Gunns and the democratic ritual

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”.