This is one of the most dubious reports I have read in a long time. It appears to have been written and made public with one aim in mind – to stifle community debate about water quality in the George River.
At 10 pm on Monday evening this week Alison Bleaney received notification from John Ramsay, the Convenor of the Water Panel that there was to be a public meeting at St Helens to discuss the full 88 page report at 6 pm the following day. At that meeting a few copies of the full report were available. Almost none of the public had read the full report but they were expected to discuss its findings in detail. This was an exercise in political bastardry aimed at securing a headline next day to the effect that there was no problem with the water quality of the George River.
Through this cynical exercise John Ramsay, the head of the Tasmanian Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) has seriously damaged public confidence in the independence of that authority.
In terms of the report itself none of the contentious issues are identified as such as there is only one seamless point of view expressed.
This panel’s approach was entirely negative. It carried out no testing of water, it took no samples, made no measurements and conducted no surveys of any kind. The only behaviour it undertook was to find fault with the tests initiated by Bleaney and Scammell. This was an exercise in suppressing public debate and it has cost the Tasmanian taxpayers $150, 000.
The strategy used by the panel to counter the evidence of toxins in the George River was twofold:
i) the first relates to the toxin in the foam; and
ii) the second relates to grab samples.
The panel report confirms a high level of toxicity in all foam samples, “From March 2005 onwards, all foam samples collected in the George River were toxic’ (p 74).
But the panel dismisses this evidence by saying that it was the method of collection through skimmer boxes that has caused the high levels of toxicity.
This is an entirely fallacious argument and has nothing to do with the evidence that the foam is toxic and every sample collected in the river shows it to be toxic. The George River carries a great deal of toxic foam which is often caught by the natural ‘skimmer boxes’ of logs and branches in the water. The end result of this argument is that the panel has confirmed the river has toxic foam.
In addition, the report says: “The poor chemical match between leaf leachates and the foam components (Hickey and Stewart, 2010) suggests that any observed toxicity in the foam is not derived from fresh leaves.” (p. 56)
This statement completely contradicts Marcus Scammell’s press statements (30/05/10 and 01/06/10) which says: “Ultimately a chemical signature from E. nitens leaf was finally matched with a chemical signature from the toxic water.”
Is the statement on page 56 of the report correct or not? When questioned at the public meeting in St Helens, Graeme Batley could give no explanation as to why these two statements are contradictory. We will have to wait on further evidence to determine who we can trust and the veracity of the report’s statement.
This then was the strategy the panel used to dismiss the evidence of toxic foam even though the river carries toxic foam across most of its length.
As for the evidence of toxicity from ‘grab’ samples, the panel report confirms that there is toxicity in the water. However, it dismisses this evidence on the basis that there were only 3 samples that showed toxicity out of 26, that is, approximately 9% of grab samples show toxicity.
The panel report dismisses these three grab sample in a poorly argued justification that displays the true cynical purpose of the report.
When asked at the St Helens public meeting why the panel had not recommended further testing of grab samples on the basis that 9% of samples show toxicity, Graeme Batley replied the panel did not consider further testing to be worthwhile. In terms of public health this is an irresponsible reply.
Yet in spite of the panel’s bias this report has confirmed that the George River is toxic. Further testing must be carried out.
A final point: all the public statements made by the Break O’ Day Mayor Legge in relation to this issue should be treated with scepticism; Legge has many hundreds of hectares of plantations growing on his property along the Break O’ Day River, a river that was once healthy.
