JOBS, JOBS, JOBS is the catchcry …

… but the reality is top profit and salary grabs for the few – the sack for many. Employed workers’ share in the wealth produced has been falling for 40 years.
We need socially beneficial, ecologically sustainable work opportunities and social and economic policies that protect our physical environment and that underpin a peaceful, equitable, cooperative and sustainable society.

Our forests contain unique craft timbers that can be sustainably extracted and support high yield craft and construction industries employing many more workers than the timber industry does at present. The best economic value to be obtained from our old growth forests is by leaving them as carbon sinks.

We must base all development on the following principles:

The current quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere must be reduced, otherwise our planet will no longer be habitable.

The only sources of wealth are nature’s resources and humankind’s labour, physical or intellectual, acting on those resources.

Investment needs to target socially beneficial work to make work equitable, accessible and fairly rewarded.

An economy that:

• feeds on limited and rapidly diminishing resources for the benefit of the few giant corporations and their greedy top management with their massive payouts,

• destroys farmland, turning it into tax-minimising plantations that soak up the water-table, demand chemical spraying that pollutes waterways, puts human health at risk and slaughters wildlife,

is not the way for Tasmania to go.

Tasmania is rich with sustainable green energy sources: wind, hydro, solar, tidal. Our carbon footprint could be neutral.

Instead:

• We are destroying the best carbon sinks in the world: old growth forest with their huge biodiversity, replacing them with thirsty monoculture plantations that take 80 years to become carbon neutral.

• We are intent on building a massively polluting pulp mill amidst prime fishing, tourism and agricultural industries, feeding it with scarce water and old growth forest.

• We place container ports in the North of the State, not in Hobart’s magnificent harbour. The bulk of shipped goods have to be brought South.

• We have allowed carbon efficient rail transport to become all but unusable through lack of maintenance and planning, thus forcing more and more trucks onto the roads, greatly increasing carbon emissions, damage to roads and danger to human life.

We tackle the problem of crowded roads by building more and more.

THERE HAS TO BE A CLEVERER, KINDER AND MORE CONNECTED WAY!

Technological innovation has allowed individual workers to produce more goods in less time. This should benefit everyone. BUT only an already over-wealthy few are benefiting. Even before the current set of economic crises became evident, while unemployment rates appeared to be low, the number of workers working part time had risen sharply whereas the number of workers working full-time had correspondingly fallen.

An example of increasing use of resources per job was the doubling of the amount of logs per job in a five year period: 172.5 cubic metres in 1971 to 351.3 cubic metres in 19761.

As the years roll on it is getting worse, not better. Twenty years ago there were 11,200 jobs, in family sawmills, small businesses, specialist craftsmen with Tasmania’s unique quality timber. Today, that figure is 6,500 and falling. In 1994-5, every hectare clear-felled created 1.3 forestry jobs; in 2003-4 it was 0.35 jobs2.

Because unlimited growth of production and consumption is impossible, intelligent conversion of resources into consumables by value-adding is imperative as an alternative to gross increase in output.

Some immediate policy implications:

Sustainable, employment-productive and economically beneficial uses can be found for some timber resources.

There should be no more timber plantations and existing plantations should be phased out, the land and water being used for food crops, Tasmania’s specialty.

The Tamar Valley pulp mill should not go ahead.

We should expand such existing industries as staple and fine food production, including leatherwood honey, wines, fine timber crafts and furniture, the cultural and educational sector and information technology.

There must be resources allocated to researching and developing products and infrastructure relevant to the growing demand for renewable energy sources, such as renewable energy.

We must turn forest waste into biochar by pyrolysis to reduce the risk of bush fire, minimise carbon emission and improve soil quality for food production.

A rail transport system, capable of moving people in a safe and acceptable time frame as well as providing efficient and safe transport of goods.

Water audits, that include groundwater, need to be conducted before more major dams or irrigation infrastructure is constructed.

All infrastructure for the production and delivery of goods and services must be built in such a way as to take into account sustainability and quality of life for all people and end the ruthless treatment of and destruction of other species.

Footnotes
(1) Graduate Diploma Thesis – Study by Bound, M. 1979 – Sources of figures include ABS Catalogue No 8203.6 ISSN 0314-1918 July’79 Tables 1 and 2 (embargo noon 24 July 1979); ABS Census catalogues that included (1971 and 1976 “Industry by Employed Persons Tasmania”)
(2) Buckman, G, Tasmania’s Wilderness Battles: A history. Allen & Unwin, 2008, pp. 122-3.

This document has come out of a round table discussion held in Launceston in May 2009, initiated by the SEARCH Foundation. Papers delivered at that discussion are available on the SEARCH Foundation web site:
http://www.search.org.au/projects/roundtables