Alex Bainbridge, Hobart
"Gunns don't appear to have a very good name in Tasmania. They are seen to be a company based on arrogance. Gunns are not widely respected in the Tasmanian community from my observations."
These are the diplomatic words of Tamar Residents Action Committee (TRAC) spokesperson Les Rochester. He was referring to Gunns Limited — the biggest native forest logging company in Australia and the biggest hardwood woodchipping company in the world.
Since Gunns bought Boral's Tasmanian woodchipping interests in 2000 and North Forest Products in 2001, the company has become the monopoly woodchipper in Tasmania. While most other states have been moving away from woodchipping native forests, Gunns has been dramatically increasing the volume of native timber it extracts for woodchips.
Over the same period Gunns' profits have increased meteorically from $9 million in 1999-2000 up to $105 million in 2003-04 — making it one of the most profitable companies in Tasmania. While Gunns produces sawmill and wood veneer products (and has bought out the Tamar Ridge wine label), most of this profit comes from woodchipping.
The woodchipping component of Gunns' business actually went backwards between 2004 and 2005, and this resulted in a drop in its overall profit to $101 million in 2004-05. Greg Barber, national corporate campaigner for the Wilderness Society, writing for <http://crikey.com.au> attributes this drop in woodchip sales to "a dramatic increase in wood supply [on the global market]" due to the increase in plantation timber from other parts of the world.
This is what explains Gunns' enthusiasm for a new pulp mill in northern Tasmania — a new avenue for using those woodchips it is finding harder to sell on the global market.
Pulp mill
"Every time we hear something new about the pulp mill, it goes from bad to worse", Socialist Alliance campaigner Kamala Emanuel told Green Left Weekly. "I'm not sure how much worse it could get, but knowing Gunns' record, I'm sure they'll give it a bloody good try."
Emanuel was referring to the successive announcements from Gunns about the mill processes. Still smarting from the defeat of the proposed Wesley Vale pulp mill in the 1980s, the timber industry and its supporters in the state government have been keen to try to present this mill as the "world's greenest pulp mill". "It turns out, however, that this is entirely public relations spin", according to Emanuel.
When the proposal was first floated in 2004, we were told the mill would be "total chlorine free" and "plantation based".
Then, this February, Gunns announced that the mill would, in fact, use chlorine dioxide and native forest timber. Chlorine dioxide will mean the mill will produce organochlorins — highly toxic waste.
Then on May 9, the last day for public submissions regarding the Integrated Impact Study Guidelines, Gunns significantly modified its pulp mill proposal including tripling the amount of land required and no longer considering the options of going totally chlorine free, nor using an alternative site.
The chosen site is at Longreach in Tasmania's north-east, and close to large tracts of unprotected native forest. The other site that had been considered was at Hampshire in the north-west, close to Gunns' stock of plantation timber. If plantation timber were used, not only would it mean saving forests, it would be possible for the mill to be totally chlorine-free.
One major problem with the mill will be its use of water, estimated at up to 26 billion litres per year. The current business and residential water usage in the whole area is only 15 billion litres, yet water supplies are stretched. Already there are periodic water restrictions in place and the added pressure of new plantations in the area (which use large amounts of water) will make this worse.
Fresh water will be drawn from the rivers and pumped out (as polluted effluent) into Bass Strait. Gemma Tillack of the Wilderness Society told GLW that the polluted effluent will be pumped into an area "with limited water movement where it can take up to 160 days for the flushing of water to occur".
The alternative, which Gunns has so far rejected, is to use "closed loop" technology — where water is extracted once and then reused.
The other major problem with the proposed mill's location is that there is a known "inversion layer" in the atmosphere that traps pollution. The mill is expected to produce 300 kilograms of "particulate matter" per day.
Rochester described this as "absurd industrial behaviour". He told GLW that the federal government is aware of the pollution problems in the area. "After all, they gave $1 million to the Launceston City Council to remove wood heaters [so as] to reduce particulate pollution." (National air quality guidelines have been exceeded eight times this winter in Launceston.)
The same federal government has contributed $5 million to Gunns to conduct a study that "he [PM John Howard] knows will lead to pollution of that air" said Rochester. "So the prime minister had placed industry ahead of the health of the community."
Mates in government
Both state and federal governments have been actively supporting Gunns' pulp mill proposal. The state Labor government is closely aligned with Gunns. Premier Paul Lennon always appears ready and waiting to do Gunns' bidding.
Even before the proposed pulp mill has been approved, the state government has spent millions on a Pulp Mill Task Force to promote the mill. So extensive has this been that the Resource Planning and Development Commission — the planning body responsible for assessing the mill — had to write to the government requesting that the promotion be reined in, according to an article by Paul Oosting on <http://Tasmaniantimes.com>.
"If the [Pulp Mill] Task Force activities are not reined in, the commission will be compromised in the eyes of the public and therefore the assessment process will be seen to be contaminated", executive commissioner Julian Green wrote.
Tasmanian Greens Senator Christine Milne told GLW that "There's very little daylight between Gunns, the Labor government and the pulp mill task force. Their media and public relations people are interchangeable and the lines they run are exactly the same."
Last December, two days before details of the pulp mill were released, Gunns began a lawsuit against 20 environmental activists and organisations who opposed its logging practices.
A campaign is underway to defeat this lawsuit, and activists were buoyed by the August 17 court ruling that Gunns pay the legal costs of the Gunns 20 members.
From Green Left Weekly, September 21, 2005.
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