Big Rod and Julia’s bribe

My magnificent young rooster, Big Rod, was anything but the other morning. The evening before, he had flown up into a tree to roost with Speckles, his best mate. I heard him heralding the false dawn, but when I came out about 8am the trail of feathers toward the dam alerted me all was not well. Big Rod, I sensed, was in big trouble.

I found him, standing defiantly within the dam fence, comb mangled, beaks split, hackles bloodied. There was no denying it: Big Rod had come down from his last roost. It was then I had a flashing thought that it was not just a mortally wounded rooster I was looking at; I sensed I was gazing at a scene symbolic of the lot of our desperate Tasmanian forestry industry workers — battered and torn, bruised and scarred, doggedly hanging on to a failing way of life, refusing to believe that the industry that has given their families a hand-to-mouth existence for nearly two centuries is on the brink of demise.

Just like our loggers and truck drivers, Big Rod was refusing to accept that his career, indeed his life, was over. With a drip feed (the equivalent of PM Julia Gillard’s multi-million-dollar offer to forestry workers) he might have lived on for a while, but he would have looked very odd wandering around the yard with a tube stuffed down his oesophagus and a drip-feed stand tucked under a wing. Never again would he be able to peck up the grain scattered before him each day.

My decision wasn’t difficult: I can recognise a hopeless case when I see one. Gillard probably can as well, but, political expedience being what it is, she has chosen to ignore it. Instead, she is reprising the bribery practised by Liberal PM predecessor John Howard by scattering the chaff of vain hope before forestry workers she desperately wants on her side come the next election. (Remember Howard outbidding Mark Latham in 2004, thus prolonging the industry’s agony while winning for himself a handy block of votes?)

So it was “Farewell, Big Rod” as I laid his head on the block. Though obviously short of blood, he struggled a bit, but then, just before the axe fell, he lay still and stopped squawking, as if realising there was no point in resistance — better to end it now than to struggle on in agony.

It’s a pity Gillard is choosing not to do the same with the timber industry. With one carefully thought out package, probably costing not much more than what she is already offering, she could put enough cash into workers’ banks to see the older ones through to retirement and the younger ones able to pay their way until suitably retrained for, and employed in, other industries.

And she could insist on locking away the extra native forest the Greens and forest defenders are demanding, at the same time encouraging an enlarged selective logging and value-adding system that would obviate the need for the barbaric clear-fell and scorched-earth tactics of Forestry Tasmania, tactics that take a huge toll on habitat, flora and fauna. A bonus for her would be that she could then bask in the knowledge that a lot more carbon was in safe storage.

Such an approach would, at last, lend a bit of credibility to Tasmania’s at present ludicrous claim to being clean and green.

As Timber Communities Australia’s Barry Chipman says of Gillard’s present “solution”, it has been a problem that calls for “balance”. He fails to mention that balance rarely satisfies anyone: while forestry industry workers are belly-aching about how much they are being asked to give away, forest defenders are complaining just as loudly about the 100,000-or-so hectares that are not to be reserved and that the 400,000-or-so that are slated for reserve are not guaranteed instant national park status.

It’s all looking like more knee-jerk double-talk from a PM who, soon after being given the top job, got off on the wrong foot by promising an asylum-seeker trading centre based on East Timor; a PM who said she wouldn’t be seeking to use PNG again to offload asylum seekers; and a PM who said she had a deal with Malaysia — and then spent months in tortuous negotiation before being able to make her promise a costly (and probably counter-productive) reality.

All this morally questionable stuff is feeding the fortunes of Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, a tricky Mr No and bonehead champion of the great flat-earther moronity.

Gillard’s judgment may be flawed from time to time, but at least she does appear capable of vision and giving close attention and commitment to issues of vital national interest. Abbott has yet to prove he has a grasp on anything other than that a moronic mass out there is easily swayed by trite mantras.

The Malaysian deal is another manifestation of the great national cowardice and lack of humanitarian decency Australia is displaying to the wider world; and of evidence that we are so willing to play with the lives of helpless people that we will commit them to the care of a police state.
The now apparently imminent asylum seeker deal with PNG reinforces the Howard-engendered sense that Australia is still willing to resort to neo-colonialist tactics by leaning on an impoverished Third World neighbour to do our dirty work, instead of acknowledging that, in the greater scheme of national priorities, seaborne asylum seekers should be seen as a small-beer irritant.

The carbon tax campaign, while indicating a bit more ticker on Gillard’s part, is no more than a charade. Something much more substantial is needed if we, the world’s dirtiest polluters, are to play a serious role in combating global warming. The merit in the tax is that at last Australia will be tackling, no matter how pathetically, one of the great challenges humans will have to deal with for centuries to come. As the song says, from little things big things grow

And now we have the Tasmanian forestry package, a political fix that will not end the pro/anti forestry hostilities. Nor will it provide enough impetus for Tasmania’s forestry-reliant communities to come to the realisation that this is, indeed, the 21st century, not the 19th; and that reliable timber export markets (which have rarely, if ever, turned a genuinely profitable dollar for the state economy as a whole) are relics of the past. Instead of blaming those awful Greens, they should be trying with all their might to persuade their children that this is not the time to grow up and do what Dad did, rather, they should press on past Year 10 and into tertiary study. Education is the way out of the cul-de-sac Tasmania has inflicted upon itself.

Big Rod is in the fridge, about to get an ignominious roasting. But at least his troubles are over and I will remember him for a show of great courage that denied a predatory quoll a tasty meal.

Tasmania could do with a bit of that kind of courage, a courage that recognises that times, conditions and markets are in constant flux, and that a huge and brave change of mindset is needed to meet the challenges they bring.

For the moment, Tasmania, on the question of a new and creative approach to forestry operations, is making a terrible mess of it all. It’s a pity Gillard and Giddings can’t see beyond the deceit of yet another Howard-style slick fix solution.

Liberal and Labor? Did you see Eric Abetz and Giddings on Q&A the other night? Each is as awful as the other.

Bob Hawkins is an advocate for transparency in all democratic institutions. He is not a member of any political organisation.