Truth lurking beneath surface of global push

FORMER Tasmanian premiers Paul Lennon and Robin Gray, and exGunns boss John Gay, are often put forward as the architects of the disaster that was this state’s woodchip industry.

They are often blamed for the ugly mess that culminated in the implosion of Gunns, the collapse of plantation companies, contractors losing jobs, breadwinners being lost to families and Tasmanian ports being buried under woodchip mountains nobody wanted.

But Gay, Gray and Lennon were not the architects of this disaster.

Nor were the industryaligned senior bureaucrats who were assigned strategic roles in the design and implementation of its legislative and regulatory framework.

Nor were the enterprising locals who built businesses servicing the industry.

No, whether they knew it or not, these local players were pawns and cheerleaders in a bigger game.

They were enthusiastic actors performing on a set that was like a cardboard cut-out town in a spaghetti western, only instead of cactuses and saloons painted on the flimsy facade there were eucalyptus regnans, treeferns and Tasmanian devils.

The architects of our disaster operated behind the scenes, among the rickety timber framework that propped up the Tasmanian cut-outs.

The architects of our disaster also operated behind sets painted with suitably local motifs in New Zealand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Chile, South Africa, Brazil, Uruguay and Thailand.

The architects of our disaster are global players in the international pulp and paper industry.

The modus operandi is for their consultancy arms to fly into town armed with reports packed with statistics that demonstrate disturbing trade deficits, worrying unemployment rates and a woeful lack of investment in local timber businesses.

Federal, state and local government representatives are duly alarmed by their revelations and respond by requesting the same global experts prepare reports on how to fix it all.

Armed with the new reports, bureaucrats and potential local business partners jet off to places like Canada and Finland to be wined and dined at global pulp and paper forums where key statistics from the reports are repeated in charts and graphs in persuasive presentations.

These forums are one-stop shops.

What about step this way, sir.

Where do we buy the equipment? That’s the door on the left as you came in, sir.

We have no experience. How do we run the project? We can provide project management, sir.

What about legislative hur- finance? Just dles? No mind, sir. Our advisers are across all manner of legal issues in all manner of jurisdictions.

What about opposition? We provide public relations advice too.

It all appears so easy. It is about jobs. Everybody is promised a buck.

What the industry does not consider is the impact of its rapacious expansion — the potential for gluts of woodchips on global markets, the impact of economic downturns and yoyo exchange rates on exports, the environmental destruction and social upheaval.

The industrial machine that was behind Tasmania’s woodchip disaster is a behemoth that makes a lot of people very wealthy, but it has nothing on the scale of the global arms trade, where the same expansion template, with the same blind resolve, is at play.

Senior executives, bureaucrats and politicians from countries all around us are being advised, wined, dined, forumed, symposiumed and terrified into spending billions on submarines, missiles, fighter jets and the latest hi-tech killing machines and war strategies.

Our region is being militarised, but just like with woodchips, the public hears little about the weapons sold to neighbours such as Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia, China, Japan and the Philippines.

All we see is the cardboard cut-out set, in front of which local actors parrot lines about national defence and jobs. After all, we all want to work and feel secure.

But the real game — a pyramid scheme where the elephant in the room is death, destruction, human tragedy, generational grief and environmental disaster — goes on behind the scenes.

The world has been bumping along the bottom of an economic downturn for a decade but the arms industry is flying.

It underpins the mightiest economies.

Global militarisation is happening in the name of national security, but insecurity is its driving force.

Each weapon we buy ramps up pressure on those around us to follow like a rabid dog chasing its own tail.

Businesses and governments clamber for a slice of the public defence spend, with no thought of the ramifications.

The construction of Australia’s new submarine fleet was an election issue in South Australia because of the jobs it promises there.

Not a word about a future with hundreds of submarines — from nations with different economic, political, cultural, religious and ideological beliefs — prowling insidiously under the waves in the Indian and Pacific oceans.

Not a word about the consequences of the militarisation of our region.

Not a word. world’s