Plundered Island

Barnaby Drake

Over the last 10 or so years, we have already invested more public money into Gunns that the company is worth. If we had spent this money in the stock exchange instead, and bought their shares, we could now own the entire company! Looking at the profit they make, we would have been one of the richest islands in the world. Instead, we languish, with our health and education in the doldrums, while the pirates laugh all the way to an offshore bank.
THERE WAS a time in the history of the world when they hanged pirates at the yardarm. Those days have long since gone, and it is more the tendency now to scourge the victims of this robbery and support the plunderers with both more public money and with legal immunities from ever being held to account.

Anyone who opposes this, either by actions or words can find themselves on the wrong side of the law, or can be prosecuted by the villains of the piece for affecting their profits. Our defenders are vilified and held up to be public enemies, while our law givers bask in the shadow of giant corporations, sure in the knowledge that they will get a share of these spoils which they have helped them accumulate.

The public assets that are being plundered are ‘none of your business’ and are free from inconveniences of the ‘Freedom of Information Act’ and are hidden under ‘Company Confidential’ tags. This would not be too bad, except that what they are taking are OUR assets and OUR tax money. As in the past, this treasure is buried, not in the place of origin, but in far off stock exchanges and investor banks.

But this is not a one-off event – this is ongoing far into the future with contracts ‘set in concrete’, to quote one government minister. The pirates are being rewarded for all their services to the community!

To cover this operation, we are constantly being fed a series of lies, half-truth and spin, where black appears as white and vice versa, not only by the companies themselves, but with the full co-operation of our minders who employ up to seventy spin-doctors to feed us this unmitigated syrup.

The proponent gets away with it by ‘creating jobs’ and ‘value adding to our forests’ and ‘investing in the future of Tasmania’. History says otherwise.

Jobs!

Despite the upturn in Tasmanian economy, the fear that they can still engender with this spectre from the past! That all-embracing word that we are still supposed bow the knee and doff the cap to. But it is a phantom.

Over the last twenty years, Gunns have destroyed the private timber industry with take-overs and closures, downsizing and mechanisation. They have destroyed farming communities as they grab the farms and convert arable land to plantation. Many jobs and livelihoods destroyed in this sector. Tourism has suffered and jobs have declined here too. And now we have this be-all-an-end-all project that once more is going to see Tasmania rise like a phoenix on the back of JOBS! However, once the approvals have been obtained, initial estimates of workers have been cut from 1900 to a mere 600.

Contractors have been slashed by one third, losing 143 jobs, and now 140 Scottsdale workers are losing their jobs with a mere week’s notice, many of whom are official ‘Casual’ and are possibly not entitled to receive the redundancy offers, paid leave or superannuation that the full time workers receive (?) (I know of one Gunns employee who has been a full-time ‘casual’ for 12 years, and I have been told of others. This avoids all workers’ rights, holiday pay, pension payments and also, employee tax, as well as adding a little shine to the company books? Maybe another unrecognised subsidy?)

‘Value adding to our forests’.

Maybe, but not for the owners. If you can call slaughter of all our high conservation forests and replacement by monoculture plantations, ‘value adding’ then they have a strange method of accounting. True, they get 100% subsidies for replacing them, and they then claim they are ‘sustainable’ by offsetting this new tax-free asset against the plundered public resources. The public does not get this tax break or any of the money involved. All we get is the cost of cutting it all down and shipping it to Gunns, but not the tax-funded MIS money. They then chip it all and sell it at a huge profit – for themselves.

Meanwhile, Forestry makes a huge loss, despite ongoing subsidies and are annually ‘forgiven’ for their debts.’ The Pirates make an annual half a billion profit. This is how ‘Value-adding’ works.

We have even seen the situation where 100 000 hectares of densely forested land disappeared off the land registry in a one-sided swap deal. (We didn’t even get a big red paper clip for it! All we got was one Big Red.)

‘Investing in the future of Tasmania’.

What investment? And who’s doing it? Certainly not Gunns, as their profits head offshore, and the jobs that they promised get less by the day. But we, on the other hand, ARE investing in Gunns! Currently it is costing us at least $250 million a year, (which is equal to half their profits) plus all the unidentified subsidies, gifts, benefits that are funded by the local taxpayer, and all the rewards that the Federal government deem fit to pile onto them.

So what do we get for this ‘investment? Gunns doesn’t return anything to us. Forestry returns nothing to us. Hydro returns nothing to us, so where is this ‘investment’. Normally one would hope to see a little bit of return for all this money we invest.

But, our government, in it’s wisdom, has committed our forests for another 20 years to the pirates, and if they fail to deliver, you’ll will have to cough up another $15 million per year to compensate them. Then, by doing this, they are effectively cutting out any carbon trading scheme that would have netted us up to $9 Billion in the first year of trading and an ongoing annual fee after that.

Who needs a pulp mill?

OVER THE LAST TEN OR SO YEARS, WE HAVE ALREADY INVESTED MORE PUBLIC MONEY INTO GUNNS THAN THE COMPANY IS WORTH!

If we had spent this money in the stock exchange instead, and bought their shares, we could now own the entire company! Looking at the profit they make, we would have been one of the richest islands in the world. Instead, we languish, with our health and education in the doldrums, while the pirates laugh all the way to an offshore bank.

If we owned and managed our forests for the benefit of Tasmanians, rather than the pirates, and we processed our own woodchips, we would only need to ‘harvest’ about one twentieth of our old growth forests compared with what is being slaughtered now, to yield a substantial income for every citizen in the State.

We would save our forests, increase our tourism revenue, save our image, reduce the pollution, reduce the amount of toxic chemical spray, enjoy better health, increase our water supply and give our children a future.

This profit would further increase as carbon trading starts to bite, and at the conservative estimate of the value of our forests, we would each get a one-off payment of $180 from the deal with on-going annual installments. Instead, we are all currently paying Gunns $500 each in subsidies per year and every year, which will continue far into the distant future.

This is called, ‘Investing in the future of Tasmania’. They left out the bit that said ‘for Gunns’!

I think we have a good case to revert to the old system and restore the yardarm.

Barnaby Drake