Last week, in the middle of the state election campaign, Kevin Rudd’s national government pledged itself to provide $12.5 million of Australian taxpayers money to add to the Tasmanian taxpayers money the Tasmanian premier proposes to waste on a particularly imprudent and environmentally damaging development inside a Tasmanian national park. And suddenly there was Tasmanian Premier David Bartlett providing his immediate, enthusiastic and highly vocal endorsement of the proposed federal government takeover of Australia’s hospital system, despite the fact that other premiers, including Labor premiers, consider that as yet there is too little information available upon which to base a decision. While I am personally sympathetic to a hospital takeover, it is all too easy to join the dots and see through this strange coincidence.
Bartlett’s Tasmanian government is currently well down the track to losing this weekend’s state election, and among those issues that have contributed to it being on the nose with the Tasmanian electorate is obviously the ongoing conflict between those Tasmanians who cherish their environment and the tendency of the state Labor government to pander to the big end of town rather than respond to community aspirations.
One of the more recent manifestations of this latter conflict is the proposal by the Bartlett government that $25 million be spent on the highly questionable Three Capes development near Port Arthur. This involves establishment of a large scale tourist development inside a national park, in total disregard of the intended nature conservation priority implicit in establishing national parks. It entails construction of a series of accommodation structures that are being marketed as simple bushwalkers huts but which are sufficiently large (60 beds) as to effectively constitute mini-hotels, and which require further dusturbance of the national park to establish supporting infrastructure. These will be used by those tourists affluent enough to pay high charges to the private operator of the system, while the government prohibits for at least part of the year traditional tent-based use of the connecting track network by Tasmanian families. Strategically isolated in this accommodation network for long enough to use up much of their holiday time without having to emerge from the bush to spend much of their money in other local businesses in the wider community, the Three Capes clients will then fly back off home, while the Three Capes operator goes off to count his money. Meanwhile Tasmanian families will continue to have to meet various state charges that make the cost of living increasingly difficult to cope with, such as the $12.5 million they presently fork out each year in school fees, while the state government proposes to waste twice that much providing another of its mates with the Three Capes development as a nice little tax-payer funded earner.
That the federal government should suddenly commit itself to funding a major commercial tourist development inside a national park, in complete contravention of the purpose for which national parks are established, is concerning enough. That it would commit itself to funding an enterprise that actually appears to be illegal under the management plan for the national park involved is especially concerning, and even more so if the intention is to simply sweep away the protective management intended by the management plan in the same way as previous governments swept away the intended protection for the national park that contained the iconic Lake Pedder (has anything changed in the last half century?). When this latest development involves massively increased traipsing of the plant killing fungal disease Phytopthora throughout the national park there are even more questions to be asked. And when the Rudd Labor government commits itselff to funding a development for which there has as yet been no environmental impact statement or any other due process the situation is nothing less than scandalous.
Former Labour leader Mark Lathan suggested in his autobiography that “No policy issue or set of relationships better demonstrates the ethical decline and political corruption of the Australian Labor movement than Tasmanian forestry.” But methinks the smell emanating from the Three Capes scandal raises a few questions about the relationship between the ALP and this particular Tasmanian tourism development too, and indeed just how much further the rot may truly extend. Unless the fact that these giant “huts” will contain more beds than are currently provided in hospitals provided to deserving rural communities suggests there really is a valid link between Three Capes and federal hospital policy, provided the patients are well enough to walk there and back. Ah, good old federal Labor, supporting walking families.
