Environment
Jobs jobs jobs! How many new pulp mill jobs?
There are several competing stories around the pulp mill proposal that we are asked to believe. We can choose to believe Gunns’ PR man Matt Horan, who says it will create 2000 construction jobs [2], or we can believe Gunns’ secret advice to the George Town Council engineer that only 1250 building workers are needed [3]. We can choose to believe Horan that the pulp mill will create “about 16,000 jobs in the future,” [4] or we can believe consultant ITS Global that it will create only 292 direct long term jobs [5].
How many new jobs will really be created by Gunns’ proposed pulp mill? In a review of the media over the last two years I found sixteen different estimates ranging from 292 [7] to 16000 [8]. Depending on who is talking and the kind of jobs they are talking about, there are either 292, 300, 900, 1000, 1044, 1250, 1600, 1617, 2000, 2500, 2900, 3000, 3400, 3500, 8000, or 16000 new jobs from the pulp mill.
The pulp mill will ‘crowd’ out existing Tasmanian businesses and quash potential developments according to Wells Economic Analysis [28]. It locks the State into an undifferentiated bulk commodity market at the expense of businesses based on scarce, unique and distinctive attributes of Tasmania. In its benefits-only study, ITS Global, the State government consultant, suggests without any supporting evidence that a pulp mill can co-exist with Tasmania’s clean green image and therefore that those who run tourism and fishing businesses are wrong about losing their jobs (p. 5). The negative impacts on those industries are still being avoided by the Commonwealth and Tasmanian governments but the elephant is still in the room. The only details available on the negative impacts come from the economic study commissioned by the Tasmanian Round Table for Sustainable Industries Project 2007 (TRTSI) [29].
Using the TRTSI approach, the total amount of work for Tasmanians in tourism and fishing that will disappear is equivalent to 3.4 times more than that created in a pulp mill over its expected 24 year life.