Greenwash Political Action Party and Urban Grassroots Movement for the Green Party

Friday, February 10, 2006

Saving Recherche Bay

You may have heard the great new that Recherche Bay will be protected from
logging. After a long struggle, countless talks and books sales, it is a
great win for the environment and for our history.

What a treat to have a win like that!

Yet it is fascinating to see how the story has been written up.

The last minute scramble from the Lennon Government to join the campaign and announce it as a positive win, when all along they had said the area could be logged without harming it. Indeed, they had continually ridiculed the Greens - and Bob Brown in particular - in his efforts to save it.

The Lennon PR machine was in overdrive to spin the story as a loss for the Greens and an embarrassment for Bob Brown because he wasn’t there at Lennon’s press conference. I guess that's not surprising, but what was interesting was how gullible some journalists were - including the supposedly politically savvy Crikey - swallowing the Lennon PR flunky's lines. Gulp. Gulp. They were like fish desperate to be on the Government take.

How anyone can believe that forcing the Government to contribute hundreds of thousands of dollars to saving an area the Greens have campaigned for is a political loss is beyond me.

Politics today seems to be more about who does the opening, who cuts the ribbon than achieving change. Is that all that counts? But it does make me think about the whole other issue of how much an individual can achieve if they are prepared not to take credit for it. But that is a topic for another day.

Turning an area of less than 200 hectares of remote Tasmania from obscurity into a national icon is no mean feat - and it was Bob Brown and a hell of a lot of others who helped achieve this despite the efforts of the Tasmanian Government and the logging company Gunns Ltd desperate attempts to resist

And while we are apportioning credit I’d like to give a fair share of it to Byron Bay. I am currently in Northern NSW and recollecting on a visit earlier this year when Bob and I traveled up the North Coast promoting the Recherche Bay issue and selling Bob's little book about Recherche Bay.

The biggest audience was at Byron Bay where a packed group of 300 plus flocked to hear Bob tell his great story about this magical piece of Tasmania, where the French visited for their peaceful encounters with the Aboriginal people 200 years ago.

And it was someone in the enthused audience who suggested to Bob that we should just raise the money and buy it. And while Bob had thought of that before, it was that that got him going on that track with new zeal. Ringing friends and colleagues across the country until finally he - somewhat reluctantly - rang Dick Smith.

The rest is history. Scalp one of the Tasmanian election to the Greens.

posted by Ben Oquist # 12:09 PM 1 comments