QUENTIN BERESFORD
NewSouth, 2015, 442 pages, $32.99 (pb)
It was a sweet day when the placards – No Pulp Mill! – won an
epic seven year battle against elite corporate and political power in Tasmania after
Gunns Ltd., the largest timber corporation in Australia, went bust in 2013 with
debts of $3 billion. Public outrage over
its proposed woodchip pulp mill had sunk the state’s largest, and most
powerful, corporation.
Quentin Beresford, politics professor at Edith Cowan University,
situates Gunns’ spectacular implosion in ‘crony capitalism’ – the close and
profoundly undemocratic bond between business and state - that had ruled Tasmania’s
economy and politics for decades and had arrogantly ignored or bullied its people.
Hydro-industrialisation had led the way with cheap
hydro-electricity for industry, the tab picked up by the taxpayer for the government’s
loan financing debt. The logging industry
next joined the corporate profit party with “eye-glazing” government subsidies,
bargain-basement government royalty revenue and environmental regulation exemptions. The trading of financial favours worked both
ways with forestry industry political donations to Liberal and Labor parties
returning the state’s economic favours.
Gunns not unreasonably thought that its
ideologically-compliant and donation-tamed ministers would surely see to it
that nothing would get in the way of government approval for Gunns’ next big project,
a proposed pulp mill in the Tamar Valley, near Launceston.
Not the toxic pollution from the dioxin-contaminated
effluent, not the rotten-egg gases and other air pollutants, not the mill’s
enormous thirst for water, not the massive clear-felling of old-growth native
forests to supply the woodchips for the mill, not, for good measure, the quantum
leap in greenhouse gas emissions.
Every single politician of note, Labor or Liberal, state or
federal, got on board the Gunns-forestry-pulp mill bus. They may have been part of the minority (less
than a third) of Tasmanians supporting the mill but the politicians had all the
power. Their armoury against the popular
will included personal aggression when under public challenge, a lack of
tolerance for dissenting views, quarantining government policy and deal-making from
public scrutiny, fast-tracking parliamentary approval, criminalising protest
and dogmatically refusing to consider an economically diversified and cleaner
future as an alternative to capital-intensive, low-employment, anti-environment
‘development’ projects.
Gunns, for its part, tried to sue its critics into silence
whilst mobilising its timber workers, made susceptible to corporate propaganda
over their jobs, as shock troops against mill opponents in an “organised campaign
of intimidation”.
There emerged, however, a counter-power. A “multi-dimensional strategy” incorporating
local community opposition, mass public rallies and ‘corporate activism’
targeting Gunns’ business customers and investors sustained a campaign that was
remarkable for its size, breadth, intensity and longevity.
Beresford devotes much favourable attention to ‘corporate
activism’. Certainly, its successes were
real. The ANZ (Gunns’ principal lender)
withdrew its backing for the pulp mill after tens of thousands of the bank’s customers
threatened to close their accounts.
Other large financial investors ran off, fearing similar “reputational
risk”. Japanese buyers of Gunns’
woodchips (Gunns’ most profitable market) dumped Gunns’ native forest woodchips
in favour of the surviving market of sustainably sourced woodchips during the
global financial crisis.
These were all hard-headed commercial decisions based on
Gunns’ soaring investment risk, rising debt, falling profits and tumbling share
price. All these failing financial
indicators, however, had been fatally aggravated by a vibrant and determined popular
campaign against the pulp mill. ‘Corporate
activism’ is dependent for its effectiveness on the old-fashioned protest
stuff, and even has the potential for being counter-productive, as demonstrated
by The Wilderness Society, a multi-million dollar organisation reorienting from
protest to boardroom business deals, which offered its green imprimatur to a
pulp mill in return for Gunns sparing more native forests.
In the end, Gunns’ refusal to move with the greening times
burst its government-backed financial bubble as “their plans unravelled in the
face of people power”. The fatal mistake
of Gunns and its hired governments was to underestimate the power of the
placard.
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