BRUCE MOUNSTER
TASMANIA’S convict past has been blamed for its below-average level of skills and education.
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Skills Tasmania general manager Mark Sayer yesterday told a conference in Launceston he believed fallout from Tasmania’s convict past continued to stunt vocational and academic achievement.
He said the convict era was only two or three lifetimes ago and, by the end of transportation in 1852, about half the state’s population were convicts.
Mr Sayer said convicts were mostly unskilled, poorly educated and the work gang system served to reinforce convicts’ bad attitudes.
“It’s easy to guess attitudes towards education and training might not be inherently valued,” he told the Tasmanian Skills Conference.
Mr Sayer said Tasmania’s privileged classes, who made fortunes from millions of hectares of land given away by the government, also gave education and training a low priority.
“With an industrial base built on large-scale farms … there was not a strong demand for qualified people,” he said.
Mr Sayer said the shocking treatment meted out to the state’s Aboriginal population also inevitably had lasting consequences.
He said 19th-century attitudes, passed down the generations, were only gradually breaking down.
Change in Tasmania moves at the pace of a tectonic plate grinding millemetres every thousand years or so … This is what Tasmanian Times concluded in its first edition in October 2002:
All this controversy points to another feature of the state we’re in: the sometimes brutal exclusionism of the one-party state.
There are those who say that if you oppose the Premier/Deputy Premiers’ full pro-forests position – or question its development or wealth-transfer policies – you face vilification and exclusion. Ask prominent conservative Tasmanians who have reconsidered their position.
Perhaps the half-joking statements of prominent Tasmanians firmly entrenched as power players in the Government/business nexus are more than light asides: “Toe the line or you won’t work in Tasmania.’’
And: “Old-growth logging in Tasmania ends when Gunns says it ends.’’
The Bacon Government is blowing up its development balloon taking us along for the ride.
Paradox is in the basket beneath the balloon – that uneasy interface of tourism and resource exploitation, of the party of the workers as the biggest supporter of big business.
We’re on a fascinating journey.
Mind you, this is Tasmania and we have always marched to a drum beat distinct from the rest of Australia.
Our history is different; the structure and layers of Tasmanian society have developed with their own distinctive island character … and perhaps, here lies a the beginnings of an understanding of our current political reality …
For, in colonial times there were masters, overseers and servants/slaves, and perhaps today’s Tasmania is largely the same.
The political establishment may have changed its complexion from the conservative squatocracy of the 19th century.
But there are the same old old-boys’ networks; a new century “interface between big money, senior bureaucrats and the strongmen of whichever of the two parties of capital happens to be in power at the time,’’ as academic Peter Hay so eloquently puts it.
And this ruling class; this one-party state, is no less narcissistic, oppressive and hyper-sensitive to questioning and proper debate than the colonial masters.
The overseers can be found in the Public Service, organizations dependent on government largesse (“Toe the line or you won’t work in Tasmania”) and sprinkled throughout ever strata of society, from business to sport.
Then, there are the servants/slaves – just grateful for a job.
There is another disparate group – the Dissenters; the Outsiders … whether they be the corner store owners alarmed by the increasing globalisation of the Tasmanian economy, the cashed-up expatriates looking for nirvana or the disquieted retirees alarmed by billowing plumes of Forestry burn-off smoke.
All recalctricants can take inspiration from history, however – and one historical symbol of intransigence are the Pipes of the 19th century.
John West (once editor of the Launceston Examiner, then later the Sydney Morning Herald) in his History of Tasmania (1852) wrote:
“The newspapers of this hemisphere were long mere vehicles of government intelligence, or expressions of the views and feelings of the ruling powers’’.
He recorded how “Malice or humour, in the early days, expressed itself in what were called Pipes – a ditty, either taught by repetition or circulated on scraps of paper: the offences of official men were thus hitched into rhyme.’’
Thus, “the fear of satire checked the haughtiness of power’’.
Long may it be so in this, beloved Tasmania!
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