During the first international conference on temperate forests, held in Deloraine, Tasmania over the weekend of November 16- 17, Tasmanian Green Party MP Dr Bob Brown was interviewed for Green Left Weekly by DAVE WRIGHT.
We've heard from a number of sources, and at this conference, that the Australian environment movement is planning a "long hot summer". Where will the hot spots be in the coming period?
Well, I've found every summer hot for the last 20 years, ever since Lake Pedder was flooded.
In Tasmania — and it's reflected in all states of Australia — the marauding of what's left of our natural ecosystems goes on at a disgusting rate and with studied ignorance. At this conference we have seen how little is known, for example, about temperate forests throughout this country. The bulldozers and chainsaws continue to move in.
In Tasmania we've got the Southern Forests in Picton, where I spent nine weeks with the Wilderness Society blockaders earlier this year, the Great Western Tiers, which we look out upon from this conference, and the largest tract of intact rainforest in Australia in the Tarkine Wilderness in the Northwest of Tasmania. All of these are under immediate threat. In fact, there's new logging taking place, new clearfell logging within 10 kilometres of where we sit.
Doubtless there are going to be both community groups and major organisations like the Wilderness Society involved in peaceful direct action again in the forests this summer. Besides the East Picton blockade last year, the previous year there was a blockade in the Tarkine, which led to a scientific study showing that the erosion from the steep slopes being flooded there couldn't be justified and they had to move cable loggers out.
There has been concern expressed by some trade unions that there could be massive job losses (if logging is stopped). What is the Greens' position on jobs versus the environment?
It's a case of proper environmental care creating jobs, and I get angry — I don't use the word often — but I get angry with those union leaders who are working with the multinationals to mislead the workers on a broad scale.
We saw union leaders backing Resource Security Legislation in this state, and it led to the Greens putting a no confidence motion which brought down the Field Labor government.
The promise of Resource Security was that it would end the loss of jobs and, in fact, that it would enhance jobs. People like Jim Bacon, the head of the Tasmanian Trades and Labor Council, took a mediating role with the logging industry in getting Robin Gray and Michael Field to agree to shield Field from a no-confidence motion for three months, last year, so that he could get the legislation through on the promise ected.
But what have we seen? In the wake of Resource Security, which put 1.8 million hectares of our threatened forests into logging zones for those companies to exploit, they have announced the shedding of 800 jobs in the first eight months of the new Liberal government, so the jobs are going west at something like 100 a month. Clearly the workers were defrauded.
The logging industry, whether it be sawmilling or pulping, is shedding jobs because it is aggregating and automating. Moreover, it is moving inevitably, because of the economics of the industry, into softwood plantation timbers. It is not going to provide more jobs even if we get a pulp mill, a mega pulp mill, a son or daughter of Wesley Vale.
There's no doubt that if we were to protect the whole of the Tarkine and the whole of the remaining threatened forests in Tasmania immediately there would be job losses involved. But the rapid phasing out of logging in our forests is on the cards for economic reasons anyway.
Some of the points you've raised are taken up in the Greens' alternative economic policy statement, Green, Dynamic and Prosperous. Could you outline some of the main aspects of this, and how it would be implemented?
The package capitalises on our advantage here in Australia as a relatively environmentally intact place producing foodstuffs in an age when much of the arable lands of the traditional food baskets like Europe have been degraded by Chernobyl and a whole range of toxins.
We've got an inherent general advantage in Australia if we want to present ourselves as the "Clean, Green" food producers from the Southern Hemisphere.
But the other important aspect is it says the dinosaur industries — the heavy metallurgical manufacturers, the miners, and the woodchippers and pulpers — are all job shedders. And they're also dipping deeper into the pockets of the average citizen for hidden subsidies like low forest royalties, low water rates, low electricity rates.
In Tasmania, for example, Comalco is paying about two cents a unit for its power while the woman up the road with the dress shop in Deloraine is paying about 16 cents per unit to light her display window.
This is despite the fact that across Australia small businesses, employing fewer than 20 people, produce more than 70% of jobs. Moreover, they put the money back into the local economy whereas the big industries don't; they send it to shareholders elsewhere. So the traditional philosophy of the Labor and Liberal governments in this state — and it applies to the rest of the country — is to keep propping up these big companies at the expense of local initiative, of people who want a fair go in getting their own industries, their own ideas working. This is simply giving the resource extractors, who are after the quick dollar, the advantage and the subsidy. How do you see the Greens going at the next federal election?
The Greens are better organised than ever before on a national basis to enter into a federal election, and we're approaching an election in which 30% of the electorate, according to the polls, don't want to vote for either of the major parties. We will see an increase in the number of options available, from the Shooters' Party on one end of the spectrum through to the Greens on the other.
The Australian Greens will have Senate teams in Queensland, New South Wales, Tasmania and possibly in Victoria and the ACT, and the WA Greens will also be standing a strong Senate team.
Policy development is going on at a great rate, and the ability to offer an option which is different to Fightback! and One Nation, and the "economic rationalism" which understraps both those policies, is very important.
This conference underscores, also, how far the major parties have gone from offering an option to those people in the community that believe that temperate forest logging should be stopped in Australia's native forests.
Do you think the Tasmanian Greens stand a chance of getting someone into the Senate?
Yes; I think they stand a very good chance, and they'll be announcing the Senate team probably before the end of this month, certainly before Christmas. The Democrats will also have a good team standing, and last time there was an enhancement effect whereby the Greens' preferences enabled the Democrat candidate to get in. It was a very close thing and it won't be any different this time.
There will be two good teams to ensure that a Green candidate does get into Canberra from Tasmania, and there is a lot of enthusiasm for it. We also have a Liberal government in power in Tasmania now, which we didn't have at the last state elections, and that concentrates our minds a great deal.
What do you see as the most important issues that need to be taken up ?
A: The media will ensure that a major issue of the election is personalities, those of Keating and Hewson, in a presidential style election. But I think the major issue for the electorate is a loss of faith in politics, a loss of faith due to the fact that besides the name calling there is so little difference in the style and the general policies of the major parties.
I think the government will hone in on the GST, yet, incredibly, we've got the prime minister saying that in the event he doesn't win the election he'll support the GST. Now, I know there are political reasons given for that, but if you feel strongly opposed to a policy that is going to bring wide-scale trouble and anguish for lower income people, and you're a social justice party — then you fight that policy ne, much the same way as the Greens stood against the Resource Security in Tasmania even though we had to face having to go to the polls over it. I guess what Paul Keating is saying is that he wouldn't send the country to the polls over the GST.
Have you thought about moving into federal politics or are you happy to remain at the state level?
I think we've made a very important contribution to world Green politics by not only winning the balance of power with five Green Independents, but by holding all five seats when the tide swung to the conservatives at the start of this year, and it was the loss of Labor seats that put the Liberals into the office. I want to keep working with that. Nevertheless, I do think its important, also, to be involved in helping develop the Green thinking and Green politics at a national and international level.
But I don't see getting locked into the Senate after 10 years in the parliament here as a good way for me to go, particularly when we have such terrific other candidates. I'm always thinking about that sort of option, but I've turned it down because I think it's better for somebody else to do it.