The Government Leader in the Senate, Eric Abetz, is a millstone around Tasmania’s neck, former Greens Leader Dr Bob Brown will tell the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management conference in Hobart this morning.
Giving the opening keynote address, Brown says that “the Abetz view of Tasmania as a quarry and woodpile is not only last century, it is directly responsible for worsening Tasmania’s poorer economic performance and higher unemployment rate compared to mainland states.”
This is highlighted by two significant job-creating and economy-stimulating projects of great benefit to Tasmania which depended on private innovative thinking outside the negative politics practised by thinkers like Abetz.
MONA has succeeded because politicians had no say in it. Unlike the hundreds of millions of dollars if taxpayers’ money which, as Minister for Forests, Eric Abetz injected into the job-shedding logging industry in Tasmania, MONA was not built on government handouts.
“Now we have Graeme Woods’ Triabunna triumph of a concept for converting a failed woodchip mill into a successful modern, tourism hub which promises to be the pride of the region and once again without government handouts. Like all the other woodchip mills in Tasmania, this one was closed and rusting when Wood took it over. Now he has unveiled plans for an exciting tourism and scientific study centre and Abetz is bad-mouthing both the project and the visionary behind it. Abetz is a millstone around Tasmania’s neck in 2013,” Brown says.
Bob Brown, Bob Brown Foundation
