My Cry from the Heart: Deliver Us From The Message

Deliver us from The Message

I’m just a little Australian settling in front of the TV or thumbing through the local paper…..

I can expect to read about a local road accident or perhaps an outburst of crime. I can catch some gossip and sport. Keep up with the births and deaths, skim the classifieds.

Living almost anywhere in Australia I can turn on the evening news without one mention of a hated business proposal contrived to support selective groups at cost to others across the community. I know this, because I catch news via free-to-air satellite TV. I catch local news from Alice Springs, Mt Isa and Longreach on Southern Cross network. I catch propaganda-free news from a host of other TV stations across Australia. The news is free of a relentless, ongoing push for vested interests harmful to the community at large.

Then I switch across to regional television from Tasmania. News snatches reliably justify clear-fell forest practices and wood-chipping. The plight of redundant logging communities is lamented. Hopeful tidbits on Gunns’ long-proposed pulp mill are inevitably sprinkled through the viewing week. Then come the commercial breaks. There’s a taxpayer-funded bundle of sleaze from Forestry Tasmania. (Thought FT was broke!) There’s a glossy ad for the Gunns pulp mill, replete with gleaming stainless steel and a big mural of pristine rainforest in the mill’s hypothetical control room. Gunns urge us to join their blog. (Thought they were broke too, and in desperate need of compensation).

I’m wrenched back to the sorry tale that is Tasmania.

This is my highly subjective plea for fresh air.

Softening up

A seven-year nightmare continues every time I dare open the local paper or turn on the regional TV.

I would rather be living anywhere else in Australia to be free of this mind-numbing campaign waged by the few, but I can’t afford to leave this poor, battered state. This is Tasmania, circa 2011. The populace is in the grip of mind control relentlessly dribbled over the days, weeks, months and years on behalf of one company and one industrial cabal.

Where have the millions been found for the newly stepped up propaganda? Where are the journalists and editors saying no to the dribble of so-called news backing up this loaded message of salvation for the community? Now that people have been recently primed with additional advertorial, I can sniff another industry-commissioned poll attempting to validate Gunns’ mega pulp mill…..

We’re in Tasmania. The news has an agenda. An educational role. A purpose. A relentless slant. A patronising message for naive consumers. A Tasmanian message. It is bad enough to digest the relentless spin per unqualified narrow perspectives: we hear an opinion from an industry group – from an “analyst” – from a government business enterprise – from a bankrupt contractor – from a pollie – from the CEO of Gunns. We are subject to a slow drip of loaded opinion reminiscent of early Chinese torture techniques. It is bad enough to read or listen to such drivel. It insults your intelligence daily. But the gut-wrenching obscenity is the effect on the minds of people across Tasmania. Advertorial is couched in respectability alongside genuine news stories of community concern. The distorted narrative grows as familiar as… living in a company town, on a company island, in a Gunns universe.

There is no way that one of the world’s biggest chlorine-belching pulp mills would have been allowed to escape independent assessment and take shape through fast-track legislation written by lawyers of the company concerned without the massive publicity campaign that has masqueraded as news for as long as most Tasmanians can remember.

There is no other way that a proposal with such momentous impacts would have survived for nearly a decade – despite international market censure and in-house financial collapse – and all that in spite of continuous taxpayer subsidy. How many years ago were we witness to that “information” bus spruiking the “world’s best” pulp mill from city roadsides – care of the taxpayer? – Who could forget those 8-page full colour lift-outs from the newspaper? Just how long has this marathon campaign been softening us up because low value products will never find a respectable market without “social licence”?

When will it ever end?

Just another Gunns Saturday

So, it’s Saturday – just another Gunns’ Saturday for the media. The front page of the paper points to pages 8 and 9. The headline reads: “It’s just business – Lunch with the Gunns boss”.

I turn to page 8, fingers trembling with rage: “Gunns CEO has eyes on mill prize”. And there you have it. Yet another two pages of a so-called newspaper, contrived to sell the filthiest, most harmful, most greedy, most selfish project ever foisted upon the people of a state. Yet another two pages – of scores and scores of such pages over seven years, carrying one relentless message. All dressed up as journalism. Good morning Tasmania! You shall think as you are told. You shall live with the plans that we have for your valley, for your farms, your hillsides and streams, for your roads, for Bass Strait, for the very air that you breathe – because your newspapers and TV stations are as good as ours for their exploitation. We have spent enough over a decade to make damned sure that the editorial tows our line. Isn’t that what a palm oil investor does in the Amazon? – Buy out the cheap local paper? It’s so cheap to buy hearts and minds when a limited population of half a million guarantees low cost column-centimetres and TV schedules.

Now I’m watching a real estate ad promoting south east Tasmania: beautiful unspoiled beaches and hinterlands. And no pulp mill down there, where the pollies and bureaucrats live and work.

-Now I’m watching Escape to the Country on Southern Cross TV: the presenter asks, why do you live here? –For the community life, for the markets, the pubs, for the history, of course. Can’t help ironically musing that there’s no world scale kraft pulp mill in the wind for those English people. Come to think of it, not for any other “first-world” people around the entire world.

-Now I’m watching Aussie scenery in unfilled commercial breaks on free to air satellite TV- lovely beaches, coastal towns, hillsides, outback scenery. I’m full of bitter envy. Lucky Aussies. There’s no pulp mill or similar in the wind for them. If there is heavy industry, people have moved in to cash in on the mines and factories already there, as in Whyalla or Mt Isa. No monster proposals are foisted on existing communities. Except here in Tasmania.

Let’s watch the local news from around the mainland via satellite TV: no mention of a pulp mill. No inevitable declarations of the “right” to wood-chipping as a way of life. No intermittent mind control. No campaigns. No relentless message. So, yes, there is indeed life beyond propaganda. People do still live, prosper and enjoy themselves without throwback industries. They don’t have to become hostage to any grand industrial design. They don’t become captive, as in Tasmania – where a company and an industry so easily manipulate the media to control the hearts and minds of the people.

Opportunity lost

Across Australia, reforms addressing climate change bring hope and prosperity, but Tasmania has been singled out for other things. It has been declared Australia’s pulp plantation. It will wear Australia’s world scale retro pulp mill. As chosen people Tasmanians will be suitably informed…..

To those who had another vision for their island – and for their children’s future – they will just have to wear it. And they will be told what is good for them.

However, more than a few will lament lost opportunities that beckoned before they were trashed by the greedy few.

One day all of that propaganda dribbled over all of those pages, through all of those newscasts, for all of those days, weeks, months and years, is going to provoke such a clear explosion of rage that people will never again wonder what went so dreadfully wrong on the poor little island of Tasmania.

If I had one prayer for this island it would be: “Deliver us from The Message”.