Articles

A ‘world scale’ pulp mill introduces resource depletion, infrastructure damage, health and environmental risks, business uncertainties and various hazards into a range of exposures in Northern Tasmania, all of which merit close attention and substantial care in their management and control.

Hieronymous Bosch meets Kafka in Wonderland.

The effect of allowing political donations from recipients of grants serves to conceal a flow of money from the taxpayer into party coffers. This kind of ‘donation’ can too easily lead to governments supporting favoured industries in order to keep their party political funds topped up at taxpayer expense.

Tasmania is a small island with limited resources. There comes a time (and we’ve probably passed it) when industries that choose to remove resources, such as the logging industry, start to have severe adverse impacts on other industries like agriculture and tourism, that rely on those same resources. The timber industry has had decades of taxpayer funded support, nonetheless many of their contractors are still being pushed to the wall.

Perhaps it is we, the public, who are not good enough for our politicians. Perhaps we just don’t measure up to their exacting standards. Despite their best efforts, we just keep on letting them down, failing to appreciate all of the good things that they are doing for us.

These questions, among many others, merit serious consideration. There is no point our having laws that fail to meet their own objectives, neither is it of any value or legitimacy to have a process that cannot assure that the objectives are met.

And once again Tasmania’s project review processes, apparently designed in a long-gone era, punish the taxpayer and create conflict.
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The RPDC process, like Council development processes, sets developers against communities, governments against taxpayers, public servants against the public.
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Basically the process is in the wrong order. If the public were in on the deal from the beginning, then proponents could take public input into account before they committed to details and made substantive investments. By making proponents invest first, the stage is set for expensive appeals, conflict and public anger.
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Look at the proposed pulp mill, who in the public is going to read and understand the thousands of pages of IIS? And who pays the public for their efforts? No-one!