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Carlton Beach looking toward the mouth of the Carlton River.

Carlton River Catchment & Southern Beaches Conservation Society
P.O. Box 92, Dodges Ferry, TASMANIA, 7173
Email: [email protected]

Letter to all members of the Tasmanian parliament and councilors of the Sorell, Tasman, Clarence and Kingborough municipalities

10th September 2012

RE: Help stop the Carlton River Toxic Waste Dump

Dear elected Councillor or Member of the Tasmanian parliament,

The company Southern Waste Solutions has recently received approvals from the Environment Protection Authority (EPA) and the Sorell Council to construct and operate a controlled waste C-cell or high level hazardous waste disposal site between Copping and Carlton River – we refer to it as the Carlton River Toxic Waste Dump.

The local community is united in its demand that the permit for the Carlton River Toxic Waste Dump be revoked and we ask you to assist us to achieve this.

The proposed dump has the potential to receive virtually all types of ‘level three’ or high level non-liquid hazardous waste including many substances which are toxic to humans.

We fear there is a high risk that many toxic materials will escape into the environment and cause serious damage to human health, the natural environment and local industries, in particular tourism, aquaculture and farming.

Most materials which are likely to be dumped will never break down or become less hazardous. Most materials will remain a hazard well beyond the 100 year life span of the dump and perhaps last in the ground for ever.

Our primary concerns relate to the risk of toxic materials escaping into the ground water or streams and ending up in the nearby Carlton River, Fredrick Henry Bay and onto Carlton Beach.

It seems almost certain that some dust will escape from the dump during strong winds, especially as toxic materials are off-loaded and while the active dump face is exposed.

There is also a possibility that trucks carrying waste to the dump site could have accidents and release toxic materials in nearby towns or even in Hobart.

We are not at all convinced by the methods proposed by the proponent to prevent material leaching into the ground water or waterways. Also many of the risks from dust are not even acknowledged and the measures that are proposed are unlikely to totally contain it.

The company claims that their approach is world best practice but we have found many serious flaws in their proposal.

The site proposed for the Carlton River Toxic Waste Dump is not ideal in many respects as it is within 200m of tributaries of the Carlton River and the main river is only 800m away. The water table at this site is known to be very close to the surface, the area is subject to high seismic activity and it lies over a significant geological fault. Seismic activity was not considered in the assessment and the geological risks were glossed over. The threat from rising water tables was addressed solely by a commitment to pumping water which is clearly not failsafe.

There is a real possibility of a catastrophic failure of the leachate barrier through a major breach caused by the water table rising, seismic activity or an accident involving heavy machinery or use of explosives but this possibility was never considered in the assessment process. Consequently, the project was approved without any contingency plans for catastrophic failure. This may have been because there is no way of repairing a landfill leachate barrier after it has hazardous material in it and neither the proponent nor the regulators wanted to draw attention to this fundamental flaw.

Even though the Copping-Carlton area is clearly not ideal, it appears that virtually no effort was made to assess other potential locations for a toxic waste dump.

To make things worse, hardly anyone in the local community, including Copping, Dodges Ferry and Sorell knew about the proposed toxic waste dump until after it was approved. It appears that both the Sorell Council and the Environment Protection Authority did the bare minimum which was required of them by advertising the development in newspapers and on their web sites and by notifying the immediate adjacent land owners. This is the first high level hazardous waste dump ever proposed for Tasmania and everyone in the local municipality and perhaps across Tasmania should have been made aware of it and had an opportunity to comment prior to a development application being made and before the Copping-Carlton River area was chosen.

The local community is united in its demand that the permit for this toxic dump be revoked. The permit holder, Southern Waste Solutions, is a company entirely owned by the Sorell, Clarence, Tasman and Kingborough councils and is therefore owned by the ratepayers and should be operated in their interests. It is entirely reasonable for the community to insist that the permit be revoked by the proponent. The board which controls Southern Waste Solutions simply needs to listen to the community and decide to tear up the permit for the Carlton River toxic Waste Dump.

We have written to all state members of parliament and councilors of the Sorell, Tasman, Clarence and Kingborough councils. We ask you to do all that is within your power to assist the local community to stop the Carlton River Toxic Waste Dump.

We understand that currently the proponent does not have funding but they are hopeful of receiving government funding. We urge you to make every effort to prevent any local, state or Australian government funding being offered to assist with this project. We further ask that you directly pressure the board of Southern waste solutions to tear up its permit.

While we acknowledge that there is a need to securely deal with toxic waste in Tasmania, we believe the disposal of hazardous waste is clearly a state-wide issue, and it therefore needs to be carefully considered from a state-wide perspective to ascertain the most suitable way of dealing with this waste with respect to both environmental and public health risks.

We are calling on State Government and politicians to develop a state-wide hazardous waste policy for Tasmania, similar to what was recommended in the Current and Future Controlled Waste Practices in Tasmania Draft Report, which was written for the Tasmanian State Government in 2008 by Sustainable Infrastructure Australia. We believe such a policy should give careful consideration to a range of issues including, but not limited to:

• Putting the onus back onto businesses and industry to reduce their hazardous waste outputs;
• Encouraging innovation and technological advances in the fields of reprocessing, recycling and retreating such waste;
• Investigating more environmentally friendly methods for disposing of such waste – of which there are many; and
• Research into alternative sites for hazardous waste disposal facilities where the impacts and possible risks to both the environment and public health are minimised.

The Government must acknowledge and guarantee that dumping hazardous waste into a landfill site is an absolute last resort, to be considered only when all other options have been exhausted. If this toxic waste dump is built in the Carlton River Catchment in isolation from other measures, then dumping toxic waste into landfill will become the first option in Tasmania rather than the last option.

We can provide you with more information if required and would welcome an opportunity to meet with you or your staff.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Reardon
Representative of the Carlton River Catchment and Southern Beaches Conservation Society

• Thomas Connelly: Emotion and Rhetoric:

Community opposition to the Carlton River Hazardous Waste Dump must be causing some concern. The Murdoch monopoly owned Hobart Mercury felt the need recently to run multiple articles criticizing the emotional uneducated local hinderers of economic growth.

http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2012/09/09/359901_opinion.html

http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2012/09/10/360141_opinion.html

I had to struggle to contain my laughter at these articles. Much emotion and rhetoric, while criticising and insulting the local community for doing the same. The journalists felt free to conflate various issues in an attempt to create community hostility. The big three Tees. Towers, Trawlers, and Toxic dumps. (Oh how the tabloids love alliteration.)

To join the very real concerns over the Abel Tasman with the concerns of a small group in Glenorchy who do not want a mobile tower in their area is a wrong headed equation which attempts to raise the NIMBY flag, making a mockery of the issues.

The prime mover of this campaign in the Southern Beaches region was the lack of consultation and engagement in the early stages of project planning. Community consultation is very important. This cannot be overstated. Our dreams of democracy are based on this very idea. The idea of Athenian democracy that we flatter ourselves we follow was based on community input and discussion. The Local Government Association of Tasmania ‘recognises that community engagement is vital to the democratic process…’ In the Carlton River Dump site project we have had closed doors investigation, followed by a consultation phase which seemed to have included the bare minimum the law allows.

Without consultation at the earliest stage of any project the problem then becomes one of trust.

I cannot talk about the mobile tower in Glenorchy as I am not familiar with the issues involved. But I do take exception to the mocking tone of the author, telling the locals not to complain about poor service.

Personally I would be happy to throw away all mobile phones. My phone is 5 years old and I spend no more than $20 a month on the phone. Too many people have been burnt by phone companies offering the sky and giving only large bills and poor service. Too many people have bought into the considered words of experts and find themselves with the shock of large bills, as well as entering the merry-go-round of constant updates and add-ons. But this is not the place for me to rant on about mobile phones. And most likely the topic for another conversation.

To compare the Trawler and the Carlton River Hazardous Waste Unit to mobile phones is, again, wrong headed. Nothing like this Trawler, nor this C Cell have been seen in Tasmania before. Indeed as reported in the Mercury “[The Carlton River Dump] is no run-of-the-mill development.” And herein lies the question of trust. If community members, the citizens and electors are not consultated, except within the tight letter of the law, they lose trust in the councils and businesses involved, they lose trust in their betters, in the powers that be. Once trust is lost all the balming words that ‘all will be well’ are seen through the prism of distrust. In small communities like Copping, Dodges Ferry, Sorell, Dunalley, Forcett and others this distrust is not needed at all. In a way unknown to citizens of large cities like Sydney, in small rural communities we all know each other, and so the need for open and transparent process takes on even greater import.

When a new project is to be developed, one that has never been tried in the state, it is important for the councils to be even more proactive in consulting the community. Or trust is lost. When the project involves possible toxic chemicals the councils have a greater need to engage the community at an earlier stage. This did not happen, consultation was obviously flawed or there would be no need for a second round of community engagement. So flawed in fact, as was reported in the Mercury, that the local member Rebbeca White said she had no knowledge the dump was to go ahead. If the council will not talk to elected members you can understand the communities concerns.

Such secrecy does not lead to positive outcomes. Such secrecy leads the community to doubt all the reports issued and announcements made.

So again we see that this process has lead to a loss of trust. How can there be trust when one side has information and the other side is told, like Bananas in Pyjamas or The Doctor, to simply trust.

But sadly too many of us have lived too long to take much on trust anymore. We have seen many examples of private companies, local councils, and nation states fail over and over again their fellow citizens. With these failures the citizens are the ones who have to pay the price. It is not like a Senator wakes up on one fine morning and says, ‘I know I will ban companies from putting poison into baby food.’ No, these laws have to be made because companies have seen fit to put poison into baby food, and it is up to the people to force government to legislate on our behalf. Same with toxic dumps and super trawlers, we are told that all will be well, but we all know from painful experience that careful oversight is required. Unless the local community does this oversight work, who can they turn to? In particular the recent Carlton River Dump has no detail as to what will happen in some thirty years and the dump is filled and ‘capped.’ Who will monitor the site then? Who is pay if the worst happens? After our recent experience with consultation how can we trust this dump to be safe for an unknown number of years?

I was particularly amused by the words emotion and rhetoric thrown around like cuss words, or school yard insults. For what is a newspaper if not a rhetoric machine? The opinion pages of a newspaper are as interested in shaping opinion, as they are reporting and reflecting opinion. In the same way that the entertainment and style pages seeks to shape our attitude to certain films and books and etc, so do the opinion pages seek to shape public opinion concerning the political issues of the day.

Let us look in detail at one phrase used by The Mercury to promote science and oppose emotion. The locals opposed to the Carlton River Dump are described as an ‘angry shrieking crowd.’ Is this not an appeal to emotion? Is this not a rhetorical device? It is always nice to get a more or less exact definition of words used, in this instance the word verb (or more accurately and more pedantically participle) shrieking means, ‘a shrill, often frantic cry’, ‘to utter high-pitched sounds or words’, and finally ‘a piercing sound or words, as an expression of terror, pain, or excitement.’ The constant reference to high-pitched may tell us something about the use of this word. It is accepted that deep voices gain more authority than the high-pitched sounds of, dare I say, women and children. Is not Julia GIllard referred to as shrill? A quick google search gave me quotes such as ‘Julia Gillard’s shrill attack on the coalition’, ‘Julia Gillard [is] becoming more and more shrill’, and one last one describing her as ‘shrill and aggressive.’ And this lovely bit of rhetoric from The Australian ‘The invective from Julia Gillard is really disgraceful. Her smart-alecky shrieking across the benches really lowers the standard…’ Doing the same with Leigh Sales rather than the PM we find, ‘increasingly shrill, ‘excruciatingly shrill’

(try saying that three times fast after a few tequila slammers).

If the word shrill means high-pitched cry of terror or excitement, is not the Mercury using this word to try to feminise or even to make the opponents of the Carlton River Toxic Dump seem infantile? Adding some science to the argument, according to Dr
Paul Carding, speech pathologist at Freeman Hospital in Newcastle on Tyne, a deep voice is seen as ‘more authoritative and sophisticated.’ So with all this information we can confidently answer the question in the affirmative. Shriek, shrill and such words are used to make the citizens seem like children, or even worse (in our society) as women. Even Maggie Thatcher felt the need to take spin lessons to learn how to deepen her voice.

Just as an aside some of words that are antonyms of authoritative include such words as humble, meek, docile, compliant, passive, submissive, yielding. So the ones without deep voices are the docile ones. Maybe high pitched voices should not be allowed to speak at public meetings?

To more objective, professional and anti-rhetorical could not the meetings be described as angry, vocal concerned citizens. Surely the Mercury could not be saying that the people have no right to challenge the experts?

On many occasions the Murdoch press is happy to spring to the defense of free speech in opposing any changes or inquiries into the newspaper business. Do they not want to spread this love of freedom and democracy to the general public. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide if the newspapers are playing cynical games or not.

Many times we hear the need to go back to an older type of education for our children. We hear how trendy post modern teachings in schools have destroyed our children and the future of the nation. Why then this hatred of rhetoric? Surely the teaching of Rhetoric is central to any classical education. Rhetoric, Grammar, Dialectics, add some Mathematics and Rugby and we have the foundation for a good old fashioned English education, the type of which won the battle of Waterloo. We have to ask ourselves, what does the Mercury want? How do they propose to get there? Or is the Mercury, much more than the uneducated hillbillies down Iron Creek way, actually the source of the knee jerk opposition and division they often decry in our community.

What is rhetoric? From my Liddle & Scott Greek dictionary Rhetoric comes from an old Greek word which means ‘the art of speech’, and some one who engages with Rhetoric is ‘One who is skilled in speaking.’

This from the word Rhetor, a public speaker, but also a judge, or an advocate. This raises the idea, hidden in the slogan ‘if you don’t like Murdoch paper, just don’t read it’; the idea that newspapers are a commodity, but indeed a special kind of commodity. A commodity that is at the same time a rhetoric machine, a machine which seeks to use words to try to persuade. Surely the free speech lovers of the Murdoch press are not saying that only they can use Rhetoric in a positive sense, and any dissenting view uses Rhetoric in the negative sense of the word.

One of the many tricks and turns of Rhetoric is to attack the words of their opponents. In this case the ‘newly-minted’ (a phrase worth thinking about) Greens senator Whish-Wilson is mocked for saying “People aren’t interested about hearing about the science or economics of this, they simply don’t want the vessel and can’t see what good could come of it.” Is there any context to this quote? Is the senator speaking in a similar way to the students of apartheid era South Africa, when they would sing, ‘We don’t need your education?’ Could we not understand the Senator to be saying something like we do not want your biased science, we reject the economics which only support the few as opposed to the many? Some people can look at economics and come away thinking that a wage of two dollars a day would be good business sense. However there is much more to be taken into account. The author then goes on the suggest that opponents to the Carbon Price scheme use this seemingly anti-science stance to attack the Greens Party. Is it the place of the Mercury to use their bully pulpit to tell the enemies of the Greens how to fight their battles?

The Murdoch press with their vast power are of course a key element of the ‘system’ and so will use their power to suppress opposing view points. But as has been seen by the recent events the power of the people, democracy in its literal meaning, can turn away super trawlers, can stop mobile phone towers, and democracy, cooked up with the right mixture of science, rhetoric and emotion will be able to stop the Carlton River Toxic Waste Dump.

From:
http://bogong-moth.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/emotion-and-rhetoric.html

thomas connelly

http://bogong-moth.blogspot.com/

• Southern councils say controlled waste vital for a ‘clean, green’ state

The Southern Tasmanian Councils Authority (STCA) has voiced its unanimous support for the
Category C controlled waste disposal cell at the Copping landfill facility, stating the project is
not only worthy, but also vital for the clean green future of Tasmania.

STCA Deputy Chair, Mayor Tony Bisdee said Tasmania did not currently have an approved
landfill site with an engineered facility to safely dispose of controlled waste, and it was
essential to address the issue now.

“We produce this waste as a by-product of many of the industries that we rely heavily on in
our region, including agriculture, aquaculture and manufacturing,” Mayor Bisdee said.

“We currently store these types of wastes on sites all around southern Tasmania, which often
provide very little protection to the environment and minimal long-term monitoring.

“The Category C cell will be a purpose-built facility to contain this material in an existing
landfill site that is recognised Australia-wide for its excellent environmental standards.

“Not having such a facility to deal with controlled waste increases the risk of accidental
contamination of our environment because the waste is not properly contained, and will also
damage Tasmania’s clean green reputation.

“The STCA fully supports the project and commends Southern Waste Solutions on its
commitment to extending consultation with the community, despite having met all the
required planning approval processes and public advertising set by the EPA and Sorell Council
Planning Scheme.

“We are confident in the process they have undertaken to ensure that the concerns of all
reasonable Tasmanians will be appropriately addressed.”

The STCA is a regional organisation made up of the 12 Southern Tasmanian Councils to
address regional development issues and progress sustainable economic, environmental and
social outcomes for Southern Tasmania, its local communities and the State.