Before he left recently on a business trip overseas, a good friend of mine, a man passionate, as so many of us are, about this state and its future, sent me an e-mail. At the end of it he wrote, apropos tomorrow’s election: “I hope I will come back to find Tasmania has a new government, one with wise community-enriching policies that are guaranteed to build on the wonderful natural advantages of this little island. The new government will empower all Tasmanians to personally engage with the interesting opportunities that abound for those so motivated.”
This is a hope shared by many Tasmanians, many Australians too, who often despair of the quality of government here, the wasted opportunities, the mendacity, the cronyism, the ignorance, the arrogance, the smugness and the collective failure of imagination of our soi-disant leaders, present and past. We were reminded of by the rogue’s gallery of head shots of the latter species published last week as part of the plan to scare the pants off voters by raising the spectre of a hung parliament. There they were, spectres themselves, the desiccated and sinister homophobic Robin Gray, the Uber Bogan, the amiable but ineffective Michael Field, none of them with a record of a single notable achievement during their tenure at the top, beating the drum of self-interest and status quo (LibLab Gang of Four roar at Greens: HERE).
We are told two of today’s candidates for leadership are ‘untested’ and the party represented by the third has made much of this fact, but no novice could make such a hash of running the show as the current lot. If what they are offering passes as ‘experience’ then it’s an experience that surely doesn’t bear repeating.
Call me naïve but I thought that governments were elected to implement the will of the people, and yet the current government has persisted, as will one of the other contending parties, to pursue policies that are manifestly contrary to the wishes of the majority of Tasmanians. The primary example of this disdain for public opinion is course is the continued support for antediluvian forestry practices and for affiliated initiatives such as the highly contentious pulp mill project. That this is an unpopular, indeed insupportable state of affairs was highlighted – yet again! – by the open letter sent this week to government by a group of eminent Tasmanians concerned not only by the morality of the government’s inexplicable endorsement of logging of old-growth forests but also by the legality of the unholy alliance between the corporation concerned and government (Unhealthy relationship: Open letter to politicians: HERE). Nowhere is this nexus better exemplified than in the sad spectacle of a Treasurer scampering around the globe touting on behalf of the company in question when his job is surely to ensure the long-term health of the state, not of an ill-managed business with no future other than plans for more of the same vandalism.
In another powerful letter, circulated this week by GetUp!, the burgeoning grass roots movement aimed at bringing participation back into democracy, Bob Carr, the longest serving Premier of New South Wales, writes passionately about the future of the River Red Gums*. Carr, who served as environment minister in the Wran Labor government between 1984 and 1988 before becoming Premier, was responsible of the massive expansion of national parks in New South Wales and is understandably proud of his record. So what does the current government have to be proud of? A shocking record in education? Ditto health? Ditto conservation of the natural and built environments? Absurd layers of bureaucracy that make this not only the smallest but also the most over-governed state in the nation? A ‘line in the sand’ that disappeared almost immediately? And, in the weeks leading up to today’s poll, a disgusting, gutter-level campaign of fear and smear designed to appeal to the baser instincts of the electorate and to further divide this already polarised state?
You will note that apart from highlighting Bob Carr’s enlightened policies on conservation that created a further three hundred national parks in his state, I have not mentioned any other mainland government. As someone who spends a good deal of time in Sydney it ill behoves me to cite the current New South Wales government or indeed any other mainland government as an exemplar. Indeed New South Wales’ descent from the high-minded policies of the Wran era that gave the state the exciting new libraries, theatres, museums and art galleries that generated a palpable pride in a city that had often been dismissed, especially by Melburnians, as gauche and uncultured, into the present chaos is almost as sad as Tasmania’s self-immolation. The fact is that we must demand better performance from ALL our elected officials and continue to remind then that they are our servants and that we are not their serfs.
During my almost six years here I have watched with dismay as politicians, with no particular skills, lorded it over the populace as if they were descendants of the Medici. To that notorious ministerial question “Don’t you know who I am?” there are two possible retorts. “Yes. A loud-mouthed nonentity” or, more plainly, “Who do you THINK you are?”
Later today we will know whether to despair or to continue to hope for that better-managed, more democratic Tasmania that my friend wrote of and to which he hopes to return. May it be the latter. But, being a realist, he did append a comment to his hopeful message – ”Pigs might fly.”
*To be published on Tasmanian Times on Monday.
