The whole question of Tasmania’s long term land and water management is now up for grabs.
Tasmania’s plantation estate is the elephant in the room which has the potential to wreck the whole home for decades into the future. Few people have been prepared to acknowledge this, but it is well past time that the voices of those who have been drowned out in the on-going fight to stop Gunns building a pulp mill in the Tamar Valley, be listened to, because the issue is not something that can be slotted into a separate silo from the pulp mill, to be evaded, ignored, swept under the carpet or treated as a political bargaining card and a trade-off by various interest groups.
Tony Burke’s “no going backwards on a plantation-only pulp mill”, whatever it reveals about his lack of understanding of federal law (in this case the EPBC Act) in his own portfolio, also shows how the blinkers are well and firmly glued on when it comes to the many issues surrounding the unsustainability of Tasmania’s plantation estate.
This is to be expected from a politician who is happy to give a tick of approval to “dioxin lite” effluent pouring into Bass Strait in the order of 29 gigalitres annually, matching the volume of water used by the greater Launceston area for all other purposes. But it is also to be expected from a federal politician who is blind to the ramifications of Plantation Isle because the issues are being hidden from view.
In exactly the same way, it is most unfortunate that the roundtable established in May last year failed in its deliberations to deal with the whole issue of the plantation estate. The evidence is overwhelming that the community voices and the professional voices which have expressed a range of concerns about the plantation estate, over a long period of time and in detail, were deliberately excluded from the roundtable in order that those issues be ignored and evaded in their entirety.
The roundtable’s “principles of agreement” are therefore an irrelevance in relation to Tasmania’s holistic future. They have been a continuation of the PMAA by other means, a kind of “critical non-compliance” with the key issues, social, economic and environmental, that we should not allow to be continually ignored.
The campaign against the pulp mill should not be confined to a singular concern of location in the Tamar Valley, or to a trade-off between native forest feedstock and plantation feedstock. In the first place, it needs to be remembered by the people of Tasmania that there is no legislative requirement within federal law, whether it be the EPBC Act or any other Commonwealth legislation, and within Tasmanian law, that imposes conditions on the place and location of wood supply for the mill and forestry management practices used.
It makes no difference at all whether feedstock comes from native forest, regrowth, plantations or a mixture of all those sources, when the conditions under which those sources exist or have been established are in gross violation of forestry management practices as stipulated under FSC certification, or indeed under any conditions which degrade the environment. Most of Gunns’ hardwood plantations cannot be granted FSC certification because they have been established without reference to high conservation values relating to protection of water catchments, soil protection and other landscape considerations. In fact, if Gunns’ own information to its shareholders is to be believed, the company is currently not seeking FSC certification for its pulp mill supply within Tasmania.
In addition to the fact that inadequate attention has been paid to the hydrological issues and soil protection issues in the growing and harvesting areas, insufficient attention been paid to fire risk, to the loss of food-producing land and to health issues associated with chemicals used in the establishment and maintenance of plantations, including the contentious matter of aerial spraying.
Short term area-rotation of monocultural eucalypt plantations are unsustainable in Tasmanian conditions, and clear-felling is a practice which must be stopped as a way of harvesting timber. It is the antithesis of good forest management.
Other issues of concern include the question of the toxic effects of eucalyptus nitens plantations on water supplies, and the failure of government and regulatory authorities to address these concerns, but rather, systematically attempt to evade the issues. Similarly, issues of lax and discriminatory application of existing law, and the continuing special legal privileges which pertain to the forestry industry alone, have the potential to make further inroads into the public purse if Plantation Isle is allowed to tighten its grip further.
It has already been seen how pork barrelling for the pulp mill has occurred in infrastructure development, especially in road development, in various direct and indirect subsidies, and in the misuse of the law in relation to acquiring private land for the East Tamar pipeline. The potential for this to extend further, to service both public and private plantation feedstock, is obvious, at both local and State jurisdictional levels.
Finally, there is the overall holistic issue about Tasmania’s vision for its own future. It has always been very clear that the opportunity costs of a pulp mill in Tasmania far outweigh any benefits, and that the mill would be uncompetitive with mills elsewhere, such as in South America, in the global marketplace. In the end the burden of losses – as is happening now in Tasmanian forestry – will be socialised. That is inevitable if a pulp mill is built in Tasmania, whether in the Tamar Valley or elsewhere.
The location of Gunns’ pulp mill in the Tamar Valley has been the focus of opposition for most of the past seven years, but it is time to extend our vision and come to grips with the fact that a pulp mill anywhere in Tasmania will not address the key issues which underpin the maintenance of a huge Tasmanian plantation estate for decades into the future. It will merely postpone them, at much greater cost to Tasmanians at some future date.
The signs are there for all to see that we are avoiding confronting the elephant in the room, like latter day Easter Islanders or Detroit car makers. Plantation Isle holds out a future for Tasmanians as desolate as the treeless landscape of Easter Island or the wasteland of deserted factories, suburbs and deteriorating infrastructure that is the lesson of Detroit.
Peter Henning
NB: Some information in this has been taken directly from material written by Alison Bleaney, Frank Nicklason and Frank Strie.
