Free speech gagged

THE sacking of Angela Williamson from her job with Cricket Tasmania for her public criticism of the Tasmanian Government’s failure on abortion services has proved a PR disaster.

Her story has drawn widespread condemnation.

Tasmania’s reputation as an open, civil society has been tarnished.

Putting aside the particulars of her case, the sordid affair has torn the scab off a festering wound — how we deal with dissent.

Those in power too often try to ostracise dissidents.

Good, talented, wellintentioned Tasmanians with much to offer their state have been sidelined and thwarted due to clashes with the hegemony.

That’s not how democracy, so dependent on freedom of speech, is meant to work.

During the Bacon and Lennon governments in the early 2000s, Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan spoke out against the woodchip industry and for a moment became public enemy No.1.

Paul Lennon, as premier, infamously told the author he was not welcome in his “new Tasmania”.

Their spat was spiteful and public.

Flanagan asserted that Jim Bacon had less vision than a blind earthworm, which could be taken as evocative criticism of his policies, and described Lennon as a burst saveloy, which is difficult to see as anything other than a schoolboy taunt.

The fallout of this quarrel is that an acclaimed author, who could be working with officialdom for the good of Tasmania, is now largely absent from local public discourse and initiatives.

I suspect the gulf between Team Flanagan and Team Lennon is as wide today as ever, their pleasantries cloistered but just as barbed.

Such grudges are especially debilitating in a place as small as Tasmania.

As a reporter, I met many involved in the skirmish over disputed political territory between Labor and the Greens, which led to the downfall of the Field minority government in 1992.

Decades later they still carry the scars — clever, skilled people steadfastly refusing to ever again work with each other.

The roots of these grudges burrow down from state, local and federal government into the bureaucracy, nongovernment organisations, associations and lobbies.

When the woodchip industry held the whip hand over the state in the 1990s and 2000s, most groups and committees were loaded with industry supporters or at the very least chaired by devotees of this silent but deadly network.

It gave the impression of an overwhelming consensus of industry support that did not in reality exist.

As a reporter I met many with concerns but who spoke only off the record because those who went public often found themselves on the outer to be stepped around like puddles of toxic sludge. It wasn’t always this way. Photographer Olegas Truchanas was an engineering clerk for the Hydro Electric Commission when he publicly opposed his employer’s plan to dam Lake Pedder in the late 1960s.

Truchanas gave slide show lectures featuring his Pedder photographs.

Thousands turned up. His speeches ignited a fierce but unsuccessful defence of Pedder and sowed the seeds of the 1980s protest to save the Franklin River.

ARTIST Max Angus explained in his seminal 1975 book The World of Olegas Truchanas that public servants were “expected to remain uncritical of the government’s decision to destroy the lake”.

“It was an act of moral courage at a time when the battle had been long and tempers had grown short,” Angus wrote of his friend Truchanas going public.

As a temporary Hydro employee and without Australian citizenship, Truchanas could easily have been sacked. But he was not. In fact, Hydro commissioner Sir Allan Knight attended a 1971 exhibition of Pedder paintings and sought him out for advice on which to buy.

Author Natasha Cica raised this with former premier David Bartlett in her beautifully realised 2011 book Pedder Dreaming: Olegas Truchanas and a Lost Tasmanian Wilderness.

“Can you imagine an employee of Forestry Tasmania at the moment speaking up for the conservation movement?” Bartlett responded.

“People could have an opposing view to each other, and they could express that in all sorts of ways, without this feeling that we have to hate each other about those views.”

Today, here and overseas, those in power often purge their chains of command of dissent, put loyalists in charge of potentially dissident agencies and make public examples of those who speak out.

Perhaps Truchanas’s public role in germinating the conservation movement and its successful Franklin River protest in the 1980s brought about this more oppressive attitude in Tasmania.

Before seeking refuge here, Truchanas fought with the Lithuanian resistance against both communists and fascists.

One defining aspect of our liberal democracy that stands us apart from such totalitarian regimes is how we deal with dissent.

Sometimes citizens feel so passionately about a matter they break ranks to speak out.

The fact we accept this as part of democratic life is what makes us who we are and elevates us above the brutish vindictiveness and oppression of despots to the higher moral ground.

Those who went public often found themselves on the outer to be stepped around like puddles of toxic sludge