THE most powerful arm of government, the Hydro Electric Commission, worked with government and industry in directing the post WW2 policy of hydro-industrialization.

Building power stations and providing bulk power cheap attracted industry to locate in Tasmania, until the winding back of tariffs on imported manufactures. It was a cozy arrangement, providing good pay and challenges for the Hydro’s engineers, large government contracts for contractors and suppliers and also jobs for the then Labor government to claim it provided for its voting base.

Just before these industry supporting tariffs commenced being wound back Japanese industry targeted Australia’s forests to a supply more wood for its paper industry. The long fibred Eucalypt of its former adversary fell into a desired category and so the woodchip export industry came to Australia, sometimes as a joint venture, sometimes Australian owned. These Australian companies took the opportunity to export fibre as woodchips from an apparently abundant forest resources bought at a low price on the spurious notion forests needed cleaning up and led to a negative return to the owners, the public.

The second large government debt generating industry began to appear in Tasmania.

As the water sources for power generation close to population centers became fully exploited, so further and further into Western Tasmania went the dam builders, following the miners and the piners into the west and south-west.

Here was where the old ideas of nature as something to be tamed and turned into a commodity came into conflict with the growing idea that its wildness was something essential to the human spirit. These old attitudes came into conflict with a growing understanding of nature as a necessity in its own right, as necessary to support us in a world of increased commodification as our daily bread.

The first modern expression of this in Tasmania was in the Campaign to Save Lake Pedder. A little later the Woodchip Campaign arose from a similar understanding of nature.

In the decade and a half that Tasmanians campaigned against the costly exercise of dam building and the destruction of nature, those in power continued with the belief that they were and held to the same practices they had developed, the cozy deals, the understandings and the costs moved to the taxpayer.

Except for exports, the control over resources within our federal structure was a matter for the states. And why would the federal government not give a permit anyway; it was as it should be with nature, money should be taken and wildness tamed, it is the human function and the role of a colonial economy is to supply raw materials to the center.

And then came the Gordon below Franklin Hydro Scheme proposal at a time when the cultural cringe had suffered almost mortal blows and a sense of national iderntity had emerged.

Tasmanians debated the matter and the then Premier Doug Lowe, anointed by the former Premier ‘Electric” Eric Reece, decided that it would only be fair to ask the public which alternative dam scheme they wanted.

Against all the campaigning that the local media could muster in cahoots with the HEC, its captive government and industry; Tasmanians voted 34% for No Dams to be built, a question that was not on the referendum paper. The support for the position of the nascent pre-greens was a shock to all.

More media campaigning and government was changed to a more pragmatic model. The Liberals had been in opposition until Robin Gray arrived on the political scene and with his own brand of crash through took government from Labor after over 4 decades of unbroken power and pushed the agenda of a GBF scheme ahead.

Work commenced, but different to the campaigns to save nature run before, many other Australians took an interest in the destruction of this wild piece of nature. Tasmanian times had changed, no longer isolated by distance an electronic media brought to the homes of the world the actions and arguments against damning the wilderness as they did those of the Vietnam War. 

Gray took on a federal government of his own colour, then under Malcolm Frazer, who had read the national mood by opposing this Tasmanian action. Gray refused to abandon what he believed to be central to Tasmanian culture, Hydro dam building and Frazer was bound by a belief in state rights.

A Federal election saw a change to the Robert ‘Bob’ Hawke Labor government, one committed to stopping the dam being built, and with a successful High Court challenge extending the Commonwealth’s powers, the Hawke government stopped the dam from being built. The scars are still there on the River today and they continue to run deep into Tasmanian society 25 years later.

Of interest was the reasoning behind the dam proposal, a demand for more power. Several years after the dam was stopped it came out that the so-called demands for power were only industry wishes. They had little intent of expanding business here but with a large surplus of power the price would be low if they did decided to.

Of course compensation had to be paid and the Tasmanian government needed to ensure work for those in the dam building game. More dams were built but eventually the cost of mega dams against the growth in demand turned the Hydro into the wind. The growth in wind farms could be more closely matched to demand and also selling its expertise elsewhere, where nature had not been damned and protest was less likely.

However, costly schemes were still saleable and the desire to get the payment on offer for entering the competitive national electricity market saw a commitment to a power cable connecting Tasmanian to Australia.

The decision makers failed to heed the warnings of climate science and so the cable sold to us as a conduit for income from selling green power to the mainland was connected to a system that now has fallen to at best half full in recent times and for the last 2 years has seen coal fired power imported to keep those dependent on mains electricity supplied. 

Whilst fortuitous for those dependent on mains electricity it is also costing and will see electricity prices rise for those so dependent whilst the snow and rainfall deficit continues. The longer term prediction is for snow to cease and rainfall to decline under the changes caused by increasing levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

And down in the woods the export of woodchips continued.

A little paragraph in the then wood supply agreement slept quietly until North Broken Hill P/L decided to enter the forest destruction game and, after taking over the Burnie Pulpmill from Associated Pulp and Paper Manufacturers, and thus gaining their 1926 forest concession, came up with the idea of making pulp and so becoming the major player in the Tasmanian forests exploitation for continued access to native forests.

Not for a very, very longtime will a company seriously again propose to put a world scale pulpmill at Wesley Vale. Defying the local wishes, polluting the ocean and its resources, the high class agricultural land and also taking huge volumes of water from the Mersey River, a system that would now have difficulty meeting that demand.

Premier Gray went out of favor with the voters when this mill failed to meet federal environmental standards, his second major defeat, and went to nurse his wounds in the business world, having been implicated in a plot to bribe a member of parliament, Jim Cox, to retain power.

Found guilty of attempted bribery was the businessman Edmund Rouse, who spent his time working in the Risdon prison laundry and lost his knighthood. He headed a northern Tasmanian media empire that included the ever recalcitrant Examiner. One of those business connections that was caught out. 

Across the nation on and on the struggle for the forests went, as areas never before logged fell as grist to the woodchipper. Parties wishing to govern promised and failed to deliver; twisting again and again on the petard of this icon of the environment, unsure what action would translate into power.

Finally, government decided to try and take control over process and starting under Paul Keating and moving to the era of John Howard both the old parties in Canberra worked with the permanent government and industry in attempting to remove forest from the national agenda with an agreement between the Commonwealth and each state to manage forests for their environmental values as well as for the money. 

It’s a pity the Regional Forest Agreement did not also require forests to be managed with a return to the State, that way at least the price for wood would have gone up to more realistic levels of value.

Of the four states to sign up to the RFA, forest destruction has been wound back in all of them through campaigns showing the waste of continuing with the destruction of native forests, especially those in a natural state, and the value to the industry of using plantations to supply needs.

However, Tasmania has remained central to the issue of forest and also the issue central to it. Its forests finally became a question of national choice in 2004 when Mark Latham failed to be convincing across a range of issues, and led Labor to a monumental defeat at the zenith of Howard’s popularity.

Tasmania’s 5 federal lower house seats remain important and so they can be used to ensure government pays due heed to the power of old ideas. The Labor state Premier sacrificed his national party and spurned Latham’s forest compensation policy. Future Labor policy was bound to acknowledge that power play for a considerable time. A double win for industry.

Three years later and Howard lost his own seat as well as government and Labor has returned to power nationally, keeping faith with the Howard’s alteration to the unalterable RFA and to the 5 seat lesson flowing from that.

During this time a new pulpmill was proposed a second time and cleverly played out against a background of an election. The Liberals Malcolm Turnbull approved it in record time after an extremely short consideration of the proponents’ environmental statement. Whether the time spent was sufficient is now a matter for the High Court.

And in the new Rudd government the former idol of the environment has retreated to his inner Garrett, perhaps awaiting approval to appear, but certainly not communicating with his previous public.

Stripped of power over restoring the climate to stability and cornered into supporting approval of a pulpmill he should have opposed, given his values, the man who claimed it was more important to have power than be pure now has neither. 

And the Rudd government has been drawn deeper into the mire that surrounds the old ways of behaving, pinning their flag to the old ways of forestry, the splash of every writhe to make the outdated ideas and ways palatable sticks corrupted process ever thicker to the fresh new government. 

This tie to old ways will also bind the Labor party on climate policy as the coal and oil industry manipulate their power in the permanent government and through the media into the electorate to pervert effective policies for Australia to take a responsible path restore climate stability. A precursor is the current power struggle in NSW Labor.

In Tasmania due process for an assessment was promised and then abandoned, world class environmental standards were promised and then abandoned and jobs were promised and then over half of them abandoned.

The government has been advised by the proponent’s suppliers in a situation similar to the role of the Hydro under ‘Electric’ Eric, a party with a major financial interest has told the government the mill will be safe and they can see no conflict in that.

The people of the Tamar have been abandoned to suffer unknown stinks in the very least. The uncertainty involved in the proposed pulpmill puts great mental strain on those residents who don’t want it and also those unsure of its consequences.

Process has come undone, the stink that pervaded forestry activities, conducted as a law unto themselves, has come to cover all of the institutions of Tasmania; the 2 levels of government and both the permanent and the provisional State government and has probably overwhelmed the Liberal provisional government in waiting. 

No one can be sure what is not crook, who is paying whom behind the scenes or what backs are being scratched in this imbroglio conducte in the menagerie of foul play and corrupted process that has the pretence to call itself government.

It has led to the resignation of 2 Deputy Premiers, the disappearance from the state of the former Head of the Department of Premier and Cabinet and the resignation of at least 3 commissioners of the RPDC.

Of course not every supporter of the pulpmill has to be brought directly; although the offer of $867 each showed what Lennon considers Tasmanians value most.

We cannot know what would have followed from the construction of the Gordon below Franklin power scheme but we do know that the dependence on hydro power has come under doubt as climate instability becomes stronger. 

We cannot know what a large scale pulpmill will result in although we have examples overseas from which to draw.

We do know that the 2 biggest government business enterprises are also the generators of a large state debt.

We do know that biological carbon sinks, the natural ones that have delayed the onset of climate destabilization are storing less and less carbon due to the impacts of our carbon generating activities and that if we wish to avoid catastrophic impacts of climate instability we need to fully mobilize every sink now.

The mindset of Tasmanians in government and big business had when the Gordon below Franklin power scheme was proposed has not been replaced by another; still remaining is a belief that we can continue with business as usual, that the old ways of inward looking business isolated from the world at large still work, that we can tame and commodify nature and not suffer any consequences, that government process can be separated from normal standards of behavior in the interests of a narrow perception of private good, the public and their values treated as a necessary sideshow to be used or ignored depending on how it conforms with that outdated thinking.

25 years on the Franklin River may run free, albeit with a lower flow, but the same limited horizons continue to restrict Tasmania’s potential.

phill Parsons returns to the old practice of a short bio. His direct experience of Tasmania goes back to 1972.

phill Parsons

Observations on 3 decades of power in Tasmania …