Economy
Devine retribution … John Gay, Working Class Hero
Felled by an invidious green plot
This is the chilling story of how green activists targeted and finally brought down John Gay, the visionary former chairman of the Tasmanian timber company Gunns, damaged the company and helped wreck the state economy.
It contains a clear warning for the rest of Australia of what lies in wait as emboldened environmental activists move on to new bogus campaigns against their next targets: the ”wild rivers” of Cape York at the expense of indigenous enterprise, the fishing industry, farming or, catastrophically, the coal industry.
In Gay’s downfall is everything you need to know about the conscience-less dishonesty of the green movement, and how its war on progress is camouflaged as concern for nature.
”I’m not bitter with the company,” says Gay, who resigned in May. “I had to leave Gunns because the institutional investors were targeted by the greens and kept pressuring me to resign, and I just wasn’t prepared to put my wife and two kids through any more [of the] thuggery in the green movement. They’ve damaged Tasmania and did their best to damage my credibility.”
The third-generation Tasmanian sawmiller left school at 15 to work with his father, before building his own sawmill and being headhunted at 28 by Gunns, a family-owned timber milling and hardware store business in Launceston then turning over about $10 million a year. He became the managing director, transforming Gunns into a top 50 company with a market capitalisation of $900 million by 2003, when it was one of the best-performing companies on the stock exchange.
Gay bought the company back from the multinational Rio Tinto, becoming a hero of the working people of Tasmania.
But the international green movement and the Australian Wilderness Society fought a relentless campaign to bring the company to its knees and destroy Gay.
They let loose violent feral protesters who chained themselves to trees and sabotaged logging equipment; protesters with placards picketed the ANZ Bank, which had undertaken to finance Gay’s proposal for a pulp mill in the Tamar Valley, but pulled out at the last minute.
And they had environmentalists in suits successfully traduce Gay to cowardly institutional investors who earlier this year dumped Gunn’s shares, halving the value of the company in a week.
Greenies in suits also went to Japan, destroying Gunn’s markets for its woodchips, threatening – in an oh-so-reasonable way – companies which used pulp sourced from Tasmania’s forests to make paper.
Afraid their brands would be trashed, Gunns’ Japanese customers dropped Tasmania like a hot potato.
Then there was the personal vilification. Gay describes it as ”torture” for his wife, Erica, and adult son and daughter, with his home under assault two or three nights a week for years – from smoke bombs under the house, stink bombs at the front door, dead possums in the yard, people rattling the gates late at night and screaming abuse from the street.
Leo Schofield writes to the SMH:
Pulp mill fictions
Miranda Devine paints the former Gunns chairman and chief executive John Gay as a cross between Santa Claus and St Vincent de Paul (”Felled by an invidious green plot”, August 19). Others with more experience of Tasmania see things differently.
No thinking conservationist opposes logging. What we are fiercely against is the wanton destruction of the state’s irreplaceable old-growth forests for conversion into sushi boxes, not to mention the foul polluting pulp mill proposed for the Tamar. A perfectly workable, non-controversial alternative exists in the north of the state at Hampshire, but Gay and Gunns, and a clutch of biddable vision-free politicians, refuse to consider it.
Tasmania’s economic future depends on tourism and food production, both of which require proper management of its unique natural and built environments, not their obliteration. Some of the trees in the ancient forests existed before Jesus set foot on earth. May one suggest Devine take a first-hand look at the havoc wreaked on a unique landscape by Gunns’ clear-fell logging and mass poisoning of native animals?
Leo Schofield Kempton (Tas)