Sam McQuestin with Premier Will Hodgman in MP-aspirant days
I had a Twitter engagement with Sam McQuestin last night. A rare event given my virtual anonymity on that platform, yet it was one that made me think about political leadership in Tasmania.
Mr McQuestin, State Director of the Tasmanian Liberal Party, is probably a well-known name to most readers of Tas Times. Yet in the broader community, he’s a virtual unknown. Even in his home town, people might nominate him as a failed Liberal candidate; a bottle shop owner, or a person with family connections to Gunns.
Given his leadership position, one might assume he has talents that aren’t evident in an online forum. That may well be the case, but I doubt it, if we consider his attack on some supporters of Kerry Finch, who is facing re-election for his Legislative Council position against a sole Victorian Liberal challenger.
I suggested, given the impropriety of his comments, that offer an apology to those he’d defamed on Twitter. Instead, he labelled me a Green stooge, and presumably returned to his roast side of beef.
I responded by saying that rather than a Green stooge, I’m actually a person who his party sought to endorse in a recent election. I also offered to debate him publicly on the topic of ethics, so I suppose I didn’t really expect a replay.
Still, Sam is playing a game. A political game that is working in Tasmania.
Anybody offering an opinion which doesn’t confirm to current Liberal thought is labelled a Green. Green, of course, being a pejorative term, one used with very limited success by Labor in the recent State election, and great success by Liberal in every election in the last three years.
In publicspeak, environmentalist = Green. Forget that many of the major environmental gains in the last three decades have been achieved by Labor governments. Ignore the fact plenty of Australians are passionate environmentalists, yet vote for parties other than the Greens. In Tasmania, Greens are toxic – even many environmentalists will now run and hide rather than be labelled Green.
Elsewhere in Australia a different paradigm exists, but the 22.5 million who can’t vote here can only look at us with wonder, and in the case of expats, embarrassment.
And the media lap this up. The soon to be repealed forestry agreement was doomed from the start – a classic case of a fragile government outsourcing responsibility to a committee. If the goals were worthy, they would have been enshrined in legislation within weeks. Instead, we’ve had years of debate (sans conflict at least) and will end up with no positive environmental outcomes.
So where are the champions of the environment? There are the Greens of course, but I suspect their penchant for endorsing wiccas, students, retired academics and political staffers ahead of pragmatic achievers will limited their electoral appeal until there is a fundamental shift in their outlook.
Some of the environmental groups have seen their funding slashed. Others, like the Wilderness Society, are now seen as traitors by many of their former allies. Few have the ability to create politically acceptable environmental policy. Even fewer have the will, or the ability to bring that policy to the mainstream.
If the loss of Lake Pedder represented the genesis of the environmental movement in Tasmania, then the Franklin Dam protests may have been the high water mark. Few outcomes since have been as enduring, and I wonder whether there is even enough cohesion left to fight another battle.
I hope time proves me wrong. But Tasmania needs new champions to fight for what many of us believe is worth protecting. Not the same former politicians. Not the same speakers, at the same rallies, attended by the same minority of well-meaning, but politically naive people.
We need a new generation of activists, politicians, journalists, writers and business leaders who will convince the mainstream that what we have in Tasmania is worth protecting. They won’t come from within Sam McQuestin’s lot. Even the current cabal of Labor politicians are so scared of being aligned with the Greens that no reforms will come from them.
We need people happy to stand up and out themselves as environmentalists. They don’t need to be Green to do that.
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• Pilko, in Comments: Last night the Liberals robo-called my house peddling more lies about Finch. This call is going into households all over West Tamar. Here it is – https://soundcloud.com/shaggynuts/liberal-party-robocall-29-4-14
• TV Resident, in Comments: It should be illegal for any political party to tell lies about anyone running for any level of politics. Just because Kerry Finch doesn’t agree with the destruction of Tasmania’s natural forests and he refuses to accept a filthy pulp mill in the Tamar Valley, doesn’t make him a green. I am in total agreement with Kerry Finch and I am not a Green either.
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• What Will said on March 13, last year, two days before the state poll …
