Environment
The Tamar is just a nuisance
Peter Henning
GEOFF, you are right. But the people of Launceston could not care, even if the Tamar turned into a fire hazard. For most of them the Tamar does not exist. It is just a nuisance. It’s in the way. It’s not useful because it can’t be used to solve a water-deficient community – it can’t even be used by the pulp mill, for goodness sake!
The Tamar should be banned. After all, it can’t be dammed, and everyone agrees it’s stuffed.
But let’s not stuff it completely. At least let us keep it open to shipping for the enlarged and reinvigorated Bell Bay Port, whatever it costs. That has to be a lifeline for wood chips exports to unknown destinations for the foreseeable future, especially now that the Dilston bypass road is going ahead on the East Tamar.
Another option, of course, is to require that Launceston residents buy their water in supermarkets or collect it from their roof areas, so that the silting of the Tamar can be accelerated from clear-fell logging in Launceston’s catchments. After all, a lot of people are already doing this. It could be mandated, in the interests of public health.
That would also enable more intensive planting of MIS plantations throughout the South and North Esk River basins without complaints from Launceston residents about deteriorating water quality and quantity.
But most of them wouldn’t notice deteriorating water quality anyway, and if they did, they would accept it in the interests of corporate needs, such as executive bonuses. The local media wouldn’t mind either, to say the obvious, so the only losers are those who wouldn’t be able to afford to pay the extra cost for water. Let them drink alcopops or eat hydrated cake. Maybe they could be asked kindly to migrate to Adelaide and buy water there – but it might be more costly.
Who knows, at some time in the near future, we could do away with the Launceston gorge area altogether. Or at least transform it into a dry gulch tourist attraction, say from the Trevallyn bridge all the way to Blackstone. We could even build a road through it, from the old derelict power station, under the various walking bridges.
But I really can’t see that the people of Launceston will be any way worried about whether the Tamar lives or dies. They couldn’t care less about what is happening to their own water supplies, so why should they worry about the Tamar?
Let me say that most of them would be quite happy to have polluted water, polluted atmosphere and a polluted political system. As long as it happens gradually, so they can explain to their children and grand-children that they they didn’t know what was happening.
Otherwise they would have done something, right?. Yeah, right.