Lennon's New Tasmania

(1) Subject to subsection (3) and notwithstanding the provisions of any other Act -
(a) a person is not entitled to appeal to a body or other person, court or tribunal; or
(b) no order or review may be made under the Judicial Review Act 2000; or
(c) no declatory judgment may be given; or
(d) no other action or proceeding may be brought -

in respect of any action, decision, process, matter or thing arising out of or relating to any assessment or approval of the project under this Act.

(2) For the purposes of subsection (1), “any action, decision, process, matter or thing arising out of or relating to any assessment or approval of the project under this Act” includes any action, decision, process, matter or thing arising out of or relating to a condition of the Pulp Mill Permit requiring that the person proposing the project apply for such other permits, licenses or other approvals as may be necessary for the project.
(3) Subsection (1) does not apply to any action, decision, process, matter or thing which has involved or has been affected by criminal conduct.
(4) No review under subsection (3) operates to delay the issue of the Pulp Mill Permit or any action authorised by that permit.

And so it has been in the polity of Tasmania that a majority of politicians have made plain to us all how best we should interpret their thoughts.

The statute bar put on this legislation is quoted in full to show clearly how the majority of Tasmanian politicians perceive their roles as “representatives” of their constituents. Their collective attitude was further articulated through the voice of the Deputy Premier, just before the legislation was passed by the upper house. He suggested that businesses affected adversely by pulp mill pollution had the avenue of pursuing civil action.

Clearly, it is not as if there was a lack of awareness that the legislation contained no provisions for any baseline studies on possible adverse impacts, or that it totally excluded any consideration of social, economic and environmental costs. As the statute bar makes clear, most politicians were concerned to ensure that there were legal barriers to prevent consideration of any such risk assessments.

This was the mark of the New Tasmania, where as Paul Lennon indicated on March 14, 2008, the anniversary of Gunns leaving the RPDC assessment process, “the Tamar Valley became a site where the numbers stacked up the best”, and those opposed to the market fundamentalism of this economic logic on any other grounds at all, “most people in Launceston”, according to Lennon, could safely be described as a NIMBY lot - a “not in my back yard” lot.

He is not alone in this conviction in the Tasmanian Parliament, so that those with alternative views (and with no vested interests) and those who might be adversely affected by the mill, have all, in their diversity, been cast adrift en bloc, as political outsiders. In the New Tasmania the new politically invisible inhabit a new kind of terra nullius, their voices not only unheard but unwanted, their rights to fair and equal representation seen as unwarranted and barred by legislation.

Terra nullius? The notion of terra nullius or “land without owners”, was, is and always will be, a neo-liberal’s dream come true. It is a pure alliance between political power and the interests of capital. An alliance between government and defined sectional interests.

In European colonial history it provided the “legal” justification for dispossession of people from their land. The political and economic logic was that exclusive land title and property rights were available without cost to the new owners.

This form of alliance reached its apogee in Van Diemen’s Land during the 1820s and 1830s, resulting in the complete dispossession of the Aborigines in favour of a small elite of wealthy sheep farmers. Ironically, as James Boyce has demonstrated in his brilliant new history of Van Diemen’s Land (and to paraphrase him), the success of the elite’s labour force, convict hunters and shepherds, in driving the Aborigines from their traditional hunting grounds, strengthened the social and economic power of the elite but weakened their own, creating the circumstances of their own eviction from the better land and the curtailment of their autonomy and independence.

In the words of Henry Reynolds, “the theory of an uninhabited continent was just too convenient to surrender lightly”. For a small British elite in Van Diemen’s Land-Tasmania during the 19th century, the consequences of the implementation of the notion of terra nullius were the foundations of economic wealth beyond their dreams, control of the pastoral economy for generations and political and social power.