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Tasmania’s ethical and moral political wasteland

By Peter Henning - posted Tuesday, 6 October 2009


The breakdown in governance leads back to forestry, much as carving rocks did on Easter Island, or building pyramids did in ancient Egypt. Societies going nowhere, uselessly expending resources and energy to construct their own destruction, in the interests of a self-interested, self-centred, wealthy and insular political status quo, desperately determined to resist anything and anybody which threatens that.

The rotten Pulp Mill Assessment Act (PMAA) is the legislative precedent which articulates the current Tasmanian norm. It is a building block for similar legislative action in the future, and it is a law which can be applied to the construction of a pulp mill anywhere in Tasmania. It is there in black and white. A precedent has been set which can now be followed, the precedent itself being used as justification for that.

It does well to remember that if the PMAA had been passed by the Commonwealth Parliament, rather than the State Parliament, it would be open to challenge in Australia’s High Court as a breach of the Australian Constitution.

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But more than that. We have already seen by a decision of the Tasmanian Supreme Court that the PMAA contains within it exact and precise provisions to ensure that requests for transparency and openness are not permitted under the terms of the Act. That formed the substance of Justice Evans’ judgment in July this year.

But more than that. We still do not know what happened between late February (or perhaps earlier) and the early weeks of March 2007 which produced the essential features of the PMAA, features which replicated much of the existing law pertaining to a development of “State significance”, now transferred en bloc to a development which had withdrawn itself from the assessment process (RPDC assessment) applicable to such projects.

These are just some of the easily identifiable examples of how democracy in Tasmania is now being incrementally ruined from within, but these are symptomatic of a much larger malaise, a malaise which sits at the centre of how Tasmania’s whole future is being determined - not just matters of governance and social justice, but the shape of the whole economy, the shape of the whole social landscape, rural and urban, and the whole nature of the environment we live in and leave as our legacy.

There is an important principle here which can bear repetition. Transparency in the political system is an essential requirement for a democracy in action. Secrecy, decisions in camera, deals behind closed doors, group-think caucus conformity, “commercial in confidence”, lies and deception all weaken democracy because they create distrust and suspicion of all those involved, and of the political processes followed and of the institutional structures and the organisations.

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First published in the Tasmanian Times on September 29, 2009.



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About the Author

Peter Henning is a former teacher and historian. He is a former Tasmanian olive grower, living in Melbourne.

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Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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