A Cry from The Heart: Aerial Spraying Regulation Farce

As a previous aerial spraying activist with the TCT who helped start up Toxics Action Network in Tassie over 20 years ago, may I express my surprise at the outrage from activists at the latest legislative nonsense on aerial spraying.

I walked out on the State Government’s Aerial Sraying Guidelines Committee 20 years ago when the rest of them literally laughed me down after I expressed concerns at regulating buffer zones based on fraudulent or insufficient chemical testing. I’m sure that after 20 years of corporatised government, nothing has changed.

However, the interminable, naive appeal to “government” to “do something” over forestry plantation pollution also ignores the complicity of what I call the political Green movement, desperate for political kudos, which effectively supported chemically managed plantations, by refusing to countenance any alternative kind of forestry industry, in return for reserving high conservation forest areas.

The Wilderness Society, TCT, ET and the Greens party have, by excluding alternatives from discussion such as hemp for paper, community controlled forests (a la Southern Forests Group, mid 1990’s, where Rex Direen was told by TWS’s Alec Marr his plan would get up “over his dead body”), Prosilva, or any attempts to consider ecological management of existing forests, created a no win situation which only serves to distract anyone serious about this issue.

I well remember a conversation with Sean Cadman, who has been working for TWS on the recent Forestry Roundtable, in about 1992, when he and Alistair Graham were on the Senate Select Enquiry for Forestry panel representing the TWS and TCT respectively.

Sean apologised to me for agreeing to plantations that had to be managed with chemicals, but he and Alistair had put in a minority report calling for “sustainable” plantation management research. When I expressed my doubts about plantations’ ability to be managed without chemicals, he reassured me it was the only way to safeguard the pristine wilderness areas, and that “plantations will only be grown on old degraded farmland where people are, and its stuffed anyway”.

I was shocked to hear what I considered a callous disregard for human health, but as I didn’t want to battle the “Big Boys” in the forestry debate, as many, especially women, friends had done and failed, I turned a blind eye, hoping we were still on the same side and getting on with organic agriculture and positive alternatives.

I bothered to go to a forest activists’ meeting at Sean’s home last year to be told what had been planned for us. I asked Sean what he meant by “sustainable ” plantations in their draft document, and he admitted they still didn’t know, nor had they done anything about it in the last 20 years! But don’t YOU bother to go to an “activists'” meeting, because they blame everyone else except themselves, and they will manage each other to exclude and ostracise, and garble on in a Clayton’s type discussion with detail designed to impress I suppose.

I now see we will have to battle the “Green” politicians if we are to stop the rape of Tasmania by industrial plantation forestry (and industrial agriculture), and the horrific cancer, diabetes and other chronic illnesses which result from chemical pollution, and now affect 1 out of 4 Tasmanians (DH&HS website).

I would like to ask the Doctors for Forests to take a cold hard look at the apparent incompetence of their own profession in dealing with the lucrative chronic illness industry fostered by chemical use, without campaigning on chemical free alternatives. Cancer alone is worth $6 billion /annum in Australia alone. Has anyone ever heard Bob Brown criticize his own profession? No. He only talks about euthanasia. In a conversation I have had with Kim Booth last time it was debated in Parliament, I asked when the Greens were going to join the dots on this matter, only to be told that “I was drawing a long bow there”, and that euthenasia was for anyone tired of life! Maybe that’s the reasoning behind the Greens’ pointless policies and taxes?

Well frankly, I’m tired of a “leadership” who offer no alternative but systemic dysfunction, illness for profit and more plantations. How about you?