While readers in New York, London and Paris can read about the tragedy of Tasmania in major articles in the New York Times, the Observer and Le Figaro, you won't read about it in Tasmania if Tasmanian Premier Jim Bacon has his way.
Never before in its history has Tasmania received such major international attention, all of it with a similar theme: the extraordinary beauty of Tasmania, the uniqueness of its society, and the stupidity and destructiveness of its government.
Still, with a capacity that might make an Iraqi information minister blush for delivering a good news story in the face of all evidence to the contrary, Premier Bacon would seem angered by any outbreak of the truth on his home turf.
Not content with a Tasmanian media that some claim is overly concerned with "balance", leading (incorrectly its supporters would say) to a perception that it is weak and easily intimidated, Premier Bacon is now threatening tasmaniantimes for making the Le Figaro article available. Will he also sue the New York Times and the Observer?
And does this absurd attack on free speech confirm what some critics say, that the Bacon government is the most repressive, secretive - witness the latest example, the closed-to-media-and-even -the-mildest-of-critics, open-to-a-select-few opening of the new Southwood project, dubbed Hushwood, by The Mercury - and anti-democratic in Tasmania's modern history?
Is Jim Bacon really, as writer Richard Flanagan has said, 'the man who had the vanity of thinking he would be the new Don Dunstan of the south, but turned out only to be another Joh Bjelke Petersen'?
Perhaps it's appropriate to quote here Goal 21 from Mr Bacon's Tasmania Together process:
Standard 21.5: To capture Tasmania’s stories and make them available to all
Rationale: Recording Tasmanian stories in an accessible way will capture what it is to be Tasmanian and assist us to project ourselves to the rest of the world.
tasmaniantimes believes that Tasmania's past is scarred by secret deals never revealed and by those who speak out being intimidated into silence or exile.
tasmaniantimes believes that Tasmania's future is best served by the truth, and so it will continue to bring you the truth about Tasmania, even when it offends and threatens the powerful.
Our masthead comes from a reference in John West's History of Tasmania (1856). West was in a great Tasmanian tradition of dissenting journalists that begins with Henry Melville, who was imprisoned by Governor Arthur for his views. John West, the editor of the Launceston Examiner in a period when that paper was a major force for change in mid-nineteenth century Tasmania, went on to become the first great editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. West believed that a society unable to speak and hear the truth was doomed to tyranny.
Like the 'pipes' of which West wrote we will challenge the power of the day with humour, with free debate, and with the stories that speak to the heart of who we are and where we are going, and of what we might still dream.
Herewith a quote from another "forbidden" article:
" ...But then the paradise rapidly gives way to a scene of black devastation where for miles and miles little grows amid charred stumps and bulldozed piles of smouldering timber..."
Paul Pritchard in Hobart, Sunday April 6, 2003, The Observer, London
And those "forbidden" links...
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,930569,00.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/17/international/asia/17TASM.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/22/books/22PRIZ.html?ex=1051996304&ei=1&en=46