ABC pic of Terry Edwards
Page 43 of the Hansard of the Leg Co select committee on the Tasmanian Forests Agreement at:
http://www.parliament.tas.gov.au/ctee/Council/Transcripts/15%20January,%202013%20-%20Hobart%20-%20morning%20session.pdf
THE LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL SELECT COMMITTEE ON THE TASMANIAN
FORESTS AGREEMENT BILL 2012 MET IN COMMITTEE ROOM 1,
PARLIAMENT HOUSE, HOBART ON TUESDAY 15 JANUARY 2013
Page 42:
Mr EDWARDS – Yes, that too. From our point of view, in the negotiations process we did tease these issues over very significantly, like a dog with a bone. These negotiations in combination have gone for virtually three years and there are very few stones we did not overturn and look under to see what we could do. We have come to an assessment that the best outcome we can come to is the one we have, which has a fairly significant …
FORESTS AGREEMENT BILL 2012, HOBART 15/1/13
(DRIELSMA/BRITTON/EDWARDS)
Page 43
… tranche of reserves almost up-front, or up-front if this WOG submission were to be accepted; then a subsequent tranche of reserves in March 2015; and a final small tranche down the track.
Our intent has been, and the negotiations process came to the point where there would be durability testing before any tranche of reserves were brought to the parliament and approved. We took the risk in doing so that significant tranches of reserves could already be in place, then, as you highlighted in your question to the bureaucrats, say, three years. If in three years there is a negative durability report, what penalty is there to those that have caused that negative durability? In one instance it could quite easily be the government of the day that is at fault if they dud us on the Forestry Tasmania outcome, for example. Equally, if it were because of a resumption of environmental activity contrary to the industry’s best interests, then realistically at the moment in this bill and indeed in our agreement there are no measures to deal with that.
Your question this morning, if I understood it correctly, was is there or could there be a process of removing reserves in that situation. That is not part of our agreement so I am not going to ask that be done. I am here to back in the agreement and I will do that. Clearly it is a matter for the Legislative Council in exercising its public interest deliberative role, which is not one we had. I have said this before to the Council and I will repeat it again: we do not have a public interest role; we have an interest to represent the people who pay our wages, which are our members.
Mr MULDER – When you talk about the threshold, you are really saying the best efforts on behalf of the ENGO signatories to influence or counteract the others. Should that influence or counteracting not be sufficient, or should we still lose the markets for the products despite the best efforts of the ENGOs, do you see that as being critical to the outcome of the total agreement even though it is beyond the control of some of the signatories?
Mr EDWARDS – Obviously we do see that as contrary to the expected outcomes from the agreement. The negotiating ENGOs have given us their commitment, which we have accepted, that they will do everything in their power and they believe they have some strong persuasive capacity with these groups both in terms of persuasion itself, but also in terms of persuading those groups I referred to before as the rich philanthropists, to no longer fund these organisations. If they do not fund the organisations they eventually wither and die. One has withered and died over recent times because their funding was pulled. We are hopeful that the new paradigm of peace created by this agreement will obviate the activities of those sorts of groups. We are hopeful that they will eventually come to accept the outcome of this negotiations process as a basis to move forward. We fully expect that there will be a level of continued agitation by the more extreme environment groups.
Mr MULDER – What is a tolerable level of disruption? We know there will be disruption. There is no way you can stop some protests but there has to be some sort of a level at which the Council decides that this is an intolerable level and that one end of the bargain is not being kept.
Mr EDWARDS – That is a judgment issue that will be exercised initially by the signatory group of the special council as it is described in the bill. We will make judgments about …
FORESTS AGREEMENT BILL 2012, HOBART 15/1/13
(DRIELSMA/BRITTON/EDWARDS)
Page 44:
… how we will report to government, or to the parliament I think it is now, on durability, and the parliament will access that using their public interest criteria. That is as it should be. You and the lower House in combination are the elected representatives of the Tasmanian people. You have these responsibilities and you are paid reasonably well to exercise them, far better than me and I am sure you would exercise them far better than me. It is not possible, I do not think, to simplistically describe the threshold of acceptable levels of environmental activism. As soon as you start doing that you guarantee that becomes the minimum and I do not want to do that. Our hope is that there will be no environmental activism because there will no need.
Dr DRIELSMA – Clearly you have put your finger on a …
http://www.parliament.tas.gov.au/ctee/Council/Transcripts/15%20January,%202013%20-%20Hobart%20-%20morning%20session.pdf
• Richard Denniss, The Australia Institute: Silence of the logging lambs
Last week, under the guise of a forestry “peace deal”, the Gillard government committed $350 million of new industry assistance and other handouts in exchange for the Tasmanian government passing legislation that imposes an unprecedented restriction on free speech.
According to the norms of modern political debate, Tony Abbott’s opposition should have raged against wasteful spending while the graphic artists at the Murdoch press photoshopped ministerial faces onto Stalin’s body.
But there is nothing normal about the politics of subsidising native-forest logging in Tasmania. The Right were as silent about the impact of a third of a billion dollars’ worth of industry assistance on public debt as they were on a state Labor government trying to stifle free speech.
Officially, the Tasmanian Forest Agreement package includes money to “restructure” the forestry industry, compensate displaced forest workers, pay out forest contracts, subsidise regional development projects and help establish and manage new reserves. Although the details of the funding arrangements are vague at present, somewhere in the order of $66 million to $100 million is earmarked for forestry subsidies.
There is nothing new about Australian taxpayers subsidising native-forest logging, but there is something unique about the so-called “peace deal”. That is, it wasn’t just the loggers begging the Commonwealth for corporate welfare; this time they were joined in their quest for cash by a handful of environment groups. And that is where the story swings from the unexpected to the inexplicable.
Part of the deal between the loss-making loggers and the three relevant environment groups (Australian Conservation Foundation, the Wilderness Society and Environment Tasmania) included a so-called durability clause. The deal not only delivers a swag of taxpayers’ dollars to the loggers but the environment movement has to promise to stop protesting about native forest logging. Specifically, the ACF, the Wilderness Society and Environment Tasmania have not only promised to abandon further logging protests, they have also promised to help silence other environmentalists
Silence dissenters, says Gillard
Prime Minister Julia Gillard specifically emphasised this element of the big environment groups’ terms of surrender, stating that, “The obligation is on the signatories that first came together, the parties who started this process, to do everything they can to use their abilities to silence those who haven’t gone with the mainstream consensus.”
“Silence”. Rather than encourage the green groups that were part of this $350 million deal to prop up a failing industry to debate those who think they are mad, the Prime Minister called on the critics to be “silenced”, and she meant it. The durability clause spells out the consequences for failing to stifle criticism: if either house of the Tasmanian Parliament deems that “substantial active protest” has occurred then forest reserves will be open to logging.
The creation of this legislative poison pill is equivalent to telling a union that if it strikes for better conditions then the minimum wage will be cut, or telling human rights groups that if they protest for improved treatment of asylum seekers the annual intake of refugees will be cut.
While it is unclear if it is constitutional for a state government to attempt to silence political protest, it is quite clear why the environment groups involved want to silence protest. They know their deal doesn’t bear scrutiny.
You would expect that the ACF, the Wilderness Society and Environment Tasmania received a substantial benefit for helping their old foes get $350 million in handouts and agreeing to silence themselves and the rest of the movement.
In fact, they got virtually nothing.
The loss-making loggers have simply promised, in exchange for another round of subsidies, not to log in some areas, around half of which they were never planning to log in. But given that they could not afford to keep logging without the subsidies, the big environment groups’ main achievement is the perpetuation of native-forest logging. No wonder they think silencing dissent is important.
Richard Denniss is executive director of the Australia Institute.
First published in The Australian Financial Review on May 6, 2013.
Richard Denniss, The Australia Institute here
• Dr Frank Nicklason:
Dear (Mercury) Editor
A number of writers have considered the question: Can the ‘Forestry Peace Deal’ really deliver peace? (Mercury letters 6/5)
Like many others I wish that that the deal could lead to peace. I understand that the deal, on its own, cannot.
Lasting peace is always built on the foundation of truth and justice. Without these necessities genuine peace is not possible.
Justice, as Malcolm Ryan suggests, would require that Forestry Tasmania be held accountable for the massive wastage of publicly owned forests and public funds. Also wasted has been the opportunity to develop a forest industry appropriate to the times in which we live and to the needs of all Tasmanian people, including future generations.
Whilst issues such as the ‘vesting of huge tracts of our Crown land’ to Forestry Tasmania and the numerous examples of destruction of public assets remain inadequately investigated and explained we are doomed to Ground Hog Days of bitter social division.
Frank Nicklason
North Hobart
• Libby Lester, University of Tasmania. Brett Hutchins, Monash University, Melbourne have written two very interesting articles on the TFA process in Media, Culture and Society and The Australian Journalism Review
Quote: This relative dearth of information and the non-existent profile of participants – it was difficult to establish who was attending the talks and when they were being held – was extraordinary given that a lasting “peace in the forests” (Stedman, 2010) appeared to be a possibility after several decades of conflict.
From, The power of the unseen: environmental conflict, the media and invisibility, Media, Culture and Society:
Figure 1. Number of media items per month generated by Tasmanian environmental and forestry industry organizations relating to the peace talks between March 2010 and March 2011
Note: TCA (Timber Communities Australia), FT (Forestry Tasmania), TWS (The Wilderness Society), ET (Environment Tasmania), HVEC (Huon Valley Environment Centre), SWST (Still Wild, Still Threatened), OCG (Our Common Ground).
Figure 2. Number of news media items per month relating to the peace talks between March 2010 and March 2011
Conclusion: invisibility and the logic of containment
Little of what has been described here is healthy for democratic processes and social movement politics, especially if transparency is regarded as a sacrosanct value in these
settings. The importance of environmental policies and industry practices to elections in Tasmania, and the consistent impact these issues have on the national and international stage, means that political citizenship is difficult to enact when major decisions are removed from the realm of those affected by them (Miller, 2007). This problem became apparent through complaints emanating from local councils and communities affected by the private talks when they eventually become cognizant of their existence (ABC, 2010f). The ‘secretive’ talks, it was claimed in the press, have ‘“no legitimacy” while the community was not involved’ (Neales, 2010). It is difficult to deny the validity of this charge given the impact that the Statement of Principles continues to have on citizens living across the length and breadth of the island. The full implications of the talks continue to unfold as debate proceeds about when the moratorium on logging of high conservation value forests will actually begin and what shape a new pulp mill might take. It is here that the continuing role of investigative and campaigning journalism emphatically announces itself (see Schudson, 2008). An aggressive and inquisitive stance by journalists both in Tasmania and on mainland Australia might have revealed the existence and contents of the secret talks much earlier in 2010, or at least posed unrelenting questions to all sides as to why they had disappeared from the media and public stage. Forceful questions alone might have helped elicit input and comment from a range of sources. The analysis presented in this article has moved beyond the contention that key decisions about environmental futures are sometimes decided ‘behind closed doors’ by powerful groups that wield influence both inside and outside government. A combination of fieldwork that is reliant on access to key actors, and exhaustive content analysis and monitoring of media activities generated evidence of this process in action. The issue is, why would environmentalists, journalists and, to a lesser degree, industry representatives engaged in a fiercely fought and divisive symbolic and political fight all change tack so sharply and collectively withdraw from public view. The answer, we suggest, can be found in the conditions fostered by the new mediated visibility described by Thompson (2005), which has produced a comparatively unnoticed flow-on effect. The value and function of both visibility and invisibility have changed in the era of computer-mediated interaction and convergence, reflecting the increased mutual interpenetration of complex media systems and conflict events. As Simon Cottle (2011a, 2011b, 2011c) convincingly argues about mediated politics under the conditions of globalization, the proliferation of activist networked communications and news media representations work to help constitute contemporary protests, activism and social movements. This function sees the interaction between news, activist and social networking media informing how events and issues are defined and understood by audiences, politicians and participants. Particular political positions and practices are alternatively legitimized, delegitimized and/or bypassed in highly unpredictable ways in the process. This instability in the social production of meaning then feeds back into multi-directional digital information flows, and public opinion(s) that are difficult to manage and predict (Cottle, 2011c). The decision to become invisible and remove politics from public screens and spheres, therefore, reflects an instrumental logic of containment. A profusion of information, news and representations creates an impetus to stem this flow, reduce the range of inputs into decision-making, and centralize power among key political actors who, ironically, speak on behalf of decentralized social movements such as environmentalism. By taking this approach, the capacity of media and communications to enter into the definition of environmental risks and problems is reduced and the chance of outside voices disrupting ‘orderly’ negotiations is minimized. A concerted attempt at containment is also more likely in the context of intractable environmental disputes like the one in Tasmania. Invisibility is a tempting option when the entrenchment of divisions between opposing sides and competing interests has become counter-productive for all involved, meaning they are willing to enter into negotiations because of exhaustion, vulnerability, suffering and/or an opportunistic sense that they might secure a favourable result. Manuel Castells states that politics in the network society is ‘fundamentally framed, in its substance, organization, process, and leadership, by the inherent logic of the media system’ (2004: 375; see also 2009: 193–4). We have sought to demonstrate that a counter-response of environmental and political actors may be to evade this framing by the media system altogether. In a multimodal, multichannel and multiplatform environment, the ability to not be seen at strategically significant moments should be recognized as a sign and source of power.
From The power of the unseen: environmental conflict, the media and invisibility, Australian Journalism Review:
Figure 1: Percentages of news items, website activity, media releases and social networking (forestry), March
2010-March 2011
Conclusion:
Once the peace talks again emerged on to the public stage, participants and the Tasmanian Government implemented a series of open meetings, an advertising campaign and website, and political debates in an attempt to re-engage the public and challenge the perception that the negotiations had excluded the public from involvement in the future of its forests and forest industry. Meanwhile, protest activity returned to normal levels, although they and markets campaigns became a point of contention for industry participants in the talks. While negative accusations about the “private” and “secret” nature of the negotiations have also continued (see, for example, Gutwein, 2012), it is important to reiterate that the period of controlled, mediated invisibility in Tasmania was sustained for only a relatively short period in the overall life of the peace talks. Overall, our case adds complexity to understandings of new forms of mediated visibility, privacy and publicness in the context of journalism, the internet and other forms of digital media and communications. While, in the end, the control of information about the peace talks could not be sustained, it was surprisingly achievable across a range of media forms at a crucial period. That this attempt to control knowledge about the peace talks had the result – whether deliberate or not – of containing public debate and participation in one of Australia’s longest-running political disputes should give pause for thought. Significantly, it was journalism in its traditional forms of newspapers and television and their online publications that filled the space deserted by government and industry public relations, and by the environment movement’s websites, protest activities and media releases6. Despite significant professional and organisational obstacles to reporting the private negotiations, journalists eventually broke through the agreed silence to reveal the existence and potential impact of the talks. Mimi Sheller and John Urry write of a “messy complexity” where traditional boundaries of public-private lose analytical potency in networks of mobilities: “Thus the problems of (and hopes for) democratic citizenship must be theorized in relation to these dynamic, multiple mobilities of people, objects, information and images, especially as they move in powerfully fused or hybridized forms” (Sheller & Urry, 2003, p. 122). Our case, however, suggests that by focusing on the spaces of struggle over the private-public interface, the “messy complexity” brought about by contemporary media and communications can become a little clearer. Significantly, it is journalists and traditional modes of journalistic investigation that continue to possess potency in deciding what should be made visible at the point of this interface, emphasising that an historically durable notion of the public interest remains crucial in an age of endless digital novelty and new media.
Editor: Copyright issues prevent publication of the full papers: Contact: Libby Lester | Professor and Program Director | Journalism, Media and Communications | University of Tasmania | Private Bag 22 | School of Social Sciences | Hobart TAS 7001 |
• Wilderness Society: Toolangi’s forest sanctuary disappears
