The remaining 11 Mothers Day 22 defendants appeared in the Hobart Magistrates Court today and had all of the 17 month old trespass charges, relating to a protest in the Upper Florentine Valley on Mother’s Day 2009, dismissed.
Police presented no evidence in any of the cases relating to the Mother’s Day events and Chief Magistrate Hill dismissed the charges.
Spokesperson for the Mother’s Day 22 group, Andrew Nicholson, said that all the defendants were pleased and relieved that they finally had closure after 16 months of delays caused by Forestry Tasmania’s inability to explain confusion over the boundaries of exclusion zones and their production of numerous maps purporting to cover the site of the arrests. He also said that the group hoped that the remaining charges relating to trespass in logging coupes would now be treated similarly in view of the new attitude to forest management in Tasmania.
The Magistrate today also dismissed an additional trespass charge against one of the defendants that had been dragging on since January 2009, when police applied for a further adjournment. The Magistrate said that he would not grant an adjournment on the grounds that the defendant had waited long enough for her case to be heard and further delay was unfair. Bron Smith was one of several protesters singled out from video footage of a group of several hundred who walked peacefully into the contested Upper Florentine logging coupe in January 2009. Subsequently more than 100 people, who also entered the coupe on that day, presented themselves at Hobart Police Headquarters demanding to be charged on the same offence, but were refused.
Faces of the Florentine welcome everybody to a Community Information Day at the Upper Florentine on Sunday 7th November from 11am.
Lucy Landon-Lane:
The whiteout fog experienced in the Tamar Valley this morning is an example of the dangerous road safety conditions which would be worsened by Gunns’ proposed pulp mill.
While today’s fog lifted by 9 am, during winter these conditions can last for several days at a time, causing a severe traffic hazard to people living in the Tamar Valley.
Warwick Raverty (pulp mill expert working on the RPDC committee investigating the proposed pulp mill) pointed out that the massive amounts of steam produced by a pulp mill mixes with the fog and can cause total whiteout situations which result in an extremely hazardous situation for the community.
Pulp the Mill spokeswoman Lucy Landon-Lane said: “There are thousands of school children who travel on both the East Tamar and West Tamar highways twice a day, not to mention all the other commuters. With a massive increase in trucks feeding into the pulp mill, coupled with whiteouts such as we can expect from the existence of a pulp mill, our children’s lives will be at risk.”
“Toxic emissions from the proposed mill would also mix with the fog, causing a poisonous atmosphere which we would be forced to breathe. This will cause respiratory distress and disease to the thousands of residents in the valley.
“Gunns needs to understand that this proposed mill will NEVER have support from the community. Road safety and health are just two of the issues that the community is rightly concerned about. We will NEVER give up protesting about this pulp mill until it is dead and buried.”
