And What Do You Do Mr. Gable?

by Richard Flanagan

  Tasmania is an extraordinary land, one that many hoped might become, in the words of the legend- ary landscape photographer Olegas Truchanas, ‘a shining beacon in an otherwise dull, uniform and largely artificial world’. Its remoteness, its wildness, its unique natural world—all seemed to offer the possibility of a prosperous and good future to an island that had for a century been the poorest in the Australian Commonwealth. Instead, over the past three decades, Tasmania has mortgaged its future to the woodchipping industry, which is today dominated by one company: Gunns Ltd. And it is Gunns—not the Tasmanian people—that has been the beneficiary of the destruction of Tasmania’s unique forests.

  Though founded in Tasmania in 1875, it was not until 1989, when it became part of the written history of corruption in Tasmania, that many Australians first came to hear of Gunns, then still one of several Tasmanian timber companies.

  In that year, then Gunns chairman Eddie Rouse became concerned that the election of a Labor–Green Tasmanian government with a one-seat majority might affect his logging profits. Rouse attempted to bribe a Labor member, Jim Cox, to cross the floor, thereby bringing down the government and clearing the way for pro-logging former premier Robin Gray and the Liberal Party to resume power. Cox went to the police and the plot was exposed; a royal commission and Rouse’s fall from grace and imprisonment ensued. But Gunns continued. Today it is a corporation worth more than a billion dollars, the largest company in Tasmania, with an effective monopoly of the island’s hardwood logging, and a darling of the Australian stockmarket.

  Yet Gunns remains haunted by the Rouse scandal. The Gunns board continues to this day to have among its directors former associates of the late Eddie Rouse. The 1991 royal commission found that director David McQuestin, whose friendship with Rouse it characterised as ‘obsequious’, was not ‘unlawfully involved as a principal offender’ with the bribery attempt, although his ‘compliance with Rouse’s direction in the matter was “highly improper”’—a ‘glaring breach of the requisite standards of commercial morality’. Robin Gray is also now a director of Gunns: the royal commission found that he ‘knew of and was involved with Rouse in Rouse’s attempt to bribe Cox’, and that while his conduct was not unlawful, it was ‘improper, and grossly so’. John Gay, Gunns’ managing director in 1989, and now its chairman and CEO, was cleared by the royal commission of any involvement with the bribery attempt.

  In a dissembling world ever more given to corporate deference to a green image, the company shows an often-unexpected candour. Gunns makes no secret of its enmity towards conservationists and conservation groups. Gunns plans to destroy more, rather than less, Tasmanian native forest. Gunns makes no apologies for what this means.

  ‘How do you feel about protected species dying for your business?’ John Gay was once asked on national television.

  ‘Well, there’s too many of them,’ he replied, ‘and we need to keep them at a reasonable level.’

  And while—like so much else in Tasmania—total woodchip production figures since 2000 are officially secret, Gunns’ own evidence in support of its proposed pulp mill reveals that it plans to double woodchipping from its present annual levels of approximately 3.5 million tonnes to 7 million tonnes over the next decade.

  To evade the ever-growing public anger, the woodchipping industry has had to exercise an ever-stronger control over Tasmanian life. Both major parties in Tasmania, and much of the Tasmanian media, frequently give the appearance of existing only as clients of the woodchippers. The state’s interest and that of this industry are now so thoroughly identified as one and the same that anyone questioning the woodchipping industry’s actions is attacked by leading government figures as a traitor to Tasmania. And it is not only the forests that have been destroyed by this industry. Its poison has seeped into every aspect of Tasmanian life: jobs are threatened, careers destroyed, people driven to leave. And in recent years, its influence has extended further, so that now its activities are endorsed nationally by both the prime minister, John Howard, and the opposition leader, Kevin Rudd.

  Huge money is being made by Gunns out of destroying native forests, but to maintain what to many is an obscenity there has evolved a culture of secrecy, shared interest and intimidation that seems to firmly bind the powerful in Tasmania.

  When actress Rebecca Gibney, who moved to Tasmania two years ago to raise her family, said in a television interview that she would leave the state if Gunns’ proposed pulp mill was built, former Liberal Party candidate and bottle-shop owner Sam McQuestin made headlines by publicly attacking her as a ‘serial complainer’ whose family made no contribution to the Tasmanian economy and who had no ‘right to tell the rest of us how to live our lives’. McQuestin’s family is well known for its contribution: his father is David McQuestin, a Gunns director. The attack on Rebecca Gibney was but a public example of something far more widespread and insidious.

  I witnessed a senior ALP politician make it clear that yet another Tasmanian was no longer welcome in the clearfell state after local businessman Gerard Castles wrote an article in a newspaper questioning government policy on old-growth logging. ‘The fucking little cunt is finished,’ the politician said in front of me and my twelve-year-old daughter. ‘He will never work here again.’

  In Tasmania, to question, to comment adversely, is to invite the possibility of ostracism and unemployment, and the state is full of those who pay a high price for their opinion on the forests, the blackballed multiplying with the blackened stumps. It is commonplace to meet people too frightened to speak publicly of their concerns about forestry practices because of the adverse consequences they perceive this might have for their careers and businesses. In consequence of the forest battle, a subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) fear has entered Tasmanian public life; it stifles dissent, avoids truth.

  And how can it be otherwise? The great majority of Tasmanians appear to be overwhelmingly opposed to old-growth logging, and only by the constant crushing of opposing points of view, and the attempted silencing and smearing of those who put them, can the practice continue. And so, nearly two decades after its then chairman’s failed attempt to corrupt parliament, Gunns now seems so powerful that Tasmanians joke that their government is the ‘gunnerment’, and leading national politicians of all persuasions acknowledge that the real power in Tasmania is not the government but Gunns itself.

  This goes further than the sizeable donations Gunns makes to both major parties, both in Tasmania and nationally. It goes beyond Gunns’ role in election campaigns, such as the $486,000 spent on aggressive political advertising in the 2004 federal election by the Forest Industries Association of Tasmania (FIAT), of which Gunns is the largest member.

  ‘A lot of people are intimidated by the employment side of the [Tasmanian forestry] industry,’ prominent Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan has said, ‘including some politicians.’

  But who can blame even the powerful being scared? The former Tasmanian Liberal leader Bob Cheek recalls how ‘the state’s misguided forestry policy was ruthlessly policed by Gunns’; how fearful the politicians were of the forest lobby and what he describes as their ‘hitmen’.

  In a cowed society, the Tasmanian government often gives the impression of being little more than a toadying standover man for its corporate godfather, willing to undertake any action, no matter how degrading, to help those with the real power.

  When, in 2004, Wyena farming couple Howard and Michelle Carpenter had themselves and their property directly sprayed by a helicopter with Atrazine meant for an adjacent Gunns plantation, poisoning their water supply, Gunns’ only response was to send the couple two bottles of spring water. Later, when the story became a public scandal, they provided the Carpenters with a water tank, which a few months later they removed, though the Carpenters’ water bore remained poisoned. To reassure the public that they had no cause for concern, then water minister Steve Kons fronted a media conference at
which he loyally drank a glass of water tainted with Atrazine. Steve Kons is now deputy premier.

  According to former federal Labor leader Mark Latham, ‘They [Gunns] run the state Labor Government, they run [Labor Premier] Lennon, and old Lennon there, he wouldn’t scratch himself unless the guy who heads up Gunns told him to.’

  Latham would know: after all, his own bid to be prime minister came to its end when he ran up against Gunns in the federal election of 2004. Latham was no conservationist, but the growing national outcry over Tasmania’s forests, driven by a long campaign by conservation groups, led him in the final week of the election to propose a bold plan to end logging the island’s old-growth forests, which included an $800-million compensation package to logging workers. Quite extraordinarily, the package was rejected by the Tasmanian Labor movement.

  Two days later, Liberal Prime Minister John Howard flew into Tasmania to announce the continuation of old-growth logging indefinitely, along with more extensive subsidies to the logging industry and, as a sop to the green vote, the protection of some areas of old growth. A few areas were victories. Much was a con: areas that were either already reserved or, as Terry Edwards of FIAT admitted about the north Styx, very difficult to log; or, as in the Weld or Florentine, later—in an act of arch cynicism—to be logged anyway.

  In the most extraordinary images of that election, Howard was cheered by two thousand logging workers at a rally in Launceston, supported by the powerful Construction, Forest, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU). Within the week Howard’s Liberal Party would be returned to government, and within a year some of those same workers would be forced out of the industry by Gunns breaking contracts, and looking for work in a workplace ravaged by the toughest anti-union laws in Australia’s history—introduced by the man they had cheered on to victory.

  ‘We seem to get on better with the Liberals than we do with Labor at the moment,’ Premier Paul Lennon told a journalist a few weeks after federal Labor had suffered one of its worst defeats.

  The conservationists had foundered and, with Howard’s crushing victory, Gunns now had a federal government who felt electorally rewarded for taking the company’s side. Gunns had too a state government so committed to it that seemingly no issue in Tasmania could be decided without first being held up to see whether it was good or bad for the old-growth logging industry. And it left federal Labor so terrified of ever touching the issue again that when Kevin Rudd assumed leadership of the federal Labor Party in 2006, one of his first actions was to endorse the Tasmanian logging industry. But then, as former Labor leader Mark Latham ruefully admitted, ‘No policy issue or set of relationships better demonstrates the ethical decline and political corruption of the Australian Labor movement than Tasmanian forestry.’

  The dogs were off the leash and Gunns was now at its most powerful. Within months it made a move that was widely viewed as an attempt to cripple the conservation movement, the last remaining impediment to its ambitions. On 14 December 2004, Gunns filed a 216-page, $6.3-million claim against a group of conser- vationists and organisations who became known as the Gunns 20.

  The writ was an extraordinary document that sought to sue a penniless grandmother who had opposed logging in her district; a national political leader, Senator Bob Brown; a doctor who had raised public-health issues about woodchip piles; prominent conservationists; Australia’s leading wilderness-conservation organisation, the Wilderness Society; a film-maker; and several day protesters.

  All were joined in what was alleged to be a conspiracy guilty of the crime of ‘corporate vilification’. The writ presented a tale of a group of people together seeking—through a series of actions as diverse as protesters chaining themselves to logging machinery to the lobbying of Japanese paper companies—to destroy Gunns’ profits. The perversity of the action was staggering: with the immense fortune they had made out of destroying Tasmania’s forests, Gunns had launched an action that would, if successful, have redefined the practice of democracy as the crime of conspiracy. An Australian would not have been able to criticise, question or campaign against a corporation for risk of being bankrupted in legal proceedings brought against them by the richest and most powerful in their society, claiming damage to their corporate interest. No matter how a corporation made its money, be it from tobacco or asbestos or chemicals, all of its actions would have effectively been removed from the realm of public life. Gunns’ action was compared with the legal standover tactics that prevail in such countries as Singapore, where political opponents are bankrupted then jailed through such a process of litigation.

  If its legal ramifications were enormous but unrealised, its political impact was immediate. While the writ excited a national outcry, garnering comparisons with the McLibel case, in the short term it only further intimidated many in Tasmania, and tied up the leading conservation groups and conservationists in a difficult, expensive and all-consuming court case at a moment when Gunns was planning its most controversial action of all.

  Two days after it issued the writ, Gunns announced its plans for a gigantic $1.4-billion pulp mill, the biggest infrastructure project in Tasmania’s history and one of the biggest pulp mills in the world, to be built 36 kilometres from Launceston, Tasmania’s second-largest city.

  At first, reassuring commitments were given that the mill would be environmentally friendly—chlorine-free and primarily using plantation timber. Premier Paul Lennon was adamant that the pulp mill would only go ahead if Gunns could prove to an independent government body, the Resource and Planning Development Commission (RPDC), that their proposal adhered to world’s best environmental standards. The process was to be above politics and the RPDC’s decision final.

  But public concern began to grow as it became clear Gunns was planning something entirely different from what they had originally announced. Gunns now wanted to build a Kraft chlorine bleaching mill—the type that produce dioxins, some of the most toxic substances known to man—fuelled initially by 80 per cent native forest woodchips.

  Then was revealed the shocking news that to feed the pulp mill’s gargantuan appetite, Gunns had signed a deal (the exact details of which remain secret) with then Tasmanian forest minister Bryan Green, which would double the level of ongoing destruction of Tasmania’s native forests for the next twenty years.

  At the same time, Tasmanians discovered that while the mill was being assessed Premier Lennon was using a wholly owned subsidiary of Gunns, the construction company Hinman, Wright & Manser, to renovate his historic home. It was a curious choice of builder. Hinman, Wright & Manser is known to be less than enthusiastic in its support of unionised labour, and to be a keen proponent of the Howard government’s new workplace-relations laws, of which Lennon had publicly been such a vociferous critic. More remarkably, the Gunns ‘construction division’, as it is termed on Gunns’ website, is an industrial- and civil-works company that advertises itself as specialising in ‘larger construction work’ such as mines, warehouses, concrete plants, schools, courts, remand centres, nursing homes, hospitals, reservoirs, substations, wharf berths, woodchip mills and road bridges, but makes no mention of home renovation.

  Lennon has never answered questions put at the time as to what Hinman, Wright & Manser originally quoted for the job, nor whether there were other quotes. Lennon and Gunns have both subsequently said Lennon paid for the renovations, though the precise sum has never been revealed. Lennon dismissed any questions on the matter as a painful attack on his family’s privacy.

  The revelations that have since ensued have not been so easily dismissed. In early January 2007, the head of the RPDC pulp-mill inquiry, Julian Green, and the inquiry’s leading scientific advisor and a national pulp-mill expert, Dr Warwick Raverty, both resigned, both citing political interference.

  It has become public knowledge that the RPDC found Gunns’ own evidence to be riddled with inaccuracies and errors; that levels of dioxins in the mill’s
outflow were initially underestimated by a factor of forty-five; and that the mill, as well as failing to address Australian Medical Association (AMA) concerns about ultra-fine particle pollution, also significantly failed to meet at least three official air-pollution guidelines. Senior scientists questioned Gunns’ claims that 64,000 tonnes of treated effluent pouring daily from the mill into the ocean would not harm Bass Strait and its marine life. Gunns’ modelling for air pollution in the Tamar Valley was so shoddy that it sometimes fantastically predicted air pollution would be lower with a pulp mill than without.

  Pointing out that ‘no other pulp mill in the world uses the process Gunns proposes’, and that its noxious emissions would pour into a densely populated valley already subject to the worst smog problems in Tasmania, Raverty has since warned that ‘the risk of producing unacceptable levels of deadly and persistent chemicals known as organochlorines is too high’.

  Raverty—who works for a subsidiary of the CSIRO and has consistently pointed out he is speaking in a personal capacity about the mill’s pollution risk—has claimed a Gunns executive rang the CSIRO seeking to pressure them into silencing him. The CSIRO has confirmed Gunns has ‘expressed concerns’. Raverty has since said he would welcome the opportunity to appear before a criminal-justice commission or royal commission into the process, because there needed to be public scrutiny of the ‘very unethical activities’ of the Tasmanian government.

  Though the Tasmanian chapter of the AMA warned Tasmania’s political leaders they would be personally accountable for any health problems resulting from the proposed pulp mill, the leaders were listening not to such dire concerns but rather to the Gunns board, with whom Premier Lennon and his kitchen cabinet met on 25 February 2007.

  Two days later, Gunns told the Australian Stock Exchange it was ‘confident the necessary government approvals’ for its pulp mill ‘will be obtained within a timeframe which maintains the commercial value of the project’. That same day Paul Lennon handed the newly appointed head of the RPDC’s pulp-mill assessment panel, former Supreme Court judge Christopher Wright, QC, a typed timeline laying out his demands.