtles over the cliff. And they can be goaded into it. Surely it’s not advisable to drive so fast towards that cliff edge? Oh yes it is you greenie bastards. And they do.

Which is how it seems to work.

As we examine some aspects of the pulp mill approval debacle you will be able to appreciate how fortunate the campaign against the pulp mill has been in having a government so incompetent it invariably plays a losing hand with the confidence of the delusional gambler who bets everything he owns on a hand any rational card player would toss down the toilet. The anti-pulp mill campaign has been very lucky in that regard.

As with all campaigns in the early stages, (this one began in January 2005), the battle was on to win the hearts and minds of the population. Both Gunns and the Premier trumpeted a 90% approval by the people of Tasmania for the project. They may have been right. But when Lennon set up the $6 million Pulp Mill Task Force, essentially a public funded propaganda unit to do Gunns’ dirty work, and put the million dollar green bus on the road to spruik the benefits of the pulp mill after plundering more of the public purse, people began to sniff the air wondering who amongst them had trodden on a dog turd.

Yes we can trust the Tasmanian state government to pay dearly for crap advice and then act on it. Whose great idea was the Task Force and the Green Bus, the tab for which was picked up by the public without prior approval? Whoops. The 90% figure in favour of the mill took a nosedive. Is it any wonder when the government steals money from the people to advance the interests of a monopolistic company that the people get pissed off? Did the state government really think the populace would cop this?

Then there was the small matter of who got the nod to front the propaganda campaign. A charismatic, eloquent, persuasive, personable idol the public could not resist? No. We were lucky that class of person didn’t fit the government’s job description. They chose an apparatchik from within Forestry Tasmania, a loyal servant of the great cause, protector of reputations, preserver of secrets, a moderately important operator in the stripping of the forest resource from public ownership and someone who probably knew where a few bodies were buried: Bob Gordon.

It wasn’t until I debated Bob Gordon in the George Town Memorial Hall in about September or October 2006, that I realized quite to what degree the anti-mill campaign was on a winner. Bob was no Hugh Jackman or anyone else oozing charm. Bob probably tried his best but it came out like unctuous mock sincerity which is often tonally identical to the telling of fibs. Bob Gordon lost a lot of support for the mill. People groaned when he talked. Like a good propagandist, or so the received wisdom went, he said the same thing over and over again but it didn’t seem to work. More bad advice. Bob Gordon was sufficiently grounded to pronounce, “this is not a popularity contest”, which the public took to mean both the pulp mill and himself were on the nose. Luckily for the anti-mill campaign, the State government, despite employing seventy odd people in its media unit, made a complete cock-up of its pro-mill propaganda campaign.

Bob Gordon was aided in the hard sell/soft sell pulp mill spruik by a bunch of luminaries from the logging industry: Terry Edwards from FIAT, Evan Rolley from FT, Scott McLean from CFMEU and Barry Chipman from … Where is Barry from? Let’s be honest. He represents Gunns as do all the others I have mentioned. Everyone knows it and every time one of them opened his mouth to whinge about the environmentalists or put his hand out for more and more subsidies for the logging industry, support for the mill, the government and Gunns, fell. However, they did and continue to appeal to one demographic which I would describe as ‘troubling’ (both the appeal and the demographic) though Evan’s collarless ayatollah shirts sent a message of extremism at cross purposes to the particular brand of extremism the boys were peddling and for which they were getting well remunerated.

Remember Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message?” What do you government decision-makers imagine the public made of this group of bovver boys for the logging industry and the pulp mill? Was it smart to wheel out for the cameras a line-up of blokes who looked like they had stepped out of a Black Pete comic? I nearly forgot about Les Baker, pulp mill manager who still hasn’t got a pulp mill. Yep, same comic. And John Gay. Affirmative. And then there’s the Premier himself. All these people may be worthy individuals but in this superficial age where appearances mean so much, using this line-up to market a contentious product meant you weren’t going to start in pole position.

Now let’s get down to the substance of where it all went wrong for the government and its pulp mill. That’s the point of course. It was the government’s pulp mill and it was the premier’s interference in the properly constituted planning process, his deliberate exclusion of the public from consideration, despite promising otherwise, and his willingness to plunder the public purse at the expense of essential services like health, education and public housing in order to spruik the pulp mill, and ultimately to build the pulp mill, that has caused the Tasmanian population to rebel. This rebellion has not occurred in a vacuum. There is a cause and effect at work here. Had an open and honest representative government applied principles of proper governance in Tasmania there would be no rebellion, and there would be no pulp mill either, because it appears the RPDC was not going to endorse it. It is as if Lennon wakes up every day and considers what he might do to provoke a civil war. That a civil war has not erupted is no thanks to the Premier, his gross partisanship, his contempt for the people of Tasmania and his predilection for turmoil, but is a testimony to the restraint shown by the civilized elements of this island.

In the George Town debate I mentioned above, I characterized the pulp mill as a State sponsored and State promoted project that would rely for its implementation, some of its construction and long term operation on a whole heap of subsidies pillaged from the public treasury. I am a private enterprise person and this did not look like a private enterprise project to me. One needed to turn the clock back to the old Soviet era to comprehend what we were dealing with. It was looking like a communist left gumboot factory.

So when the government/Gunns attempted to counter the flood of opposition against the pulp mill by plugging away at the tiresome distinction between development (the pulp mill) and anti-development (environmentalists) the people of the Tamar Valley in particular, who saw their businesses and livelihoods (development) set up to be negatively impacted by the pulp mill, then the pulp mill proposal was very clearly revealed as anti-development. The government/Gunns thesis looked and smelt like last year’s silage. That the Tasmanian Wilderness Society and the Greens gave some credence to the thesis by saying they supported a move to Hampshire in order not appear anti-development, was wrong-headed. Why fight on the battlefield of the enemy’s choosing? Why not refute the enemy’s paradigm?

What made the Tamar Valley a hot bed of revolt was the clear understanding, by late 2006, that the risks and impacts of the proposed mill had been deliberately excluded from consideration. Why did the government do this unless it had something to hide? It dawned on the people of the Tamar Valley that they were to be sacrificed. The Tamar was the sacrifice zone. Only the benefits of the pulp mill had been considered. Who would commit to a staggering $2 billion to build a pulp mill without a proper business plan that took into account risks, costs and impacts as well as the benefits? A state government and a state subsidised business is who. Here we have the delusional gambler betting the welfare and the economy of the whole state on a hand so hopeless the gambler doesn’t even want to look at it nor let anyone else have a peek either.

After a massive public meeting at Beaconsfield forced on the West Tamar Council by the populace, the councillors, bless them, after listening to the people and accepting what the people said, withdrew their ‘in principle’ support for the mill and unanimously passed a series of motions in opposition to the mill. Launceston City Council withdrew its support for the mill after the balance of power in the council had been altered by anti-mill candidates gaining a majority in the local government elections. Hobart City Council voted in unanimous opposition to the mill following the same elections in November 2007.

Local government was filling the moral and ethical vacuum left when the lickspittles in the state government and Liberal opposition abandoned the role of guardians of the public welfare, fell in line with the interests of the logging industry/pulp mill lobby, who were running parliament on the days leading up to and including the day of the vote, and passed the fast track pulp mill approval process through both houses on April 17th 2007. Paradoxically it was that majority (democratic!) vote that so repulsed the populace because it was gained through as cynical a manipulation of parliament as has ever been witnessed in the history of this island. In voting ‘yes’, the parliamentarians endorsed a Pulp Mill Assessment Bill that was so indecently favourable to the pulp mill proponent precisely because it had been written by the proponent and rubber stamped by government departments. The parliamentarians who voted for the bill saw nothing wrong in this, God help us.

History will record that one month earlier, on March 14th 2007, the Premier, in collusion with the proponent, withdrew the pulp mill proposal from the properly constituted planning authority, the RPDC (Resource Planning and Development Commission) and put in train a process that was so dodgy it is incomprehensible that the grown-ups in both houses of parliament, with some notable exceptions, fell for it. Did anyone down there on the benches and the cross benches know the difference between right and wrong? Obviously not, apart from Booth, McKim, Putt and Morris in the Lower House and Forrest, Finch, Martin, Jameison and Wing in the Upper House. The people of Tasmania did. Poll results showed a jump in opposition to the mill when Gay and Lennon debauched due process and when it was revealed that an arsenal of threats and thuggery had been used against members of the RPDC pulp mill assessment panel.

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