NEIL SMITH

So we “shareholders” have to show some patience? If we were real shareholders we’d be off to the ASX to reduce our exposure. To zero. Or we might have showed up at an AGM years ago and turfed out the directors.

Dear Hans Drielsma – A message from one of your “shareholders”

I SEE that you were quoted in the Mercury http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2009/06/15/79051_tasmania-news.html on Monday relating to the need to shed jobs in this tough economic environment:

“We’ve certainly tightened our belts and we are not recruiting new people and there will be some reduction in numbers and that has started,” he said. “When you lose markets and prices and revenue drops, that is what a business has to do. We’re a business. We operate in an international commodity market and we all know what is happening in the international commodity markets at the moment. They are all down. So we, along with many other businesses, are finding it tough. We are going to stay afloat this year as we have in other years”.

“But like all shareholders on many companies around the world, we are asking the Tasmanian taxpayers, our shareholders, just to have some patience because in these sorts of times dividends are hard to come by.”

Yeah sure. Another wannabe company director. Maybe you should try for a seat on Gunns board.

Running a business, is it? To me you and your mate Bob Gordon seem to be just overpaid, puffed-up Public Servants who do anything except serve the public. On a per capita basis we may have more such people here in Tasmania than anywhere else in the developed world. But the Forestry bosses would have to be the pre-eminent examples.

What about all the dividends for us when times were better? They have so far failed to make me rich. I don’t think you or anyone else in Forestry Tasmania would know a profit if you tripped over it. Hell, you were given all your assets absolutely free of charge decades ago and you still can’t make a profit.

If Forestry Tasmania is a business then my backside is the planet Venus.

So we “shareholders” have to show some patience? If we were real shareholders we’d be off to the ASX to reduce our exposure. To zero. Or we might have showed up at an AGM years ago and turfed out the directors.

Or the appropriate regulatory body would surely have called in the Receivers. Oh, I forgot. Debt doesn’t matter to this business, does it? We “shareholders” will always cough up more funds when things get tight for you. Wasn’t that $270 million of debt “transferred” out of your account a few years ago? Into ours, of course.

NEIL SMITH