Until recently the Tarkine didn’t even exist. In a Tasmanian terra nullius, governments refused to use a word to remember the local Aboriginal people in a wilderness with Australia’s largest temperate rainforest.
Slowly the Labor Government relented, and even decided it could be marketed with a 131-kilometre tourist loop road cutting into this forest in the state’s north-west.
Come the March state election, odds are that Labor will wish again it hadn’t heard the word. Tangled up in the Tarkine are many of the reasons Premier David Bartlett is on his own road to nowhere.
Let’s start with the minister responsible for running the project.
“Don’t you know who I am?” Infrastructure Minister Graeme Sturges said, as he stood over a security guard who stopped him at a ferry terminal in October. “I’ll have your f—ing job!”
Astonishingly, Sturges kept his. This is a government thin on numbers, and talent.
Chief among its boosters is Bryan Green, a sacked deputy premier twice unsuccessfully prosecuted for conspiracy and attempting to interfere with an executive officer. Each time the jury was unable to reach a verdict.
Green retains his seat and is standing for election in the electorate covering the Tarkine.
Lately he has had to explain why, despite the Government’s intent focus on the road, it failed totally to foresee something more electorally vital: a decision by vegetable processor McCains to shut a plant at the cost of 200 jobs.
Real world changes made the road’s $23 million cost more questionable in a state where even Bartlett admits electors are angry about imposts. There are rocketing land taxes, new water and sewerage charges. People watch where $23 million goes.
Then there are the federal environmental hurdles …
