Today, the radio brought the news that Tasmanian wood chip exporter Gunns called in an adminsitrator. The money had run out, the bank said there's no more, and the company capitulated.
Tasmania's Premier Lara Giddings claimed that Gunns' demise did not spell the end of the project. 'I
would say to people be very careful about dancing on the grave,' she said, 'because
the fact is the resource still exists, the proposal still exists... The unfortunate demise of this company,' she explained, 'may in fact mean that other proponents come forward.'
'The story of Gunns is a parable of corporate hubris,' writes Richard Flanagan. 'You can, as they
did, corrupt the polity, cow the media, poison public life and seek to
persecute those who disagree with you. You can rape the land,
exterminate protected species, exploit your workers and you can even
poison your neighbours. But the naked pursuit of greed at all costs will
in the end destroy your public legitimacy and thus ensure your doom.
Gunns was a rogue corporation and its death was a chronicle long ago
foretold. The sadness is in the legacy they leave to Tasmania—the
immense damage to its people, its wildlands, and its economy.' http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php?/weblog/article/the-days-of-the-cargo-cult-are-over/
In my search for a bit more background, I came across an article written by Richard about 5 yeares ago, in The Monthly. I've taken the liberty of providing a short excerpt here, to show how various Labour Premiers were just as culpable in the pulping of Tasmania as predictable conservative apparatchiks like Robin Gray. http://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-richard-flanagan-out-control-tragedy-tasmania-s-forests-512
'For in a manner that at least is understandable if onerous to Tasmanians, it is clear that in Tasmania Gunns more or less is
the law. The woodchippers and their government cronies constantly use
the courts against conservationists, but when the courts are used
against them the government's response is admirably straightforward:
change the law. They changed the law, for example, when Bob Brown sold
almost everything he had and took both the Tasmanian and the federal
governments to court to prove that under their own laws the logging
industry in Tasmania was illegal, because it threatened the survival of
endangered species, including the Tasmanian wedge-tailed eagle and the
swift parrot. He won, but the government's response was not to enforce
the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement to protect those species, but
simply to alter it so that logging is once again legal.
Faced with
the possibility that the pulp mill might not now meet the RPDC
pollution guidelines, Paul Lennon simply rushed an act through
parliament to establish an entirely new process that seems certain to
ensure the mill will be approved by the end of August this year. Though
this contradicted what Lennon had so dogmatically maintained for the
previous two years about an impartial process that was above politics,
the act (drafted with the input of a Gunns lawyer) tellingly allows for
the mill to no longer meet the original pollution guidelines. Public
consultation has been dispensed with and, most remarkably - and possibly
without precedent in the annals of Westminster legislation - the act
explicitly provides that the mill will still go ahead even if it is
proven that the consultant assessing the project has been bribed.
*
It
had been uncharacteristic of Lennon to even pretend a process mattered
more than an outcome, and it seemed cynicism more of a piece with his
predecessor, the late Jim Bacon. A one time Maoist, an
upper-middle-class alumni of one of Australia's most exclusive private
schools, Melbourne's Scotch College, and later, of one of its most
infamous unions, the Victorian Builders' Labourer's Federation (BLF),
Bacon was for several years a loyal lieutenant of the BLF's leader, the
notorious Norm Gallagher. By the time Gallagher was jailed for taking
bribes from developers and his union the subject of a Royal Commission
that led to its deregistration, Bacon was ensconced in Tasmania, where
the old BLF tactics of espousing a working-class rhetoric while cosying
up to the powerful served him well. In 1997 he became leader of the
Tasmanian Labor Party.
The following year Bacon was instrumental
in brokering the deal that saw the very electoral basis of the Tasmanian
parliament altered. Since the 1970s, when the world's first green party
was formed in Tasmania, the Greens had been a powerful political
minority in Tasmania, securing up to a seventh of parliamentary seats
under the island's unique proportional representation system and with
it, on occasion, the balance of power.
The 1998 deal was sold to
the public as a common-sense measure to reduce the number of
parliamentary members. But it was intensely political in effect, because
having fewer parliamentarians meant that a higher quota was required by
an individual to be elected, thus making it harder for minority parties
to win seats and possibly destroying future Green representation - and
with it the only real opposition to the woodchipping industry. The
former Liberal leader Bob Cheek recalls how Robin Gray, the state's
premier in the '80s and now a member of Gunns' board, lobbied him on the
night before the vote on the reform. "We've got to stop the Greens,
Bob," Gray told him. And they did.
The subsequent election in
August 1998 saw the Greens decimated and Jim Bacon's Labor Party
triumphant. The Bacon government quickly established itself as the most
pro-big-business government Tasmania had ever had. Favoured companies
received extraordinary treatment. The privately owned Federal Hotels
group, who run the island's two casinos, was awarded a 15-year gaming
monopoly - conservatively estimated by Citigroup to be worth $130
million in licensing revenues - free of charge.
But
the greatest winner was Gunns. Its shares were languishing at $1.40
when the Bacon government came to power. The company's subsequent growth
was dizzying. Within four years, it had recorded an increase of 199% in
profits. With the acquisition of two rival companies, Gunns took
control of more than 85% of logging in Tasmania. Five years after Bacon
won government Gunns was worth more than $1 billion, with shares trading
in excess of $12. It had become both the largest logging company in
Australia and the largest hardwood-woodchip exporter in the world, its
product flooding in from the state's fallen forests.
The state
government, which a century ago paid people to shoot the Tasmanian
tiger, now provided every incentive to destroy old-growth forest. One of
Bacon's first acts was to make 85,000 hectares of previously "deferred
forest" available for logging. Gunns paid only paltry royalties to
Forestry Tasmania, the public body charged with getting a commercial
return from the crown forests that were the very basis of Gunns' record
profits. When in 2003 Gunns posted an after-tax profit of $74 million,
Forestry Tasmania made a hardly impressive $20 million. By 2005, when
Gunns after-tax profit had soared to $101.3 million, Forestry Tasmania's
profit had slumped to $13.5 million. Its projected profit for 2006-07
is break-even: a return of zero dollars, nothing, to Tasmanian taxpayers
on the estimated $700-million value of its publicly owned forest
estate.
But it wasn't just that public forestry resources were
being systematically handed over to a single company's shareholders; it
was that much of Gunns' profits were coming out of taxpayers' pockets.
On private land, Gunns made a second profit from the federal tax breaks
that made tree plantations - with which clearfelled native forests were
replaced - one of corporate Australia's favourite forms of tax
minimisation from the late '90s.
On top of all this, Bacon's
government accelerated a familiar pattern of ongoing handouts to an
industry that constantly shed jobs, devastated the environment and
sought to manipulate the political system. Between 1988 and the present,
the Tasmanian forest industry has received a staggering total of $780
million in taxpayer handouts, $289 million of it since 2005, much of it
being used to facilitate further old-growth logging. If an accounting
were possible of the taxpayer-subsidised plantation schemes and added to
this sum, the real subsidy paid by the Australian taxpayer to an
industry that destroys the nation's heritage would approach a billion
dollars.
But then, not the least shocking thing about the
destruction of Tasmania's old-growth forests is that the state's logging
industry is in the end not a commercially viable industry at all, but a
massive parasite on the public purse, an industry as driven by
ideological bailouts and hidden subsidies as a Soviet-era pig-iron
foundry.
Worse still, at the moment when Tasmania was acquiring a
global reputation as an island of exceptional beauty, the forces that
would destroy much of the island's unique nature had been unleashed.
This sad irony, denied in Tasmania, did not escape the more astute of
the world's media: major features began appearing in the Observer, Le Figaro, Süddeutsche Zeitung and the New York Times
- mounting evidence that what was happening in Tasmania was more and
more recognised as an environmental catastrophe of global
significance.What might be read about Tasmania's forests in New York or
Paris, though, was not information found easily in Hobart or Launceston.
Apart from a few brave journalists, a generally craven Tasmanian media
rarely questioned or challenged the woodchipping industry during these
years. The Launceston Examiner ran a four-page feature on
Gunns' pulp-mill proposal directly lifted from Gunns' advertising.
Necessary fictions were repeated until they became accepted as truth:
that, for example, the industry's main concern is sawlogs, when even
Forestry Tasmania had admitted that sawlogs are chipped, and had been
since 1972. The government's own reports reveal that approximately 90%
of Tasmania's logged native forest is woodchipped.
To this day,
the forestry industry and the Tasmanian government withhold key
information, fudge definitions of forest types and felling practices,
and distort statistics to prevent the truth of old-growth logging
becoming publicly known, diverting debate into the dullness of disputed
definitions and clashing numbers. It's a familiar tactic of sowing
semantic confusion that has worked well for the tobacco and oil
industries. Beyond it, forests unique in the world continue to
disappear.
*
Thanks Richard
Kim
