South Wind

It may or may not be true, as suggested in some news reports, that before his jail sentence on a forest protest charge last week Ali Alishah set out to be a martyr by instructing his lawyer not to argue against his being locked up. 

Regardless, he should not be in jail. The law is only as good as the people who make it, and the harshness of Tasmania’s anti-protest laws serves only those wanting freedom to do what they like to the natural environment.

When magistrate Jackie Hartnett said that she had to send Alishah to jail because he had shown no contrition for trespassing in state forest, she surely knew that he could never be contrite for what he saw as protecting the Styx Valley’s trees and wildlife.

He’s been there before. Now aged 40, he was in his 20s when he was jailed for protesting building of a Tamar Valley pulp mill, in breach of a bail condition arising from an earlier protest action at the same site. The venture was proposed by timber company Gunns, then within months of complete financial collapse. 

Jen Sanger seeks to avoid the risk of going to jail, but in her own effort to defend Tasmania’s native forests she is Alishah’s equal. Where Alishah is a political adviser Sanger is a scientist, having won her PhD under the celebrated University of Tasmania ecologist Jamie Kirkpatrick.

As Alishah has repeatedly attracted the ire and derision of the political and corporate defenders of native forest logging, so has Sanger faced attempts by politicians and others to humiliate her for doing her job as a scientist: constantly checking data and openly declaring errors when they’re found.

We all make mistakes, but mostly they’re remedied and forgotten. Sanger had to endure public calumny when a scientific paper on forestry and fire, authored by herself, Kirkpatrick and one of their students, was withdrawn from publication in a US fire science journal in May 2020. 

This was done at the authors’ request after geographical data supplied by the Tasmanian government, differentiating plantations from other forests, was found to have been wrongly categorised, an error which appeared to weaken the paper’s hypothesis that logging raised the risk of dangerous fires.

It’s almost unnecessary to describe what happened next. Politicians and industry leaders, incensed at the paper’s conclusion that native forest logging made the bush more flammable, issued derisive public statements and demands for apologies. The Australian Forest Products Association called the research “fake”, and the national Institute of Foresters demanded an apology from the University of Tasmania. 

Liberal senator Jonathon Duniam said the paper was “error-ridden”. His Senate colleague Eric Abetz falsely claimed it got funding from the Bob Brown Foundation, accused Sanger of having been employed by the foundation when the paper was written and described her as a fake expert. When Sanger responded that their study was unfunded and the authors did not consult with any environment group before the paper had been accepted for publication, no-one was listening.

The questions about logging, wildfire and forest health remained. Now a book by David Lindenmayer, a senior ANU forest scientist who began his professional life with VicForests, has laid to rest any residual notion that logging is in any sense a process of forest renewal. 

In Forest Wars, subtitled “The ugly truth about what’s happening in our tall forests”, Lindenmayer lays out for a lay reader the long-term impact of logging these ancient eucalypt stands – the ecosystems destroyed and the carbon losses incurred – and why continuing to do this is plainly insane.

After Victoria’s devastating 2009 Black Saturday fires, a team of forest scientists led by Lindenmayer exhaustively investigated the industry’s contention that logged forests were less fire-prone. The study found that this applied only in the first seven years after logging, after which the fire risk rose sharply in the growing forest, and for decades remained well above average old-growth fire risk.

That finding was dramatically underscored by the 2019-20 Black Summer fires. Right across that huge fire range, fire damage in previously logged forests was much more severe than damage in unlogged ones.

I personally have experienced flack from professional forestry circles for reporting evidence that actual carbon emissions from high-intensity “regeneration” burns after logging were off the charts. When I asked for the “real” emissions figure I got no response. Until I do I’ll let the dense black clouds above these regular burns do the talking.

Burning forest and self-interest, political and financial, have this in common: they both blur the vision. Without clear air we will never get resolution. Our native forests will remain under the hammer and people like Ali Alishah will continue to go to jail.

Saturday’s election for the Legislative Council divisions of Elwick, Hobart and Prosser – hot on the heels of the watershed general election in March – is a rare opportunity for 70,000-odd Tasmanian voters to reshape their state.

For the first time in over 100 years, the annual poll in the rotating upper house election cycle will feature three vacant seats, following the retirement of independent Rob Valentine (Hobart) and the election of Labor’s Elwick MLC Josh Willie and Liberal Jane Howlett (Prosser) to the House of Assembly last month. 

The vote comes at a time when the two major parties are battling growing dissatisfaction. The 12 per cent Liberal primary drop at the March election was one warning sign; another was the fact that the Labor vote barely moved after a dreadful 2021 performance. Winners were the Greens, Lambies and independents.

The contests for the seats previously held by the Liberals (Prosser) and Labor (Elwick) will be good current indicators of support for the major parties. The Liberals, represented by long-serving Sorell mayor Kerry Vincent, will be hugely relieved to hold Prosser. If not, the likely winner would be Labor’s endorsed candidate, former leader Bryan Green. But my bet is that major party success will end there.

Elwick is in Labor heartland and was won and held comfortably by Willie, but Labor’s northern suburbs vote eroded badly in the 2021 state election. Its situation is not helped by the presence of a Labor rebel, lawyer Fabiano Cangelosi, opposing the party’s endorsed candidate, Tessa McLaughlin. No-one is standing for the Liberals.

Which leaves Janet Shelley, a senior public servant and sustainability expert standing for the Greens, and progressive independent Bec Thomas, long-serving councillor and currently mayor of Glenorchy. Both have a strong local support base and both push for better public infrastructure and services. And depending on the fall of preferences, either could take the seat.

The Hobart electorate, at the core of the state and federal seat of Clark and once a Labor stronghold, is now the domain of Greens and independents. Racist slurs have probably lifted support for Labor’s John Kamara, but he’s only an outside chance. Again, the Liberals are not even fielding a candidate.

As in Elwick, the strongest candidates for Hobart are to be found outside the main parties, and all five of them identify as progressives. Front-runners are Cassy O’Connor representing the Greens and two independents, Charlie Burton and John Kelly. 

Reasons to put Burton among the front-runners include a strong local campaign, public policy expertise, and the support of both Rob Valentine and Clark’s long-serving federal MP, Andrew Wilkie. The fact that he was Wilkie’s wife for six years will test Hobart’s acceptance of transgender people, but he should feel confident that this will be no more a barrier than Kamara’s African background.

Kelly’s transformation of the State Cinema in North Hobart into a cultural hub earned admiration from a wide cross-section of Hobart voters, myself included. He advocates better environmental protection, was opposed to the cable car and has raised questions about other high-profile Hobart developments – such as the AFL stadium – while taking a pro-business stance on others. 

Which leaves former Greens leader Cassy O’Connor, the most able parliamentary performer of her generation, who for many years compensated for the major parties’ generally appalling lack of environmental awareness with her own knowledge and skill in this supremely important area of public policy. 

O’Connor is a candidate for the Greens, but her strength lies in personal attributes: learning and knowledge, self-motivation, eloquence, passion, and a gift for parliamentary debate. She took ministerial responsibility in the 2010 Labor-Green alliance despite partisan attacks from within both parties, and she maintained her effectiveness through a decade of working in opposition.

I need to declare myself here. The only party I ever joined was Labor, as a student in the 1970s. I have since chosen to support issues and causes ahead of party ideologies. These ideologies began as ideals, but in this very different age they are expressed more in stolid stupidity and subterfuge in the name of party unity. 

The Greens are still a party, and it can be overzealous. But unlike the major parties it has not shied away from political responsibility for today’s most pressing human need, to find a way to live within our planet’s means. O’Connor has led that charge for years and campaigned accordingly. She deserves a place at the table.

Saturday’s vote is hard to predict, like all Legislative Council elections, but I believe the result will signify an embrace of informed, independent thinking. We have never needed it more.

Among the different ways humans respond to trauma, specialists tell us, is to go into denial. Our senses register a threat, but our conscious minds continue as if nothing is amiss. Such is the present state of Jeremy Rockliff’s Liberal government.

It would be a relief to discover that leaving climate change off his list of ministerial responsibilities was the premier’s way of signalling that he grasped fully the dimensions of the climate crisis and wanted to make it everyone’s concern. 

Alas, no. Not only was climate change excluded; so was science. To abolish or downgrade ministerial responsibility for either of these critical elements in our future is like smashing the car headlights ahead of a long night-time road trip.

This is a government in denial about a well-documented threat to our future. In the world’s poorest, most exposed nations, this threat is playing out in the form of lost livelihoods, broken communities and sometimes death. Only good fortune and our relative wealth shields us for now from a similar fate. 

Sadly, Tasmania’s state of denial is not unique. Australia’s federal and state governments – and governments throughout the developed world – are all in denial about their carbon emissions and humanity’s imminent climate peril.

While claiming to understand this peril, the federal government says little to its people about the gravity of the situation. It continues to treat the burning of fossil fuels or their export for burning in another country as legitimate, respectable behaviour. In addition, it is approving new mines and massively expanded processing capacity for fossil fuels, helping to lock in their continued use for many decades.

When you think about it, this is astonishing. Since the middle of last century science has been warning with increasing urgency and backed by an ever-growing mountain of evidence that our fossil fuel use is destabilising the climate. Governments acknowledged the legitimacy of that warning at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. 

Yet here we are, 32 years later, careening down a steepening slope that we know will end in a cliff, behaving as if nothing has changed. I personally still drive a petrol-fuelled car and burn gas for cooking, so yes, I’m also responsible in my small way. But we elect leaders to lead, and they’re patently not doing it.

It is not good enough that we no longer have a designated climate change or science minister, or a clear, scheduled, funded pathway to eliminating fossil fuels from our lives, or that the major alternative party has said nothing about this gross failure. Somehow, we have to start knocking some sense into those who seek to govern.

Tasmanians have limited capacity to influence the national government and even less what happens outside our borders. But here on this island, our home, we can really make things happen – especially when the most recent election has forced the Liberal government to negotiate with others in order to survive. A door is now open for ordinary people to make their political leaders behave responsibly. 

If it wanted to the new parliament could force the government to agree to a new cross-party standing committee, drawn from both chambers, to gather the best available climate policy advice and facilitate its rollout. Being called to account for failing to act may be enough to persuade the government to adopt a proactive attitude.

Continued inaction is threatening our health. The Dutch-American psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk, in exploring the impact on people of denying that something is amiss, notes in his book “The Body Keeps the Score” that while the mind may learn to ignore external warning signs, the alarm signals don’t stop. He continues:

“The emotional brain keeps working, and stress hormones keep sending signals to the muscles to tense for action or immobilize in collapse. The physical effects on the organs go on unabated until they demand notice when they are expressed as illness. Medications, drugs and alcohol can also temporarily dull or obliterate unbearable sensations and feelings. But the body continues to keep the score.”

While government fiddles, the body – the global system – is keeping the score. We can hide symptoms of our world’s global warming affliction but it is taking its toll on our wellbeing. That trauma will overwhelm us if we are unable or unwilling to recognise it and the imminent danger it poses.

The denial of climate reality by Jeremy Rockliff and his ministers is helping to make us all sicker. It may also have an adverse impact on an already-fragile coalition. But the future of this government is the least of our concerns.