Gunns and the democratic ritual

No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold. Cormac McCarthy.

Tasmanian academic and public intellectual Pete Hay (author, most recently, in collaboration with photographer Matthew Newton, of The Forests), had this to say in December 2006:

The first duty of the democratic citizen is to defend her place. To defend it, for example, against the life- and place-destructive technologies ordered without your leave into your home valleys and foothills by men with maps and computer simulations, and claiming the fake authority of democratic ritual, as opposed to the real authority of democratically-lived citizenship, and membership of place and its living communities.

The “democratic ritual” that Hay refers to is “the regular elections between two bland and homogenised political parties”, which allows, for example in Tasmania, “that the forests that cradle the island’s very soul continue to be trashed even though survey after survey confirms that 70-80 per cent of voters want to see an end to the destruction of the clearfells, though lacking the requisite courage of their convictions, most of them, to vote accordingly.”

It is a system which guarantees passively acquiescent voters, “timid, easily-spooked, but well-meaning folk”, and they vote in droves for policies they say they don’t support.

Other voices have been raised against this passivity, the “relaxed and comfortable” retreat from political engagement.

One such voice, journalist and cartoonist Michael Leunig, also writing in 2006, is scathing. He reminds readers of the behaviour of Australians during the Vietnam War, and asks specifically in relation to the large anti-war marches in 1970, “Where were you all five years ago when it really mattered?”, in other words before the massive loss of life and destruction.

In the aftermath of the 2007 federal election we can see it all again. Tasmania is an exemplary microcosm because it had a dominant local issue. In the weeks and months leading up to the election it was clear, in poll after poll, that a majority of Tasmanians were opposed to Gunns’ proposed pulp mill being built in the Tamar Valley. But even though there was a surge of support for anti-mill candidates throughout Tasmania, the basic shape of the vote for the major parties, which were back-slappingly unified as a single party in support of the mill, was much the same as usual.

In other words, quite a large number of people who said they were opposed to the pulp mill gave their imprimatur to the new Rudd Government to claim an electoral mandate for the mill to be built.

The retreat from democracy is not just about people deserting their convictions or their consciences when they enter the polling booth. An associated aspect of the malaise is that the mutual responsibility of both electors and elected to be informed, to understand that “representation” is a two-way street, has broken down.

Tasmanians in the 2007 federal election voted overwhelmingly for politicians who have no concern about any of the impacts of the pulp mill on them or future generations. They voted for politicians who have ignored all independent expertise and advice, from economists to scientists, from doctors to former members of the sidelined state RPDC (Resource Planning and Development Commission), and of course they voted for politicians who have ignored hundreds of public submissions.

Except for Bob Brown, not one of the other five elected senators and not one of the five MHRs has demonstrated any concern about the full range of issues: including resource sustainability, water usage, managed investment schemes and plantations, affects on river catchments, agriculture, tourism, marine environment, health of people and other species, assessment process, subsidies to the proponent, increased logging and transport hazards, air and water pollution, climate change and competition with mills coming on line in Malaysia, South America and Russia.

Michael Ferguson, Liberal member for Bass, was fond of lamenting in the weeks leading up to the election that the pulp mill issue was shaping as a personal disaster for him, because preferences from the predicted increased Green vote would likely flow strongly to the Labor candidate. This would destroy his “career”, as he put it, almost as soon as he’d begun it.

Ferguson was already on record as saying that he had not visited the site for the proposed mill, in his electorate. Ferguson’s failure to represent the interests of his constituents who might be adversely affected by the mill was absolute and complete. His main interest in the mill was the effect on his personal political career.

The dangers of this sort of political culture have become all too apparent in Australia during the Howard era, and in Tasmania they are no less obvious. It is a culture which promotes a narrowness of vision, a shutting down of alternative opinion and discussion, and a condemnation of dissent.

In this culture politicians’ self-serving careerist ambitions can only be pursued within the cloying but comforting confines of the party system of caucus solidarity. Conscience and principle are best left out of the equation. The experiences of Ben Quin, on the Liberal side, and Terry Martin on the Labor side, in challenging the party line on the pulp mill, on grounds of principle, are testimony to that. Both were warned by their party hierarchy to conform, and when no longer party members, both were vilified by their former colleagues.

Political careerism has merged with the gross ossification of caucus conformism to produce a culture where those who put their moral convictions above loyalty to party become exposed to a particularly vicious wrath of ostracism and abuse. Former Liberal Premier and Gunns director Robin Gray was vitriolic and savage in his public attack on Ben Quin, and Terry Martin was forced to endure a similar character assassination from the ALP leadership.

These political parties are nowhere more united than in their own narrow focus on self-preservation above all else, for it is that, and that alone, which sustains lengthy political careers and the rewards of office. Obedience to party has become more important than representation of the electorate, and this model has been strengthened during the Howard years and is now the dominant feature of Australian parliamentary practice at state and federal level. In this way democracy is subverted, diminished and threatened from within.

Just as disturbing, it is a political culture which is equally as vicious towards critical voices from within the general community as it is to dissenters within its own ranks. When Richard Flanagan commented, in 2005, in an article on the close relationship between the Tasmanian government and Gunns, he was labeled a traitor in the Tasmanian Parliament by then Minister for Forestry, Bryan Green, and publicly informed that he was not welcome in Tasmania by the Premier.

Perhaps most dangerous of all, it is a political culture which treats alternative visions with contempt and derision, gratuitously ignoring or rejecting any specialist or expert knowledge that contradicts policy positions.

At the height of the controversy during 2007, after Gunns withdrew from the RPDC process and the Tasmanian Parliament arrogated to itself both the expert “planning” role and the decision-making responsibility, a clear abrogation of due process, all Tasmanian politicians of both major parties, both state and federal, paid no attention to any information provided by independent analysts.

In 1946, Pulitzer Prize winning author, Robert Penn Warren, wrote his iconic book, All The King’s Men, perhaps the definitive novel of American political morality, its corruptions, power, privilege and guilt. It should be read by all Tasmanian politicians, especially those who cling to the notion that representation of the people and the protection of their environment, their health and well-being, is somehow secondary to their own career aspirations and the interests of their party.

Warren had this to say in 1946:

There were pine trees here a long time ago but they are gone. The bastards got in here and set up the mills and laid the narrow-gauge tracks and knocked together the company commissaries and paid a dollar a day … Till, all of a sudden, there weren’t any more pine trees. They stripped the mills. The narrow-gauged tracks got covered with grass. Folks tore down the commissaries for kindling wood. There wasn’t any more dollar a day. The big boys were gone, with diamond rings on their fingers and broadcloth on their back. But a good many of the folks stayed right on, and watched the gullies cut deeper into the red clay.

Which brings us to the well-known position of the proponent. It was neatly encapsulated at Gunns’ 2007 AGM in response to a question. The company directors were asked whether there had been “a cost-benefit analysis in relation to the impacts of the mill”.

The answer was an unequivocal “Yes” from John Gay, not added to or contradicted by any other director or senior manager present.

Gunns has not completed a cost-benefit analysis. It has done a benefits-only analysis. That fact has been underscored by several independent analyses, the latest by the National Institute for Economy and Industry Research, which has concluded that the costs to the Tasmanian economy will most likely outweigh the benefits, from between $300 million to $1 billion.

The costs cannot be ignored, for they go to the heart of ecological responsibility, which is no longer an option, no longer an “inconvenient truth”. It is an essential, or rather, the essential.

Without an understanding of costs there can be no comprehension, no real capacity to see future consequences of all kinds, including the ethical and humane.

But both the debate and action for alternatives are gathering pace and strength. There are increasing numbers of people whose vision for Tasmania’s future is not one which will abide the relentless degrading of our greatest assets, the irreplaceable and diverse assets of the island’s very ecology, and will not abide the relentless downgrading of health and education services, and will not abide the relentless destruction of our capacity to produce clean and healthy food.

The attempt by the Bacon government, with the support of a supine, surrogate opposition, to destroy such voices in the political domain by reducing the size of the House of Assembly, failed dismally. Lennon’s Labor government and its Liberal alternative are both deeply unpopular. Their neo-liberal model at federal level, the Howard “brutopia”, as Kevin Rudd has described it, has finally been rejected by a majority of the Australian people. This in itself is cause for hope, as is Rudd’s new rhetoric.

Rudd has written that “neo-liberals reject the legitimacy of altruistic values that go beyond direct self-interest. When costs … threaten to affect economic self-interest, however, they often seek to externalise them and transfer them to the state”.

Rudd needs to be reminded that the neo-liberalism in action which he condemns is exactly what is happening in Tasmania under the Lennon Government, but with the government as instigator, as collaborator, in the transfer of taxpayers money in subsidies to corporate interests, to the detriment of - and let us use Kevin Rudd’s words again - “the identification of key public goods, including education, health, the environment and the social safety net”.

There will always be those with a Hobbesian will to impose silence and obliterate diversity and debate, as there will always be those willing to “sell their souls and live with good conscience on the proceeds”, to quote Leunig again. But, to repeat, those who would promote abdication of personal responsibility, abdication of mutual obligation and representation in political life, and abdication from a meaningful and humane social contract, are promoting an ill-informed, disengaged, disconnected, and uncomprehending citizenry, the antithesis to real democracy.

Such failure has been described by another Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, Cormac McCarthy, renowned for his uncompromising exploration of the extremes of human behaviour and morality. In 1992, in his epic novel, All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy had this to say:

No creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold.

Only an informed, active citizenry can overcome this dilemma. Let us conclude where we started, with some paraphrased wisdom from Pete Hay. Only an informed, active citizenry can promote “a vision of democracy that mandates ethically-imbued rather than merely selfish public activity”.