Congratulations Mr Rudd

Jonathan Bowden This letter was posted to Mr Kevin Rudd and Peter Garrett on 26th January 2009
Congratulations to the federal Government, for giving Gunn’s permission to start construction on their pulp mill. It is a valuable precedent to set and this is to let you know that I am inviting interested backers with plenty of other people’s money to spend, to support my own application to the Federal government to build a massive, world’s best practice, hospital right next to the Gunn’s pulp mill.
I have no medical qualifications whatever and neither will any of the staff we pick to work there: it will be a state of the art hospital for anyone wearing a white coat who has picked up a smattering of medical terminology on one of their visits to the local casualty ward .

This hospital, which will be called the Dr Crippen Memorial Hospital as a tribute to the famous poisoner, will not be designed to improve the health of any of its patients; indeed none of them need concern themselves about coming out again except down a long chute at the end of which they will be discharged into the waters of the Bass Strait. This chute, or pipeline, is already being built, and will provide a sustainable solution to the problem of dealing with the 40 thousand asthma sufferers already in the Tamar valley. These unfortunate individuals will begin arriving at our doors in substantially greater numbers once the Gunn’s mill starts to belch the smoke from burning 500 thousand tonnes per annum of green timber, and a million tonnes of sinister sounding black liquor residue into the skies above Launceston.

Shareholders in the Dr Crippen Memorial Hospital can be quite sure that their investment is gilt edged because if the Federal Government doesn’t give the final approval to our scheme, we will sue them for breach of contract and collect vast sums of money from the Tasmanian taxpayer for the construction work we are about to start next week on our pipeline.

Our offer, with Gunn’s consent of course, will be to add our own pollutants to those of the mill, which already proposes to contribute a cocktail of poisons to the 25 billion litres of water which they will appropriate annually from the south Esk river. Gunn’s has also promised to pour 48 thousand tons of toxic sludge per annum into open cut trenches strung like the beads of a necklace around their site. We shall call these the Crippens lagoons, and feel there is a good chance they may allow some interesting, but as yet unspecified poisons, to leach into the water table of the entire Tamar valley. Our investors can readily perceive that the Gunns Crippen Institute will be setting a new world benchmark in how to turn a productive, prosperous and beautiful valley into a wasteland.

Now that all but a few of the approvals have been given to the Gunn’s mill project , surely it will become evident to both State and Federal governments that the best way to keep the mill, and our projected hospital running smoothly, will be to move the city of Launceston to a location upwind of the Gunn’s mill: or if there isn’t one, to construct a floating island in the middle of the Bass Strait.

In these difficult times, major infrastructure projects can have tremendous benefits for those who benefit from them, and surely those citizens of the Tamar valley who were worried about their health or their farm or their house or their winery or their fishing catch could be persuaded to re locate?

The Tamar River could be dammed at the Batman bridge and the whole of the valley flooded with all the air and water born residues that the mill could possibly produce in its lifetime.

So smile please on both sides of your face. the minister for midnight oil, and and persuade your electors that they have a duty to support not just one but all dysfunctional industries who hold their hand out for long enough.

Gunn’s, in collusion with the Tasmanian State Government, are clearly calculating that the Federal Government will buckle at the knees and objectors to their plan to destroy the most beautiful river valley in Tasmania will in due course be intimidated into silence. The mobile squad of Queen’s counsellors that Gunn’s dispatches to so many of the public meetings that raise objections to the mill certainly gives the forest industry cause for confidence in the matter.

As for the 4 million tonnes of native timber Gunn’s require each year for their mill, they can rest assured that the state Government will ensure that they continue to receive wood at half the cost of growing it in plantations, until every available stand of wild trees is gone. Great progress has already been made in this direction by the Government’s decision to change the definition of old growth forests into any wilderness that has never had any of its trees felled, thereby bringing most of Tasmania’s unique forests within reach of the chainsaws .

Already the saws are snarling in the Tarkine and the Arve Valley in the south west, previously virgin areas, where one of the tallest remaining eucalypts in the world was recently discovered at the edge of a logging coupe, its topmost branches waving in the breeze at a height of 400 feet.

Or has the moment arrived, when the Federal Government can no longer ignore the expressed wishes of the majority of the Tasmanian population who have good reasons for not wanting the mill; who would much rather keep their trees and their unpolluted air and their clean waters than hand them over to the high priests of industry and government, and be forced to watch while the fair body of Tasmania is roped to a stone and has her heart cut out.

Remember Mr Garrett and Mr Rudd and both buttocks of the rump that calls itself parliament in Tasmania that eternal disgrace awaits a Government that fails its people. You who hold the reins of power now will one day be judged and the jury will be your own children and grandchildren.

Your permission to allow Gunns to start building a mill whose effects on us and the environment have not even been tested, turns an issue that should have been decided on its merits, into a reckless game of chance, with a morally bankrupt and ruthlessly coercive industry on the one side and the lives and livelihood of 100,000 people in the Tamar Valley on the other.

But since a slim chance is better than no chance, we in Tasmania invite you to the tables, remind you of the stakes, and hand you the dice. Will we really have to hold our breath for another two years while you wait to roll them?

Yours sincerely

Jonathan Bowden

Riverside