Reflections on the picnic

Caring is something you can see and touch. Right from the West Tamar Highway, well made signs showed the way to Trevallyn Reserve, warm faces greeted us at the turnoff, and much labour in tents, banners, stage and stall and well organized parking, all the work of volunteer, caring hands.

Then the speakers. Articulate, heartfelt, each adding insights, details, new and stirring facts about the mire that has become Tasmanian governance, and the shambolic, catastrophic mistake that would be G*nns Mill.

The parts that stayed in my mind –

* that a large chemical plant would be part of the mill complex, mixing, making, storing, transporting that deadly chlorine, with all the competence and diligence and spare-no-expense safety that has made G*nns famous. (on the way there a landslip half-blocked a lane of the highway, following careless “clearfelling” beside their vineyard at Rosevears!)

* that as Bob pointed out, we would fight them all the way from Trevallyn to the sea, every blighting destructive step to the beaches of Bass strait, and years of strife faced any would be investor, who would of course become a foreign owner of our greatest natural resource.

* that the Pulp Mill had done Tasmania a huge favour – for all the angst and energy that it had taken to fight, because it has shown us how rotten our parties and politicians really were, how little our votes counted, how we could, and must stop being gutless consumers and be CITIZENS, activated and involved, fighting what we did not want for our children and grandchildren, and building what we do want. A beautiful, sustainable, life-supporting and triumphant Tamar Valley, a beacon for a surviveable world.

* that the clearing of about two acres of the Trevallyn reserve was a Mickey Mouse gesture, enabling G*nns to tell foreign investors “we’ve already begun”. A charade that fooled no-one.

* that Friends of the Gorge, whose soft spoken and sincere spokeperson identified heavy equipment as the greatest danger to the reserve, bringing weeds, compacting soil and starting erosion gulleys with their tyres undoing years of care and repair.

* that democracy was no longer a reality in Tasmania, if it ever had been. A plutocracy of industry barons, corrupt politicians both Labor and Liberal, pretty much did what they wanted to our state. The Pulp Mill Assessment act which violated planning laws and created the worst cronies agreement in our history was just the latest example of the way it had always been.

But the best thing to come out of the picnic for me, was an insight, quite new and quite galvanizing, in a very good way. It was implied by many speakers, the trenchant and testosteroned, capable Kim Booth, the thoughtful, good hearted Jeremy Ball, who impresses me more and more as a leader and speaker. The two young women from Launceston College. Paul Oosting. The beautiful and fierce Lucy Landon Lane – who took things to a new and important level with the reminder that the next step is voting with our bodies, getting safely and sensibly arrested.

This is the core of civil disobedience, the heart of Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and even Jesus’ work in action. Civil disobedience, carried out with dignity and complete calm, always wins; a government that arrests dozens of middle aged, honest and respectable citizens for doing what is right, even if it is “illegal”, affronts democracy and never survives. They know we are willing to do this. They are so hoping we don’t.

Peter Cundall beamed his blessing on us all, a reminder that he is a national icon because he touches something in our souls, the trustworthiness of plain speaking, earth loving, fiercely nonconforming wombat energy.

It was crystallized by Marion Nicklason of Tasmanians for a Healthy Democracy who shone a beam of light onto a new possibility – that around the world new models of governance, beyond the dinosaur era of political parties, multi-party representative government, might well evolve from the next election. That perhaps we might one day not even have Labor, or Liberal, just real democracy. That why did we even need parties at all – to plot and politicize our simple needs for good governance.

In a a nutshell, the movement to Pulp the Mill thrives and grows, because its joyful, because its right, because its caring about babies and children a hundred years from now, who deserve clean air, water that doesn’t give you cancer, fish and food and forests that keep the earth cool and lovely. How could we let them be robbed of this before they are even born

Steve Biddulph
Tamar Valley

Steve Biddulph