Mr Ian Rist has been active in exposing Tasmania’s fox program to public scrutiny like no other person.
In the face of harsh and relentless attempts to ridicule and even defame him, Ian has kept on message. Tasmanian Times readers, who have taken an interest in the now very extensive ‘fox files’, will probably recall the years that Ian faced a bevy of anonymous bloggers who hid their identity and threw stones.
It’s a well known tactic both in the internet bloggo-sphere and in prior times of slower newspaper reports; if you can’t respond to the message, ‘shoot the messenger’ through goading, provocation, ridicule and intimidation. In most cases this blatant and rather unsophisticated way of neutralising dissent or criticism works to the required end. The dissenter gets fearful, or angry, or ashamed, or simply very tired by the attacks that fail to look at the message and by default turn on them!
Matters reached concerning proportions for the government-funded fox program when Mr Rist was able to demonstrate through his recreational shooting connections, his bush experiences and common knowledge in local community groups of serious fabrications of fox material that this government program was relying on to justify their costly program. Naturally such exposure was not welcomed by any quarter… but more so by those organisations and individuals directly involved in obtaining salaried employment from the proceeds of the program to find and eradicate said Tasmanian foxes. The sub-text to the ‘shoot the messenger’ response Mr Rist copped was the public story-line constantly delivered by the government that people, who had definitive information or ‘excellent’ sighting reports were loathed to go public because they would inevitably face ridicule and humiliation.
Of course this sub-text was a subtle form of community conditioning. At every stage in this fox hunting saga the primacy of the cause has relied on ordinary citizens taking personal responsibility for disclosing matters in the public interest; that amounts to one virtue – authenticity.
Many tens of thousands of words on the failure in the threat assessment for this program and the subsequent implausibility of the fox exhibits officially accepted as ‘hard physical evidence’ have been written. The failure of this program to detect and kill any live Tasmanian foxes was the catalyst for the Tasmanian Times Fox Reward (HERE) – firstly set at $1000 for 3½ years and then bumped up to $5000 for the last year. After 4½ years of no-takers – after the claimed fox evidence peak after 2006 – I removed the reward.
Cutting straight to the real chase came when Mr Rist appeared before a Parliamentary Inquiry in 2009 and directly named the individuals involved in hoaxing and fabricating the fox incidents that the government program relied upon for their claim that multiple foxes existed in Tasmania. Mr Rist’s disclosures before a panel of 6 parliamentarians came after a formal Tasmania Police investigation into the central allegation of a declared conspiracy between several named Tasmanian hunters to secretly import fox litters, hold them to maturity in captivity and then release them into the wild in at least four declared locations; the Police failed to substantiate this extraordinary claim. That claim had been referred to the Minister of Police (David Llewellyn) through a set of hearsay conversations and note takings by Parks & Wildlife Service officials; these allegations then culminated in the drafting and submission of a ‘Confidential Briefing Note’ to the Minister outlining the conspiracy to import foxes.
So Tasmania’s decade-long war on foxes has many similarities with other sensational ‘wars’that government’s commit to ‘in the public interest’. The serious nature of any failure of proper analysis is that, if simplistic deceptions are successfully achieved, it only emboldens other hook-winkers, charlatans and liars to try that tactic again… and again. It actually works!
