Forestry: A beautiful set of circumstances

Christine Milne The Senate, Wednesday 3rd September 2008, 3:27pm

The Pulp Mill Task Force were completely discredited after they interfered and made a fool of the Resource Planning and Development Commission, to the point where the chair of the RPDC wrote to the then Premier saying, ‘Tell them to stop interfering because they are making a mockery of the assessment process.’ But the then Premier then had Bob Gordon appointed as head of Forestry Tasmania and made the head of Forestry Tasmania the head of the Department of Premier and Cabinet. So Tasmania is actually governed by Forestry Tasmania: they are the de facto government in exactly the same way as the Hydro used to be. And the de-facto government, Forestry Tasmania, is run by its association with Gunns. That is the current situation. And Ken Jeffreys, Bob Gordon’s offsider on the Pulp Mill Task Force propaganda bus, was moved across as PR man for Forestry Tasmania. So it is a beautiful set of circumstances! But it is worth reminding this parliament of the ludicrous claims these people made as part of the Pulp Mill Task Force and that now they are across in Forestry Tasmania. And in spite of the fact that the Premier said there was a line in the sand on the pulp mill approval process and he would stick to it, we now find they have been so incompetent that Gunns did not even sign the sovereign risk contract – so it is null and void, for goodness sake, and we have to fall back on the old one. So much for a line in the sand and the level of incompetence down there in relation to the sovereign agreement contract.

On the wood supply agreement, the Premier initially took a stand and then deferred completely to Forestry Tasmania and said, ‘Forestry Tasmania says it needs this long-term wood supply agreement with Gunns and therefore it is going to have it.’ The upshot is that Forestry Tasmania has not told Tasmanians about the opportunity cost of putting those forests through a pulp mill when it should be looking at the carbon stored in those forests as part of the whole new perspective on what that carbon is worth and how it would contribute to Australia meeting its new and, hopefully, stringent 2020 and 2050 emissions targets. Read more here