And despite the best efforts of the spin doctors who say the stream is still clear and fresh and beautiful it is getting increasingly brackish, muddy and unpalatable.

It is of course the forestry debate; the debate that won't go away.

The debate that draws its malcontents from across the social and political spectrum _ from conservatives like former Hobart Lord Mayor Dr John Freeman and former Liberal leader Bob Cheek to fundamentalist greens.

And despite the aggressive posturing of its greatest political defender Deputy Premier Paul Lennon it will continue to bark at the heels of a Government which maintains it has a mandate to continue policy which incongruously sees "clean/green" Tasmania as the nation's biggest woodchipper.

A state with some of the nation's most productive agricultural land and wildest forests being reshaped by massive mono-culture forests of fast-growing eucalypts with the associated poising by 1080 of countless scores of wild animals.

Deputy Premier Lennon has wholeheartedly embraced his role in a symbiotic Good Cop/Bad Cop relationship with Premier Jim Bacon.

He plays the Bad Cop pushing the Labor line on old-growth policy, lambasting all opponents as “just a bunch of greenies’’ while Premier Bacon basks in the light of a softer portfolio load, occasionally offering nice asides on how nice it would be to end clearfelling, but of course we can't.

Their relationship is mindful of that between Prime Minister John Howard and Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock as pointed out by Gerard Henderson (Age, August 13) _ "The government dances a politically clever two-step when it comes to asylum seekers, the PM offering assurances, Ruddock jousting").

The aggressive stance was exemplified on election night with Paul Lennon's triumphant assurance that not a single forestry job was now threatened (in an industry which has been job-shedding and mechanising for years).

It was as if forest workers were a special protected species, unlike garment workers, or Incat workers or the vast numbers of unemployed Bridgewater or Invermay young people.

There was another intriguing presence on the ABC TV panel on election night ... that of former Premier Robin Gray who had lost none of his aggressive dislike of anything with the slightest tinge of green. And the links forged in pragmatism between former Liberal Premier Gray and now Labor Premier Jim Bacon make fascinating reading in the subjective analysis of Tasmanian political history tabled in the Senate by Greens Senator Bob Brown (see history).

The Bacon Labor Government’s fierce defence of forests policy comes at a time when it is increasingly out of step with interstate counterparts.

West Australian and Victorian Labor governments have ended/are ending clearfelling in old-growth forests.

And the NSW Government announced recently it was banning the burning for power generation of wood from native forests. A decision like that in Tasmania would scuttle Southwood, says the Wilderness Society’s Geoff Law.

And he makes the not unreasonable point: “Tasmania is stuck in the past with its infatuation with practices such as old-growth logging, clearfelling and forest burning, which are being rejected by other states.’’

To any observer unfamiliar with the arcane world of Tasmanian politics, the forestry debate is extraordinarily confusing.

On the one hand the forestry industry and the State Government say thousands of jobs and millions of dollars in investment depend on the trucks rumbling every few minutes down our roads, laden with vast quantities of logs to be chopped into tiny fragments and sent to more clever destinations to be processed.

On the other hand the opponents of current practices say it's all a monstrous error; a wrong-headed strategy forced on Tasmanians by an old boys' establishment with an untouchable business enterprise at its centre, a slick team of spin doctors as outriders, aided by a generally compliant, disinterested or unquestioning media.

Somewhere in this morass lies the truth.

One thing is certain, however. Everything in the garden is not as rosy as the hectoring spin doctors would have us believe.

Despite the one-dimensional strategy applied by Deputy Premier Lennon with his "greenies" mantra a broad cross-section of Tasmanian society is deeply questioning of forestry strategy. A creeping understory of protesting groups have sprung to life, whether doctors, artists, writers or teachers; joined by conservatives like former Hobart Lord Mayor Freeman and former Liberal leader Cheek.

Irrespective of the Iago-esque pronouncements of its proponents and supporters, there is a bubbling unease about Forestry Tasmania's quarantined untouchability as a government business enterprise _ able to lock up Tasmanian land, poison its creatures and burn vast hectares at whim; about a forest practices board with strong industry associations, of a history of links between established political power and business interests ("old-growth logging will stop in Tasmania when Gunns says it stops").

So, what does it matter? Why this obsession with forests whose exploitation supporters say provides thousands of jobs and appropriately uses a plentiful resource.

The answer may lie in history. History teaches us that we learn nothing from history, poet Steve Turner says. In Tasmania we have one of the few chances left to learn and understand in history's classroom.

A cursory examination of Tasmania's history reveals a sorry record of invasion, genocide, inappropriate action and exploitation.

Leaving aside the appalling genocide of its indigenous, the clean/green state has a dreadful history of exploitation

A few:

Sunday Tasmanian writer Simon Bevilacqua revealed the shameful tragedy that signed the death warrant of the Tasmanian tiger in an interview last year with historian and researcher Bob Paddle.

The article detailed the debates in the Tasmanian Parliament in the 1880s which led to a bounty on the head of the tiger. Tasmanian politicians representing a powerful sheep industry lobby group grossly exaggerated problems farmers had with thylacines.

The motives, says Dr Paddle, were an attempt by the "wool kings'' to transfer power from the state level to local council, where the rural lobby was strong, and to expand sheep runs into Crown land.

The bounty produced an editorial attack from the Tasmanian News. "Year after year this pampered industry has . . . held the leading place in the favourable attentions of the legislature . . . the wool kings govern the House and they get whatever they ask,'' it said.

Bevilacqua says the bounty began in 1888 and the first payment was made on April 24, 1888.

"Little more than 2000 bounties were paid out and decimation of the species to the point of no return cost a mere 2000 pounds."

And, he quotes Paddle: "It remains a challenge for all modern-day economic rationalists to identify another situation of such significant bio-diversity reduction where so much wanton environmental destruction has been obtained for so little reason and so little money."