Charles Wooley
My theme today concerns public money. Your money and how it is spent.
So before I presume to pass any judgments I need to set the record straight. Following a report in this newspaper last Saturday there has been a misapprehension that I have been out and about, eating my head off at your expense.
Apparently the former Lord Mayor, Damon Thomas, had entertained me on his, now, somewhat controversial expense account. Documents obtained by “The Mercury” revealed that I had been the (then) Mayor’s guest at Smolt in Salamanca Square on the 27th of August last year.
No reflection on the restaurant but it was hardly a memorable meal. I had no recollection.
But when I went to my own records, in this case slightly more reliable than Damon’s, I discovered that was because I wasn’t there.
Nothing wrong with the food, I was in Sydney that day.
Still I don’t think I missed out on much. The bill was $98 so Damon wasn’t exactly chucking your money around. But my reputation has been in tatters and my friends and enemies have been having a field day, so I reckon Damon owes me a lunch, at his own expense.
I’ll pick up any parking fines.
I was in Zurich last year. It is a beautiful lakeside city with air like a crisp cool chardonnay and a dramatic and snowcapped mountainous hinterland, but then that’s par for the course in Switzerland.
The Swiss love their environment …
When it comes to banking, watchmaking and scenery the Swiss really lucked out.
I wandered across charming bridges, centuries old, and down narrow cobbled streets with splendidly preserved architecture dating from the tenth century.
The Swiss love their environment.
They are fanatically clean in their cities and their countryside. It was so perfect I found it a touch unsettling. Paris is wonderfully dirty, Sydney is an exciting unplanned mess in a fabulous place, New York is just short of unlivable but eminently visitable.
Zurich on the other hand is scarily faultless right down to its perfectly crooked historical alleyways.
Risdon on the banks of the polluted Derwent is literally and figuratively, a world away. By contrast consider the jumbled hillsides of haphazard workers’ bungalows, fibro, weatherboard and brick on the edge of a waterway, famous in environmental science, for its world record levels of heavy metal pollution.
At the heart of the community, behold the sprawling mess of gantries and sheds, pipes and conveyors, poles and wires, dust and dirt, slag and machinery, like some crazy impressionist painter’s dystopian depiction of the whole industrial revolution on one great and terrible canvas.
All my life, no matter who owned it, we have just called it ‘The Zinc Works’. And we all knew someone who worked there and that made it all right. Because of the jobs, we overlooked the air, water and even soil pollution.
I remember the State Health Department once had to issue a caution to residents not to grow vegetables in their backyards because of the high levels of heavy metal pollution. No, historically there was nothing to commend the Zinc Works.
Apart from the jobs.
Nyrstar … headquartered in Zurich
So why did I just take you to Switzerland? Well the Zinc Works are of course now owned by the multi-national mining and metals business, Nyrstar, which has its headquarters in one of the many splendid shiny glass towers in the hills overlooking the environmental perfection of Zurich, cleanest city I have ever seen.
I thought you might appreciate the contrast, especially when you now have to consider that those canny Swiss businessmen in their glass towers have been asking you to go guarantor for them on a loan of something like $50,000,000 if you want to keep the Zinc Works here in River City.
This is not withstanding the confidential deal with our government that delivers the company its electricity at a rate so low you would be annoyed if you knew. So perhaps it’s a good thing you don’t.
It’s a stark reminder, if you’d forgotten, that our future on this little island at the end of the world is not entirely in our own hands.
Decisions made in remote boardrooms on the far side of the world are so often more important than the small deliberations in our own cash-strapped chambers of government.
As ‘The Mercury’ realistically editorialized a week ago “When Nyrstar bosses talk, state politicians must listen.”
Directly and indirectly there are about 4000 jobs at stake and a financial input into the state of about $800 million a year.
Surely that’s a business call …
The company is making zinc at the far end of the world and that’s expensive and they need to upgrade plant and equipment to compete. Fair enough, but surely that’s a business call for what looks like a very big, free market private enterprise.
They accounted for more than $4.5 billion revenue last year and they’re asking us to guarantee the bank loan!
They are a bigger, better run, and certainly more profitable business than Tasmania Inc. You would think that any Swiss Banker in the neighbouring glass towers of Zurich would reckon that Nyrstar was a safe bet.
Now I’m not a financial journalist, more your typical unfinancial one, but … and tell me if it’s a silly question … why does a successful and respectable Zurich based multi-national metals business want my little state to go guarantor on a mere $50 million loan?
(It’s only slightly more than Forestry Tasmania lost last year)
So is Nyrstar, just a very tightly run outfit, or do they know something we don’t?
I mean is there even the remotest chance that the world zinc business will go pear-shaped and that the Gnomes of Zurich will come banging on our door demanding their money back?
Note to Treasurer Gutwein.
If the Swiss ever do that, hit them with their unpaid Hydro bill.
That should even things out.
• Isla MacGregor, in Comments: Good to see the ABC News tonight follow up on this lead from Comment #6 on TT on the developments wih the Nyrstar $200m blowout story from Adelaide Now: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-01-23/greens-seek-details-on-nyrstar-call-for-government-support/6040396 Thanks to the team at TT for keeping ahead of the pack. Let’s hope that the Tasmanian Liberals have a [i]wee chat[/i] with their South Australian counterparts before throwing any more money down the gurlger on propping up transnational resource extraction/processing industrues in Tas. What is [i]Markets for Change[/i] response to this news?
