Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

The Peter Garret pulp mill

Tasmanians bear the unfortunate stereotype of being ten cents short of a dollar when it comes to rational thinking. The Canadians have their Newfoundlanders, the USA has its inbred southern yokels and Australia has its Tasmanians. In recent years this image hasn't been helped much by their piggy-eyed redneck state Premier Paul Lennon when he occasionally appears on national TV.

The Tasmanian Times is much less flattering of him. A report said on 12 March 2005:

"It took a Tragedy to turn Paul Lennon into a state premier. But it will take a miracle to turn him into a charming one. Richard Guilliatt approaches (with care) the famously belligerent Tasmanian leader. Paul Lennon looks like a brickie’s labourer stuffed into an expensive business suit: his barrel-shaped girth betrays a lifetime of beer-drinking, his jowls spill over his shirt collar, and his bristling ginger moustache and thunderously red complexion make him look perpetually on the brink of either rage or heart attack."

I've been watching him perform over the last few nights, gloating over the federal government's decision to approve a new pulp mill in Tasmania and clearfell a two hundred thousand hectare block of virgin native hardwood forest. Mr Lennon reckons this is a triumph for science because some obscure codger known as Australia's chief scientist slapped together a hasty report so the Federal Minister for the Environment could be seen to have scientific backing to give the approval.

Talk about giving science a bad name. It's lucky for the Tasmanian and federal government that the nation has been so dumbed down when it comes to scientific matters.

Of course when that block of Tasmanian forest has been consumed to make toilet paper to wipe countless foreign bums, the pulp mill owners will demand to be allowed to destroy more native forest. There are more bums in Asia than they can ever hope to accommodate. They're on a roll. In a few years when this initial block of trees runs out they'll orchestrate their dull witted red-neck employees to protest for another. They'll argue that either nature goes down the sewer, or they will.

The pulp mill will dump toxin bearing effluent into the Tamar river system. That's twenty first century Tasmanian progress for you. The politicians reckon they can guarantee that the dioxin toxicity will be minimal. If it's not then the company will be told to clean up its act. Too bad that can't tell that to the aquatic flora and fauna, and the consumers of Tasmanian seafood exports. In twenty years when the political retards who have made this decision have croaked, a new generation of Tasmanians might agonise over what was destroyed. It'll be too late, and any red-necks who are still alive will have had a miraculous conversion and put up all sorts of pathetic excuses for their involvement. Things like, "They made me do it." and "I had to feed my wife and kids."

Going all the way with the forest destroyers on this latest episode of Australian vandalism has been the former skin-job rock singer, now the federal Labor opposition's do-as-he's-told spokesman for the environment, Peter Garrett. He's become so gung-ho about the pulp mill that the owners should name it after him. "The Peter Garret Pulp Mill." The name has an appropriate ring to it. The Tasmanian forests will be clearfelled in the same manner that he has clearfelled his own cranium.

© MMVII Paul R. Weaver.

About the writer

Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write a couple of million words.

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