The new Tasmanian premier, David Bartlett, today said the future of the state’s key project, the pulp mill, was in the hands of its proponents and their financiers.
His predecessor, Paul Lennon, tied his political fortunes closely to the mill, which appears to have failed to gain the backing of the ANZ bank.
Read more here: http://theland.farmonline.com.au/news/nationalrural/agribusiness-and-general/general/article/777041.aspx
Of course there has been a sustained environmental campaign against the mill from the Tasmanian Greens and others.
Pulp mills are dotted across Europe but are to be excluded from Tasmania because of the prejudices of some.
I guess the same activists will soon be back to campaigning against the export of product to pulp mills in Japan?
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
As a past client of ANZ, one thing is certain, ANZ will certainly not be getting a crack at my next roll-over. If they think they can inject green bull$hit into the business mix and hope to gain from it then they will also wear the costs in lost business from those of us who regard their brown-nosing with contempt.
But in all likelihood this is just a bit of spin to cover the more likely possibility that ANZ is having trouble attracting overseas funds since the sub-prime meltdown. It is the main driver behind the merger between St George Bank and Westpac and the smaller ANZ will be under the same sort of pressure.
But what ANZ is about to discover is that green politics is the indulgence of choice for certain over paid economic illiterati. And when wheat gets sorted from chaff over the next decade it will be these folks who will be getting the serious reality enema.
ANZ is still holding a heap of speccies from the Opes debacle, they must be risk adverse by now.
Ian Mott: And further to that the weekend edition of the AFR page 11, by Matthew Dunckley, has:-
“…Environmental groups including the Wilderness Society welcomed Gunn’s troubles and called on the ANZ to confirm its position.
Financial Services Union national policy director Rod Masson said ANZ had set the industry standard for corporate responsibility.
“Bank workers today applaud ANZ for its move to put environmental and community concerns at the centre of its fund decisions.” he said.
Don’t want to mention any names Rod Masson, but whose owns this:
http://www.bankcheck.net.au/documents/keep_jobs_here_petition.doc
Is there not a whiff of ManBearPig here!
Q. What did the ANZ employee say when she woke up on Sunday morning?
A. Gosh, are all you guys on the same team?
I think that you’re all missing the point here. Whether or not the pulp mill itself was good policy, it was symptomatic of a situation in Tasmania where it seemed to many, and not just Greens, that the State was being run for the benefit of Gunns Ltd. Lennon left because the perception that he was in Gunns’ pocket, and that the state was corrupt, led to a 17% approval rating.
To repeat: a sizeable majority in the State did not want the pulp mill, but particularly they did not want Gunns to get its way in every decision of importance being made about Tasmania’s natural resources. Lennon couldn’t withstand the political pressure, and had to leave. That’s democracy.
Further proof Alex and Mott are one and the same. Fruusttrraaatttiiooonnn!!!
Travis: Show me your ID and I’ll show you mine.
What utter nonsense Jason!
The Greens, Labor and the Liberals all went to the polls for the last Federal election with explicit pulp mill policies. If “a sizeable majority in Tasmania ” did not want the pulp mill then how do you explain the election result. Perhaps if you took the time to learn a little bit of Gunns history you may have a better understanding of teh situation in Tasmania.
Right on the mark Mott!
Perception is a wonderful thing and it is often created by advertisers seeking a gullible market who after purchase find little reality in the fanciful claims.
In the case of the pulp mill to claim “the state was corrupt” and “a sizeable majority in the State did not want the pulp mill” is not supported by any credible evidence.
Yet the lack of facts has not stopped those opposed to the pulp mill or to sustainable forestry in Tasmania’s right around the world these perceptions are being made, take for example http://catastrophemap.com/index.html
Opponents claim that the pulp mill process was corrupt because the Premier shared a meal in a public restaurant in Hobart with the Chairman of the company, yet no such claims when a green senator cavorts with a Sydney millionaire in the Kings Cross and Bondi Markets.
At the last Federal Election the same Green politician told voters a vote for either Liberal or Labor was a vote for the pulp mill. 10 million Australians voted for these two parties. In Tasmania the vote mirrored the national average of 80%. In the 2006 State election 251,000 Tasmanians or 81% voted for candidates who had made a written pledge to support the pulp mill.
For the last few years, one organization against the pulp mill has asked voters to sign up in opposition to the Mill, so far 16,000 of Tasmania’s 310,000 voters have. This is hardly a majority.
The Pulp mill of course was approved by State Parliament with every member having their vote recorded and given the opportunity to state why they chose to support or oppose the mill. This is Democracy at its best; this is a completely open and transparent process. It was only needed when the bureaucratic procedure failed to identify a timely process to approve or reject the mill.
Good post WJP, it seems “my” job is worth saving but “your” job is disposable. Or is it more the case that bimbopolitan jobs are sacred while rural and regional jobs are throw away items of zero consequence.
“Show me your ID and I’ll show you mine” reminds me of kids playing under the desk between lessons at primary school.
As they say in the trade, Lennon had a face for radio and a personality for the print media. He knew this perfectly well before he reluctantly took the job. He understood that, in the long term, the party would need a face and profile that the punters could “feel-good” about.
To seriously believe that swing voters make their voting decisions on the depth of policy and grasp of the brief is just plain delusional.
So this is where all the rednecks hang out. Jennifer seems to be suggesting that pulp mills are the victims of prejudice. Thats novel Jennifer. I wonder if Jennifer would be “prejudiced” against Gunns putting a pulp mill in Tasmania if she was a Tasmanian resident – like myself – and had borne witness to the many years of corruption in Tasmania – which the logging industry that she is so enamoured by, have been up to their necks in. The trashing of nature, justice and due process by the raw power of the alliance of unions like the CFMEU and the Australian Labor party. As Mark Latham once said
“No policy issue or set of relationships better demonstrates the ethical decline and political corruption of the Australian Labor movement than Tasmanian forestry.”
In November 2004 when Jennifers favourite logging corporation Gunns Limited, proposed constructing their so-called pulp mill in Tassy and undertook to do feasibility studies on two potential sites: the Tamar Valley (one of Tasmania’s prime wine-growing and tourist regions, that 100,000 people call home) and Hampshire (35 km south of Burnie at the centre of 100,000 hectares of eucalypt forests with almost no residents) and the assessment of the proposal was given to Tasmania’s independent planning authority – RPDC) and the majority of Tasmanians were happy.
But when that poor innocent logging corporation Gunns failed twice (on 25 October 2006, and 22 February 2007) to satisfy the RPDC that they could build such a facility in the Tamar Valley without adverse impact on the environment and the community and then in March 2007 – in cahutes with Paul Lennon – Gunns wriggled out of the RPDC assessment process after being tipped of by the Premiers dept that they were headed for a fail mark. Rather than rejecting the proposal at this point, the Tasmanian Government invited Gunns’s lawyers to assist in drafting legislation for a ‘fast-track approval process’ that failed to assess many of the important factors, bad smells among them, associated with kraft mills. Overnight, Tasmanians who had been happy became very unhappy.
It is not a matter of Tasmanians being prejudiced against pulp mills it about Tasmanians having the ability to smell bullshit.
Clearly Jennifer it is you that cant see past your own prejudices