Critical lessons from the mill debacle

The meetings were usually attended by other groups like Allens Consulting Group and members of Monash University’s Centre for Policy Studies, each of whom was rewarded with work from government and logging interests. Everyone present, except the government, had a pecuniary interest in going along with positive recommendations.

No one stood up for the public or for due diligence.

Remember Andersen Consulting?

Overall, the whole scenario is reminiscent of the Andersen Consulting debacle.

It turned out that, instead of independent consulting advice, Andersen acted more as a cheer squad for their paying clients thereby exposing their clients to unconsidered threats. Their clients used Andersen’s name and their glowing reports to justify share price and management salary increases. Everyone a winner, except the public duped into thinking everything was fine when it often was anything but.

When the one-sided and manipulative nature of Andersen’s activities become publicly known, a rapid and total collapse ensued.

In Tasmania we are facing the same kind of one sided cheer squad approach to large projects. A consulting arm for a sales outlet recommends their services/projects to government and to some private sector organisation. They offer economic models and benefit statements from other “happy” users, trips round the world and big dinners at the best restaurants. Taxpayers even paid for Gunns lobbyists to travel round the world with our MLCs to spruik the benefits of their proposal.

Taxpayers themselves were given no support, we just paid the bills.

Tasmanian Government (a kind alcoholic tabula rasa) went along with whatever their private sector mates said, on the basis that “it’s their money”. Sadly, with John Howard, we had a federal government that was totally compliant with big business so there were no waves from the Feds either. Anyone who raised an objection was tarred as Green, or anti-development, or just “misinformed”… and the circus continued.

Thus the state government not only failed totally in its public protection role, it actually took the side of the proponent and the multinational sales organisation and used taxpayers’ money to market their proposal.

We need to decide what government is there for, so that we can demand that we get value for our taxes.

Currently Tasmanians’ future is being written by a Finnish pulp mill supplier while our taxes are being used to help make the sale and no one checks the risks to industries and communities. This means that there are no plans to deal with any negative impacts because Gunns says there won’t be any. This is at odds with real experience with Poyry mill problems worldwide.

Perhaps to prove that “garbage in, garbage iut” still held true, Allens and Monash University produced economic models from financial information supplied by Poyry that “confirmed” the conclusions that they’d put into the computer in the first place.