And What Do You Do Mr. Gable?

by Richard Flanagan

  ‘It was plain as the nose on my face,’ Wright later said, ‘that he was trying to please Gunns.’

  Describing it as a ‘completely inappropriate . . . attempt to pressure’ him, Wright rejected what he termed an ‘ultimatum’ by Lennon to dump public hearings and wind up the assessment by 31 July or face the RPDC being dumped in favour of legislation fast-tracking the process. A fortnight later Gunns withdrew from the RPDC process, blaming delays which John Gay termed ‘commercially unacceptable’. What was commercially acceptable to Gunns now became a political imperative for the Tasmanian government.

  That Wright said most of the delays were Gunns’ fault was of no consequence. 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 Greens leader Bob Brown sold everything he had and took both the Tasmanian and 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. Brown 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 logging is once again legal.

  Faced with the possibility the mill might now not meet the RPDC pollution guidelines, Premier 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 this August. 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’ Labourers’ Federation (BLF), Bacon was for several years a loyal lieutenant of the BLF’s leader, the notorious Norm Gallagher. By the time Gallagher was gaoled for taking bribes from developers, and the BLF 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 commonsense measure to reduce the number of parliamentary members. But it was intensely political in effect, because fewer parliamentarians meant a higher quota was needed 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 1980s and now Gunns board member, lobbied him the night before the vote on the reform.

  ‘We’ve got to stop the Greens, Bob,’ Gray told Cheek. 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 ran the island’s two casinos, was awarded a fifteen-year gaming monopoly—conservatively estimated by Citigroup to be worth $130 million in licensing revenues—free of charge.

  But the greatest winner was Gunns. Gunns’ shares were languishing at $1.40 when the Bacon government came to power. Its subsequent growth was dizzying. Within four years, it had recorded an increase of 199 per cent in profits. With the acquisition of two rival companies, Gunns took control of more than 85 per cent 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 Tasmanian 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 making 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 the 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 1990s.

  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 day, the Tasmanian forest industry has received a staggering total of $780 million in taxpayer handouts, $289 million of it since 2005, much of which has been 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 Australia’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 Tasmanian 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 Tasmania was acquiring a global reputation as an island of exceptional beauty, the forces that would destroy much of the island’s unique natural world had been unleashed. This sad irony, denied in Tasmania, did not however escape the more astute of the world’s media: major features began appearing in the Observer, Le Figaro, Süddeutsch Zeitung and the New York Times—mounting evidence that what was happening in Tasmania was increasingly being seen as an environmental catastrophe of global significance.

  What might be read about Tasmania’s forests in New York or Paris, though, was not information easily found in Hobart or Launceston. Apart from a few brave journalists, a generally c
raven 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 annual reports reveal that approximately 90 per cent 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 tactic of semantic confusion that’s worked well for the tobacco and oil industries. Beyond, forests unique in the world continue to disappear.

  Jim Bacon’s nickname was ‘the emperor’, but the man perceived to be the power behind the throne was his deputy, Paul Lennon. Ill-tempered, badly behaved and brutally effective, his political capacity—like so many strong-arm leaders—was too often and too easily dismissed.

  Lennon made no more apologies for his thuggish behaviour (he once shoved a conservationist up against a wall in the middle of a meeting, an encounter he claims not to remember) than he did his enthusiasm for the old-growth logging industry, or his close friendship with logging baron John Gay. Anyone taking a first-hand look at Tasmania would, he once said, ‘see a lot of fucking trees’.

  When Bacon retired as premier in early 2004 because of terminal cancer, Lennon became premier, and any pretence that Gunns might be reined in within Tasmania came to an end.

  These days, Gunns is everywhere in Tasmania: there are Gunns shops, Gunns television advertising, Gunns-sponsored weather bulletins. If you go to watch an AFL game at Tasmania’s premier stadium, York Park, you pass through the main entrance, officially and aptly named the ‘Jim Bacon Gates’ built by—who else?—a wholly owned subsidiary of Gunns, and come to the Gunns Stand, the largest and most opulently fitted stand at the stadium, much of it paid for, equally aptly, by the Tasmanian government.

  With the river of money that had poured in from Tasmania’s destroyed forests and Australian taxpayers, Gunns had diversified into businesses in New Zealand and mainland Australia. It set about becoming the main player in the Tasmanian wine industry, with itself the dominant producer. That the wood- chippers’ wines—Tamar Ridge, Coombend, Devil’s Corner—were not stocked by some shops, bars and restaurants in Hobart because of consumer antipathy was of no concern, for the venture’s financial underpinning was the same as its forestry plantations: tax-minimisation schemes in which grape-growing schemes qualified for a 100 per cent tax write off. Yet again, it was Australian taxes at work for Gunns.

  Gunns now made no secret of what the cost would be for those who questioned the sanctity of old-growth logging, no matter who they were. During the 2004 federal election, plantation softwood processor Auspine—a $200-million forestry company based in South Australia that runs two pine sawmills employing 313 people in the northern Tasmanian town of Scottsdale—incurred John Gay’s wrath by having the temerity to put forward a $450-million plan in which old-growth logging would be ended immediately, but Tasmania’s forest industry would be expanded by 900 new jobs. John Gay made it clear that Auspine had been very foolish, saying: ‘Their comments have been extremely damaging to themselves and their future in Tasmania.’ Two months later Gunns’ hardware stores stopped stocking Auspine timber.

  Auspine’s pine comes from land owned by Forestry Tasmania, but a half-share in their trees was sold by Jim Bacon in 1999 for $40 million to American global investment firm GMO. In early 2007 it was announced that Auspine had lost its pine supply in a deal that saw the timber go to a new company, FEA, which doesn’t even have a sawmill. In this manner more than 300 people are to lose their jobs. Though it is half-owner of the resource, both the state-owned Forestry Tasmania and the Tasmanian government refused to intervene in the negotiations to help Auspine or its workers.

  When Paul Lennon finally went to Scottsdale four weeks after the initial announcement, sawmill workers turned their backs on the man who had always boasted he stood for the jobs of forestry-industry workers. Increasingly, it appeared to many Tasmanians that the only jobs Lennon really cared about were his own and those of the Gunns directors.

  Perhaps, predictably, one of the last defences seized on in this battle by politicians on six-figure salaries is that they stand solidly with the working class. But Lennon’s routine claim that 10,000 jobs are at stake if old-growth logging is ended is without substance, and avoids the truth: jobs have been disappearing in old-growth logging for many years not because of conservationists, but because of mechanisation.

  While woodchipping destroyed the older labour-intensive sawmill timber industry, the Hampshire woodchip mill in north Tasmania—the biggest in the southern hemisphere—employs just twelve people. A report in the Australian Financial Review in 2004 revealed the Tasmanian industry in its entirety had shed more than 1200 jobs since 1997.

  Like Lennon’s previously expansive claims—that, for example, ending old-growth logging in Western Australia had left more than 4000 people unemployed, something categorically refuted by the West Australian government—there is no evidence for the figure of 10,000 jobs. It is more than seven times the number of 1345 jobs given by the forest industry’s very own report on employment in the old-growth logging sector, commissioned by FIAT and written by pro-logging academics in 2004. Old-growth logging—as distinct from the rest of the much larger forestry industry—was estimated by a Timber Workers for Forests report in the same year to employ only 580 people.

  Both figures were arrived at before Gunns sent many contractors to the wall in 2006. When it slashed logging contracts by up to 40 per cent in order to offset a decline in woodchip sales, logging workers for the first time publicly expressed their growing bitterness towards Gunns and the hefty profits it made while their livelihoods vanished.

  In response, Barry Chipman of Timber Communities Australia (TCA) denied there was growing resentment within the industry towards Gunns. Presenting itself as the grassroots organisation of those it terms the ‘forest folk’, the TCA has from its inception in 1987 been rather the vehicle of the National Association of Forest Industries (NAFI), which is financed by the logging industry. The TCA’s support for the Tasmanian logging industry was once described by John Gay as an ‘invaluable alliance’. Invaluable though it may be, the logging industry does put a price on it: in 2002−03, $723,154 of the TCA’s total revenues of $836,977 came from direct industry contributions. In the same year, Barry Chipman’s wages were directly paid for by NAFI.

  It was ‘situations like this’, Barry Chipman said of Gunns’ slashing of contracts, that sorted out the ‘good operators’ from the bad—further incensing those contractors who, acting on Gunns’ promises of more work, had taken out bigger loans to purchase better equipment, and now were unable to meet repayments. ‘Everyone needs to tighten their belt a little bit,’ went on Barry Chipman. ‘Any downturn will also be suffered by the company and its shareholders.’

  But they didn’t seem to be suffering much that year at ‘Launceston’s Lavish Lunch’, the annual fundraiser of the Launceston branch of the Australian Cancer Research Foundation, held at one of Tasmania’s most celebrated historic homes, Entally House. It seems to have been a splendid day for the island’s clearfelling contessas, and the Launceston Cancerians—whose committee includes the wives of both John Gay and David McQuestin—later waxed effusively on their website about the event, extending ‘A big thanks . . . to Mr John Gay for opening his house for the function’.

  Entally House isn’t really John Gay’s house, of course, just as crown forest isn’t really his land. Like the forest, the histori
c house belonged to the Tasmanian people, but in 2004 the Tasmanian government terminated the National Trust’s lease and gave a twenty-year lease to Gunns. Plans by Gunns to plant a ten-hectare vineyard in Entally’s historic grounds were immediately announced, John Gay declaring that Gunns was developing ‘a detailed marketing strategy’ for the property, centring on the marketing of Gunns wines. And in this way a unique piece of Australia’s heritage became both John Gay’s house and a charming marketing platform for Gunns. The public can still visit Entally House, which technically- speaking they still own. It only costs $8 per adult.

  Meanwhile, log-truck driver Gary Coad, who in 2004 was found guilty of assaulting a conservationist and who cheered John Howard when he announced his ongoing support for old-growth logging, was forced out of the industry he had worked in for thirty years. Now, he told a local newspaper, contractors were at ‘rock bottom’, unable to make ends meet. ‘The biggest problem in the industry,’ he went on to say, ‘is Gunns’ virtual monopoly’, which meant any contractors who criticised the company could be squeezed out of the business. ‘We came up [to the Launceston rally] and fought for John Gay’s livelihood,’ continued Coad, ‘well now it’s time for him to turn around and do the same for us.’

  But no one—no Gunns director, no Labor or Liberal politician, no CFMEU rep, no ‘forest community’ advocates—was going to fight for the forest workers or speak to the betrayal they felt as they now went under and jobs disappeared.

  Instead, like Kevin Rudd on his ‘listening’ tour in December 2006, they said they supported the existing Tasmanian forestry industry in order, as Rudd put it, that there be ‘no overall loss of jobs’, ignoring the fact that supporting Gunns was exactly what ensured workers continue to lose jobs, continue to be exploited under Gunns’ pitiless tendering system, and continue to suffer.