Gunns gets the go-ahead
Turnbull has approved the Gunns pulp mill in Tasmania. After rigorous scientific assessment, he’s increased the number of conditions imposed on the mill from 24 to 48. This’d be great if they were actually going to monitor any of those conditions after the mill is built. Since Gunns has always ignored regulations in Tasmania, the extra conditions will make any difference at all.
Turnbull says the mill will be “world’s best practice”, but this is a lie – chlorine bleaching has been discontinued by the pulp industry elsewhere in the world because it’s too toxic, but Gunns wants to use it for this mill. Meanwhile, they’re still allowed to chop down the native old-growth forests of Tasmania to feed to the mill to make pulp. Those native forests are the only home for many native animals facing extinction; now they’ll be halved in size, from 11% to 5% of the original forest that remains.
The good news is that just because Turnbull has approved it, it doesn’t mean it’ll get built.
- The Tasmanian Greens are still going to fight against it and say there are grounds for a possible High Court challenge to Turnbull’s decision
- Federal Liberal MP Ben Quin has resigned from the Liberal party over the issue and will contest his Tasmanian seat as an independent because the mill approval represents a “fundamental failure of democracy”
- Geoff Cousins is campaigning to ask the ANZ to refuse finance to the project
Some YouTube links
- Greens Senator Christine Milne explains why they won’t give up
- The Chaser: Premier Lennon and Pulp Millsy – since Lennon likes mills in his backyard, they visit his house with Millsy from Season 1 of Australian Idol
2 Comments
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I’ve never understood how jobs for one group of people (timber workers) trumps jobs for another group of people (tourism workers), especially when you could argue that one of those sets of jobs is a hell of lot more sustainable and long-term than the other – I’ve been to Tasmania and when you go from the protected area into an area that’s been razed to the ground, the contrast is sickening, and practically speaking not something tourists want to see.
This is like the situation in Iceland where the whale hunting industry managed to get the government to allow it again, even though it promptly hurt tourism and the whale industry was never projected to earn even a fraction of what tourism brings in for that country. (For the record, if I had remembered about the whale hunting before I booked our tickets, I would have boycotted Iceland as a tourist destination; as it was we had to refuse to eat at any restuarant serving whale as our form of protest).
I hate that small lobby groups can subvert democratic processes, especially these days when economic rationalism is supposed to be king, queen and the entire royal family of how decisions are made – surely in a properly calculated comparison, long-term tourism beats out short-term logging/pulping. Properly calculated as in counts the cost to the environment and standard of living too.
I think this ties in to the fact that tourism and other service industries aren’t very unionised – the workers in tertiary industries are many but scattered, and so they don’t have that collective power to make demands or have their voices heard. But tertiary workers also wouldn’t stand for some of the crap that primary unions get up to…
The other relevant issue is that many politicians are only available on a cash-for-access basis, which again gives the benefit to old corporations rather than small business or multi-nationals without a strong local presence.
It’s bizarre – about 250 jobs from the mill vs. the thousands of tourism jobs all over Tasmania.