Good one Karl!  It’s crazy isn’t it?

This is Karl Stevens at his devastating best. If nothing else the whole pulp mill shitstorm has generated a renaissance of creative work: the cartoons of Karl and Luke Henning, the writings of Peter Henning and Mike Bolan to name a few.

History is a very strange thing - it gets forgotten or rewritten as soon as it becomes inconvenient.

It was only a couple of years ago, that the then Prime Minister stood alongside Paul Lennon on a large tree stump in the Styx Valley and stated he was going to save 170 000 hectares of Old Growth and high conservation forest, and he was prepared to pay quite a large sum for this in compensation. The areas specifically nominated were the Styx, the Florentine and the Tarkine.

Paul Lennon seized on the situation and immediately announced this as a triumph and trumpeted to the media that this was ‘A victory for the the forests.’

After that there were the usual shennanikins as to which bits of forest were actually to be saved, and boundaries were moved, and Karsts were included for the third time, etc, but one of the areas that emerged was the steep slopes surrounding the Styx Valley.

Last week protestors tried to prevent cable logging in these very areas, and were blasted by forestry workers for ‘endangering safety’, etc. These, I believe, are the same workers that attacked protestors with sledge hammers and torched their vehicles only a couple of weeks before.

Logging has long since been going on in the Florentine, and protestors have also been arrested here.

Two days ago, David Bartlett accompanied Bob Gordon on a flight over the Tarkine where the planned route for the new multi-million Dollar access road was shown to him.

Can anyone tell me where this map of the 170 000 hectares exists, and what is now on it, and what became of the money that was promised?

If indeed the steep sides of the Styx Valley were included, then the protestors are legally in the right, in that they were trying to prevent illegal logging on the part of Forestry. It is they who should be protected and the loggers who should be arrested - possibly starting at the top?