Economy
Good riddance, John Gay
From my home on the east side of the Huon, I look across to a horizon of Hartz Mountains peaks. Between the river and those peaks, the range-tiered landscape is a patchwork quilt of single-species plantation lands plus, here and there, bits of remnant native forest.
The plantation land varies from trees ready for chipping, saplings, seedlings and clear-felled destruction (some of it probably still smoking here and there following the autumn burn-offs). All of this acreage was once a safe home to Tasmania’s incredibly intricate biodiversity. No more. Now it is a hell.
And — like humans in the killings fields of Cambodia; in Vietnam post- Agent Orange, napalm, bombs, bullets and landmines; in Uganda after Idi Amin; in Rwanda and Burundi after the genocide; in Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the Enola Gay; in Dresden in the wake of England’s late-World War II vengeance; in Germany’s conquered lands after the Holocaust; in China after the Cultural Revolution; in Hungary and Czechoslovakia after the Red repression . . . — the surviving life forms in Tasmania’s devastated forest lands (without knowing why their homes have been bulldozed, chainsawed and burnt around them) are doing their best to pick up the pieces.
I can’t join our Labor and Liberal leaders in their obsequious thanking of John Gay for all the “benefits” he has brought to our sadly devastated, potentially economically bankrupt state. Far more than just John Gay must pass from the forestry scene and from our parliamentary benches before we are to have any chance of picking up the pieces.
Good riddance, John Gay.
Andrew Main, The Australian
Extract:
At the lowest point last week a crossing of 23 million shares, many of them sold by top shareholder Perpetual, went through the sharemarket at 25c each.
Gay has never been one to surrender quietly. The man who in 2005 launched an unsuccessful action against 20 green groups — dropped a year later after a judge’s criticism that the statement of claim lacked coherence — fired a splendid broadside in March in an interview with his local paper, The Launceston Examiner.
He revealed that he and two other Tasmanian directors, Richard Miller and former Liberal premier Robin Gray, had been asked to leave the board by fund managers that owned a major part of Gunns.
The newspaper described the institutions as “interstate business interests”.
Gay said he would not resign, and “these people said it would be better for the company if there were no Tasmanians on the board but if I go, the (pulp) mill, the Launceston head office and our interests would go with me”.
“It just won’t happen,” he said. “I was re-elected at our AGM last year. They’re just trying to wedge the board.” In early May the former premier resigned, but on Thursday last week this newspaper reported one of the big shareholders as saying: “We’ve tried everything short of an extraordinary general meeting to change the board.
“We’d like to see John Gay go immediately” and that same day he resigned after 37 years.
One close observer said yesterday Gay faced the choice of a dignified exit or an extraordinary general meeting to have him replaced — an extremely rare event in Australian listed industrial companies.
Mr Gay could not be reached for comment.
Yesterday, far from collapsing, and perhaps taking the Launceston head office with it, the company’s share price jumped by 12c, or more than 40 per cent, to 39.5c.
Although the company is carrying some $600 million in debt, the shares are widely believed to have a net asset value of more than $1.50, particularly as it controls a massive 300,000ha of plantation timber in four Australian states after taking over the management of Great Southern’s extensive bluegum plantations after that group crashed.