Gunns and the democratic ritual

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.