Dave Groves
Nearly eight years ago anyone with any economic sense at all understood that for Gunns it was a case of betting the company on the pulp mill getting up. They lost. Consequently, the winding up of the company began some time ago. (Gunns have been in the hands of the ANZ for a long time now.) It’s just that Gunns haven’t admitted as much in precisely those words and Tasmanian politicians persist with the grand delusion that they will wake up tomorrow and the pulp mill will be built and everyone in Tasmania will be employed and rolling in clover. Denial piled upon delusion – and these are the people who govern this state. There’s enough material here for a whole round of psychiatric conferences.
When Tasmanian politicians visited South America to be willingly duped into believing pulp mills were socially and environmentally beneficial, they missed something blindingly obvious: South America was where the pulp mills were – Tasmania was where they were not, or closing down. If they had asked themselves why, they might have been able to run round to Lindsay St when they got home to give their dopey pals in Gunns the beta on pulp mill economics. South America: economically viable. Tasmania: a dud.
Jaako Poyry, who stood to make a shipload of cash out of the Tasmanian bumkins, were spreading the opposite message to all those willing to listen: Gunns, Chambers of Commerce, LibLabs and assorted meatheads.
Leaving the economic imperative aside all the players in the pulp mill farce did everything humanly possible from the very beginning to guarantee failure.
1. The political classes in Tasmania aided and abetted Gunns in their monopoly of the logging industry. Gunns went on an acquisition spree, borrowed like there was no tomorrow (that was true!) and leveraged the company into the stratosphere Current state of the leveraging – an $800 million ‘impairment’. What a cute term. Sounds like the company is admitting to having a sore big toe whereas, in fact, every bone is broken and all internal organs have haemhorraged.
2. The government funded and promoted the proposed pulp mill in a classic Soviet style exercise in command economics. The state government, with the collusion of successive federal governments ‘picked a winner’. When governments pick winners that invariably means picking losers. The state government sent a bunch of ministers and lesser lights overseas (Aird, Llewellyn, Gordon et al) to spruik the mill to prospective investors and to provide them with the sort of guarantees that only governments can provide e.g. access to the public purse, regulatory relaxation, corporate boxes at the footy – that sort of thing. Didn’t work. Potential investors, if there were ever any stupid enough to consider investing in a place intent on producing the world’s most expensive and socially and environmentally odious pulp, were most assuredly spooked when Laurel and Hardy came to town. I gotta admit we had a good laugh at the vision of Aird and Llewellyn doing a soft shoe shuffle in Oriental and Scandinavian boardrooms.
3. Having bullied the RPDC into a state of crisis, Premier Lennon and John Gay withdrew the project from the RPDC. That was the end of the RPDC pulp mill assessment. Result: every potential lender and investor, if there were any left still impervious to the stench emanating from Tasmania, ducked under the bed clothes.
4. In a final act of lunacy Liberal and Labor politicians and a bunch of pretend independents in the Legislative Council, with a few notable exceptions (may your names forever be inscribed on a roll of honour) passed the Pulp Mill Assessment Act. Written by Gunns lawyers this Act was as shonky a bit of fast track sleaze as ever disgraced our parliament. If the proposed pulp mill wasn’t defunct already, then this was the kiss of death. There was just nowhere left to stand that wasn’t mired in shit.
Despite all of this, Tasmania’s politicians still insist on flogging this dead horse all the way to the knackers yard. As is the way with the world, these dipsticks will soon suffer a bout of collective amnesia and it will be as if the last eight years never happened.
And we who are left with memories intact will wonder why we ever bothered to mobilize and hold all those mass rallies and protests and actions and stunts and waste eight years of our lives combatting these cretins.
This comment first published on this thread, Last (w)rites. Either thread is open for comment
