It’s been too long since we stayed in the caravan and I’m delighted to say that we moved it to Deloraine yesterday and plan to stay in it for a couple of days. We’ve set it up outside the Rotary Pavilion which gives us access to power and water without the pressures of the next-door caravan being too close. I had already set up an office in the Pavilion so I can get on with my Craft Fair work while I’m here.
We went to the TGIF night at the Windermere Cafe and all the talk was about the latest chapter in the saga of the proposed Gunns Pulp Mill which is supposed to be built on the Tamar River a few kilometres north of where we live. This is an extraordinary story of how people-power can overturn big business trying to run rough-shod over community rights.
Tasmania has always had the reputation of being led by the nose by big business. When we came here first in 1975, it was the Hydro Electric Commission which called the shots. Sir Alan Knight, the CEO of the Hydro, used to meet regularly with the Premier of the day to give him his instructions as to how the political process could enhance the needs of the Hydro. One of the Premiers was even called Electric Eric (Reece). Of course, it all came unstuck when they tried to dam the Franklin River in the 1980’s and the Federal Government stepped in to declare it a World Heritage Area.
After the Hydro went back into its box, Forestry Tasmania took over the reins as de facto government. It is set up as a state-owned business but has never paid a dividend. Instead, it gets enormous subsidies each year from a tame government. The situation, of course, is that Tasmania is a Labor state and the votes of the workers decide the policies of the government. The bed-fellow of Forestry is Gunns, which has made its money by selling cheap wood-chips to Asia. The CEO during the 1990’s and the early part of this century was John Gay who was born in Deloraine. He lost his job a couple of years ago because of his inept management of the Pulp Mill project and is now in court facing a charge of insider trading when he sold 35 million Gunns shares two weeks before they asked for a trading halt on the Stock Exchange and the shares dropped to 20c. They are now less than 10c.
The situation is that Gunns wanted to build a Pulp Mill which, on the face of it, is a good thing. Except they got it all wrong: wrong design, wrong location, wrong timber, etc. Of all the places in Tasmania to choose to locate it, the Tamar River was the worst. It’s an area known for its beauty, wineries, fine food, etc. A dirty, stinking pulp mill just doesn’t fit. The Tamar Valley also has a weather peculiarity in that smoke is held down in the atmosphere so that this area has the highest incidence of respiratory illnesses of any place in Tasmania. It’s the wrong place for industry.
The design they took to the government for approval was old technology. John Gay was so arrogant he thought that the government would accept anything. And he was right. The Labor Government, the Liberal Opposition and the Upper House all rubber-stamped it without any investigation. How corrupt is that? And it was left to the people of the Tamar Valley to take the fight up to big business. With the help of the Federal Government, the design had to be brought up to date. The timber required will now all come from plantations rather than old-growth forests, but the stumbling block is still the location.
This fight has been dragging on for years. Gunns, once one of the best-performing companies in Australia is broke. To complete this Pulp Mill project it needs an injection of capital but no sensible investor will touch it. The latest possibility was a company based in Singapore but the news came out on Friday that they are not interested. If Gunns management had any sense, they would have seen the writing on the wall and changed the location of the Pulp Mill years ago, or dropped the idea entirely. But they blindly pursued a dead cause and their CEO was sacked, a Premier (Paul Lennon) had to resign and Gunns shareholders have lost millions.
So, who does everyone blame? The Greens, of course, not the arrogant, self-serving robber barons, nor the compliant corrupt politicians, nor the poorly-educated rednecks who expect to continue doing the same job their fathers and grandfathers did, and bugger the environment. The Greens did play a role in this but the real force has been the local population of Tamar Valley residents who rose in defence of their lifestyle. Most of them wouldn’t vote Greens in a fit but, when the crunch comes, every intelligent person is an environmentalist.
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