tappy

#1 and2, a journalist’s principal target in covering courts, exposing rorts, reporting opinions of respected men like Scholes and victims of corporate greed as saw-millers and truckies, is to make those elected to listen and act.

But the ‘club’ they join elevates them from individual representatives to an elitist group whose principle motivations are self-interest.

As a journalist in my The Examiner and early ABC days , we dealt face-to-face with the elected and Cabinet Ministers, such as Neil Robson who also railed against trail-bikes and woodchipping effects on our rivers and lakes.

Examiner editorial staff treated with much suspicion any statement from the government and often the directive to journalists was, ‘go to the minister son’.
“But he’d be in bed, Mr Connell.”
“Get him out of bed, son. You’re his boss!”
“OK, Mr Connell.”
“Call me Bert, son.”

Today the new generation of journalists have grown into the environment; press statements from an army of former journos, now running government press offices.

Elected members, including ministers do not act without the office of smoke and mirrors, the media office.

The principle role of the journalist is to report to its readers and broadcast audience. Woodchipping was in its infancy in 1976 abouts.

The heavy investments in machinery and trucks went ahead in a resource that most thought an endless one. Environmental impact was no more than an esoteric concept…except to individuals as Scholes and Robson.

Wayne Baker, President of the professional fishing industry warned of members’ thinking of huge capital investment to trawl-fish Orange Roughey, a CSIRO-promoted ‘endless fishery’. His members heeded Baker’s warning and only lawyers and doctors who rushed into investing in the Roughie-Klondike, got their fingers’ burnt, when the resource was over-exploited and died.

Truck-drivers and wood-chip contractors should have been much more circumspect about investment versus resource/markets matters. Some have been manifestly compensated. Others will go bankrupt. The warnings of pubic awareness too have been in place since the days of David Scholes…and duly ignored.

Those demanding compensation must be scorned by investors losing collective billions in the present global-markets free-fall.

At the end of the day, its simply a gamble. Family men who followed their instincts and stayed away from huge investments and poor forestry contracts are well in front.

Only a handful of ‘grumpies’ like Scholes came out bravely in support of the environment, when the chainsaws rent the air in hallowed fishing country. Today they are in armies,outranking the poor buggers who go to the bar in sawdusted-singlets after a hard day in the bush.

This inevitability was set in train in the mid70’s. But our elected representatives weren’t listening. And again those who elected them are suffering.