The True Face of David Bartlett

TASMANIAN TIMES

Did Tasmanians on Wednesday see the true face of David Bartlett for the first time: An ugly savagery that perhaps revealed an inner fury at his own failure?

For, after 11 years of Labor rule, where has the money gone?

Not only has Bartlett no solutions and no ideas — other than the unfinanceable fantasy of the Food Bowl — he has failed to secure any Federal Government largesse to bolster the State through the hard times that are now imminent.

Where were the proposals for a public transport infrastructure that Hobart now so desperately needs? Where were the plans to reinvigorate the choked-to-death Tamar River in Launceston? Where was a clever and connected policy for the North-West Coast?

Where was the revamped major commitment to managing Tasmania’s wilderness areas which are the bedrock of the largest employer in the state: the tourism industry?

Barlett yesterday sounded like a lost man. For 11 years Labor has been able to control so much of the news cycle with its army of spindoctors.

Yesterday the news was too catastrophic to be contained by any amount of lying.

The only guarantees that seemed to remain were the Holy Trinity of Tasmanian politics 2009: More money to arrest those Tasmanians trying to protect their environment and their homeland, more money for a Melbourne football club, and more money to drive a road through one of Australia’s last great wildernesses, the Tarkine.

David Bartlett was angry.

But how much angrier should Tasmanians be at a time when we desperately needed new ideas, a spirit of coming together of all parties.

Instead, the Tasmanian Labor Party’s lodestone remained firmly set in the direction dictated by the Gunns boardroom.

The question that now looms over this most dismal government is whether they are not a re-run of the previously most disgraceful government in Tasmania’s history: the Gray Government of the 1980s … a government which pork-barrelled on the one hand and slavishly supported the woodchipping industry on the other.

Politically destroyed by the Wesley Vale pulp mill, tainted by corruption, the Gray government lost power in 1989.

The Labor-Green minority government which succeeded Gray discovered Tamania was bankrupt. It was also in consequence condemned to a decade-long recession from which it emerged only in 2001.

Has David Bartlett condemned Tasmania to a repeat of that terrible fate … and another decade-long recession?