Hydro-Tasmania’s tantrums over the recent Dateline Australia film ‘Last Frontier’ have been exposed as entirely misleading.
A report by Sarawak Energy Bhd has detailed how, contrary to denials, the dam-building company is engaged in a leading ‘co-development’ and ‘partnership’ role in the implementation of Taib’s devastating plans for the so-called Sarawak Corridor of Energy (SCORE).
These involve 12 highly controversial dams that will flood huge swathes of the Borneo Jungle and destroy the lives of tens of thousands of indigenous people along with their cultures.
Hydro-Tasmania’s key complaint has been that the programme “exaggerated” the company’s role in SCORE, when it claimed it was just acting as one of several consultants engaged by the commissioning body Sarawak Energy Berhad (SEB).
The company’s angry protests soon had the broadcaster SBS in a panic and within hours their ‘ombudsman’ issued a grovelling apology, admitting that the programme had contained “inaccuracies and bias“:
“Dateline accepts the report overplayed the role of Hydro Tasmania in the dam building projects” [Sally Begbie, SBS Ombudsman].
Time for Hydro-Tasmania to apologise instead!
However, we can now detail how it is in fact Hydro-Tasmania which has been downplaying its “essential” role in Sarawak, as described by Sarawak Energy Berhad (SEB), in its Annual Report for 2010.
That report details how SEB has engaged in a key “partnership agreement with Hydro-Tasmania”, which has provided the Sarawak dam projects with the “essential skills” needed to meet their targets under SCORE.
In a section headed “Partnership With Hydro-Tasmania” the report explains that in order to achieve the SCORE agenda, SEB needed to fill “12 critical management positions” and that it had turned to the Australian dam-builder, because those skills were not available locally.
In addition the report says there is an agreement for Hydro-Tasmania to provide no less than 120 managers under a secondment programme which was due to be implemented in 2011. Seven of these were already in place at the time of the writing of the report and a further “20-30 additional support staff were envisaged over time”.
Read the full report, with full links, Sarawak Report here
Pic: Hydro chairman, former Tasmanian Treasurer, Dr David Crean. All board members, Hydro website, here
• Kevin Kiernan, in Comments: I started to get concerned about the Hydro’s likely next move back just after the Franklin dam days when it’s growing involvements in Laos and elsewhere suggested it was going to turn instead to becoming an exporter of environmental terrorism. Out of sight and out of mind mostly, but now increasingly evident for all to see from its involvements in Sarawak with Taib et al. Still, since its only non-white foreigners who are getting driven out of their homes by Taib’s thugs why should we worry about that, especially when we get the benefit of Ta An moving into Tasmania in exchange? And when all it will really cost us (apart from another nail in the coffin of any remnant scrap of “our” country’s international ethics reputation) will be the minor economic, employment and social consequences entailed here when our aging Bell Bay smelter closes down shortly in favour of moving to the Hydro’s newer dams in Sarawak. Ah, everything is back to normal again – the Hydro giveth and the Hydro taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Hydro. Now that’s a Tasmanian outfit that really knows how to work on our behalf. Maybe we should also reward John Gay and Robin Gray for all their hard work for us over the years by installing them as Directors of the Hydro too. Perhaps even change its logo to a ghostly image of former Gunns head Sir Edmund Rouse looking down on Tasmania through penstock-like prison bars.
