>When we were in Tasmania last year, someone told us that the Greens had put much of the logging and paper industries out of business with nothing to replace them, disemploying lots of people. The sad casino in Hobart was an attempt to compensate for the job loss. Is this true? Our informant, though otherwise a splendid fellow, prefers reading Deleuze to the newspaper, so I'm not sure his info is entirely solid.
The logging industry is alive and well. The public is still quite polarised politically in regard to the Greens and some people tend to exaggerate the success of the Greens though. For instance, the casino in Hobart certainly pre-dates any successes the greens might claim against the forestry, it was built about 30 years ago.
The main target of the greens has always been the export woodchip industry, not logging per se. (One of the new Green parliamentarians operates a country sawmill capitalist.) Though they did manage to prevent a new pulp mill a decade ago. The demise of the paper industry is another story. The old Burnie pulp mill was bought up by an American company which tried to introduce American-style labour contracts. The union resisted fiercely and there was a huge strike in which the company found itself on the wrong side of public opinion. The public joined the picket line, the cops, the courts and the government turned a blind eye to the picketers flagrant breaches of the law and the company had to give up.
It was an industrial dispute of strategic importance in Australian history, giving the union movement some temporary respite from the erosion of its power. The lesson learned inspired the strategy for the MUA's battle on the waterfront years later. But, like the waterfront dispute, the APPM dispute was one where the workers won the battle but lost the war. The company simply sold up, rather than invest the necessary capital in modernising the old plant in north-west Tasmania.
So the demise of the paper industry is nothing to do with the greens. It has to do with a culture in Tasmania which is not conducive to neo-liberalism.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas