Pulp Mill Debate getting sillier by the Minute! A note from Cinders.

Just when the ALP Leader Kevin Rudd and his Shadow Minister for Climate Change, Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Peter Garrett AM, MP, are being urged to bury the Ghost of former Environment Minister Graham “Richo” Richardson we see for Liberal leader John Hewson enter the fray.

Rudd and Garrett have been warned that the preference deal stitched up by Richo with the greens came at a huge cost to the Nation including “Two of the most noticeable Labor government pay-offs were the banning of a promising mining project at Coronation Hill, an area located within the boundaries of Kakadu National Park but in reality a patch of rubbishy wasteland, and of a paper pulp mill in southern Tasmania, opposed by a NIMBY coalition including hobby farmers who joined Bob Brown’s burgeoning state Green party temporarily to push their interests:.:

The Australian Article quoted warned that the ALP must not fall into the same trap.

Now on the ABC’s 7.30 report told of how former Liberal leader John Hewson thinks “Turnbull’s mad not to just set up an inquiry that kicks the issue off the election agenda.”

He of course is referring to Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in effect he is urging John Howard’s Liberal Government to do a “Richo” when the ALP “killed off “ the Wesley Vale pulp mil just before the 1990 Federal Election. By doing so according to the Institute of Public Affairs he created sovereign risk and economic hardship in Tasmania.

Let’s hope Minister Turnbull will take notice as the greens will never give their preferences to the Liberal National Party coalition as their state aim for this election is to defeat the Government.

Of course the 7.30 report couldn’t resist the misty vision of the Tamar Valley to portray it as ‘wonderful, beautiful wine growing area, wonderful sort of tourist area, and so on’. They did not show that the proposed mill is to be located in Tasmania’s largest industrial estate.

But perhaps that just par for the course for the National Broadcaster on the 5th of July they claimed the pulp would taint fish (http://www.abc.net.au/reslib/200706/r148708_526664.asx) that featured vision of scallops being caught when the ABC was aware the vision was from 1999. That the fact scallops had not been caught in Bass Strait west of Flinders island since then is confirmed in public government /fishing industry reports.

More myths are flying about but will history repeat itself?

Cinders