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Are you a patriot? I’d like to think I’m an Australian patriot, someone who believes that all Australians are entitled to a fair go, and the ability to respect and be respected by others. I also happen to believe that I was born in the most beautiful island in the world, Tasmania. So I guess that makes me a Tasmanian patriot. A patriot might be described as “one who loves and defends his or her country”. This is usually understood as having militarist meaning. That is, being ready to die for your country. However, it also means the love one has for the natural state of the country and a willingness to ‘die’ for its preservation. Anything or anyone who threatens my country is, therefore, my enemy.
Dying of course means not only losing your life but also having your liberty and rights taken away. Two of the most precious liberties we have are the right to free speech and the right to free association but it seems that under the current political and legal arrangements of our land the first is a legal fiction and zealot politicians and their chief supporters – rapacious businessmen, are stealing the second.
If you visit the Gunns Limited website, you can find a “pictorial history” of the company. There are 11 photos there. All of them old. One shows two men in the process of cutting down a huge tree. They are using axes and a third man waits, with a crosscut saw, to begin the milling process. While the photo has some ‘romantic’ charm, it also has a very symbolic meaning.
The men shown in the photo are using their energy to cut the tree down. It’s a classic “men against nature” photo. The tree probably took hundreds of years to grow but in less than a day three men are able to reduce it to a log. Thousands of men did the same thing day in, day out. Each team felling as many trees as they could to feed the mill. In some ways, it was a ‘fair’ fight. The overwhelming forces of nature meet the overwhelming desire of humankind to survive and prosper. Today, however, notions of ‘romantic’ tree felling gone.
Gunns limited, not content with pillaging and destroying the natural beauty of my home state, has no mercy. Feelings of ‘romantic attachment’ to the land were long ago replaced with lust and greed. Lust for the forests and greed for more of what it got. Gunns no longer employs the strength of men to fell trees but relies on chains and clear felling followed by napalming to clear the way for machines that can do the work of a hundred men in a day. Not content with destroying the land, Gunns wants even more.
I’ve written elsewhere “we all know that those who sit in our houses of parliament do not represent us. They have been chosen, hand picked by their parties to tow the party line through thick and thin. We also know that no matter how often a company like Gunns tells us it values their workers, we know they value their profits first”.
The growing unemployment among Tasmania’s logging fraternity is nearly always blamed on ‘government policy’ locking up “valuable forest assets” or the “deep green” influence that, it is argued, attempts to halt the “development of our natural resources” which really means “the destruction of our shared natural wealth”. What is never discussed is the fact that greedy companies have spent literally billions of dollars on devising new mechanical means of putting men and women out of work so they can increase their corporate profits. The growing list of forestry redundancies cannot be entirely attributed to “slumps in demand”, the “deep green influence” or “government policy”. Most of it has been brought about by machinery being able to do the work cheaper and more ‘efficiently’ than human labour.
The forestry workers who have lost their jobs did not lose their jobs because of a lack of work. They lost their jobs because the owners of the plantations, the harvesting companies, the transporters and the mills have found cheaper ways of extracting the surplus value from the destruction of our natural environment. Some call it a triumph of ingenuity. Others might call it unpatriotic.
Gunns is also prepared to invest millions on shutting people up. Their so called SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit(s) Against Public Participation) against 20 individuals and organisations who have done their best to show up the greed and rapaciousness of this company – and with some success I might add – would be viewed by Gunns CEO, John Gay and other corporate bosses, as being ‘the right thing to do’. Why? Because Gay and his cronies, along with the Tasmanian government do not, demonstrably, have the best interests of Tasmania at heart.
Gunns have spent millions on promoting their activities and have used their media buying power to place advertisements masquerading as “news” in the local papers. The complicity of the Tasmanian media is also evident through their unashamedly accepting money to print corporate propaganda knowingly. As Alex Carey said so well, “The twentieth century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy”.
The question we must ask is, “are Gunns and its boss, John Gay, really patriot exemplars of the true Aussie spirit?” The answer is a simple, No! Gunns will not spare any expense in their pursuit of litigation against those they despise for exposing their unpatriotic deeds. They will go as far as it takes in pursuing any means to intimidate those who challenge them. They will employ the best PR flacks money can by to try to spin their destruction as a positive and they will not baulk at using their considerable power in my home state to lead politicians astray. Furthermore, they will pay their PR flacks and the newspapers handsomely to obfuscate the truth about what they aim to do.
In the world created by politicians, their corporate sponsors and a lapdog media, the types of people they like to cheer are those who don’t create wealth but who find new and more ingenious ways of accumulating it. In the eyes of our ruling elites, John Gay and Gunns are the types of men and companies that win awards and are lauded as ‘exemplary examples’ of the true Aussie spirit. But they are not patriots and never will be.
The real patriots in the Gunns ongoing legal and ecological battle are those like the Gunns 20 who refuse to be intimidated and Justice Bernard Bongiorno who refuses to play Gunns’ silly legal games. The real patriots in the current environmental crisis facing Tasmania are those who are willing to question those in power and those who rule through the power of others. Real patriots do not accept predetermined outcomes as the only possible answer to Dorothy Dix type questions. Real patriots learn their history and realise that the golden age of leisure modern machinery was meant to bring has, brought, instead, high unemployment, displacement and despair.
If you are a patriot, good on you. If not, then the shame is on you. The shame of not standing up for your country but being prepared to see it destroyed for short-term gain off the sweat of your brow. Gunns is not a patriotic company. It is therefore, our enemy.