Readers will know that I have borrowed the name for this blog – The Northern Myth – from a favourite book of mine of the same name published in 1965 and written by the distinguished agricultural scientist and economist Dr Bruce R. Davidson.

Davidson was a man well before his time and of whom many of the current boosters of the mantra of “develop the north” should take notice.

He was highly sceptical of the overblown claims being made by politicians, commentators and other boosters in the 1950’s and 1960’s of the potential of the north as an unburdened paradise for broad-scale agricultural development.

Davidson’s The Northern Myth presents a brutally clinical assessment – based on good science and thoroughly researched economics – of the prospects for many areas of agricultural and pastoral development across the top one-third of the Australian continent.

Parts of Davidson’s book are of course somewhat dated – but I’m sure that Davidson would be just as sceptical of some of the current claims being made – by the same classes of people – about the apparently bountiful future of agriculture in the north.

The most well-known of the failed experiments in northern broad-acre farming in the Top End was the Humpty Doo rice farm project.

The good folk at the Litchfield Shire Council provide this useful snapshot of the rice project – and of the mood of the time that is strikingly similar to some current views:

Rice grown at Humpty Doo was going to feed the starving millions in Asia. The Northern Territory could become the world’s food bowl – and the post-war world desperately needed food. With new skills, new markets, big money, and big ideas, northern development would become a reality, not just a hollow cliché. Certainly there had been failures before, the optimists admitted. But things were different now, they reasoned. Past failures were attributed to bad luck, bad judgment, inadequate capital investment, and similar reasons. Now, all these limitations and reasons for failure could be swept aside by a new wave of large scale capital development. And the Territory’s coastal plains would at last live up to all the hopes which had been held for them since explorer John McDouall Stuart in 1862 said of the area “it could be the finest colony under the Crown – capable of growing any and every thing.”

It didn’t quite turn out that way.

Suddenly, in the 1950s, the area became the focus for national ambitions to develop the north. The spectacular failure of these ambitions made the name “Humpty Doo” part of Australian folk lore.

In 1954 the junior Menzies government Minister Harold Holt infected the American mega-millionaire Alan Chase with enthusiasm for rice growing at Humpty Doo. Chase formed a grand plan for planting half a million acres to make the NT the world’s biggest rice producer. Chase declared that the Territory would be a food bulwark against communism. “Hunger in Asia breeds communism, and I believe that we have here the means of removing that hunger.” A specially commissioned film, “The Miracle of Humpty Doo” was produced and widely shown.

Chase formed a company Territory Rice which began experiments and plantings. By 1959 there were 5,500 acres under cultivation. It was proposed that the rice growing area would be subdivided in to 400 small farms, with housing and townships.

Magpie geese got the blame, but there were many more fundamental reasons – the project was always undercapitalised; no allowance had been made for rainfall and sunshine variability; soils were poor and drainage unsuitable; costs were high and poorly controlled; and marketing was never properly organised.

A few years later the land-clearing bug was still afoot in the Top End.

This excerpt comes from the NT Government’s Department of Infrastructure, Planning and Environment report, Land Clearing in the Northern Territory, written by E.J. Hosking in 2002:

In 1967 the first large-scale clearing project occurred in the Northern Territory on Tipperary station by the Tipperary Land Corporation (TLC) and at the time was believed to be the one of the biggest single agricultural projects in the world (NT News, 24/07/1967). The scheme planned for 79,000 ha to be cleared over 5 years, however, poor management, seasons and trying to do too much too soon eventually sent the Texan-based company broke (Mollah, 1980). Not learning from these mistakes, the Agricultural Development Corporation (ADC) undertook a similar feat in the early 1970s on Willeroo Station. An estimated 48,600 ha was recorded as cleared, with only 16,000 ha ever being farmed (Fisher, 1977).

With self Government in 1978, the NT launched the Agricultural Development and Marketing Authority (ADMA) in 1981/82. This Authority assisted private cropping developments (Sturtz, 2000) that helped establish the NT horticultural industry, and resulted in further clearing on Tipperary station in 1988/89 and development of the Douglas Daly research farms.

The Senate Environment, Communications and the Arts Committee is currently having a close look at forestry and mining operations on the Tiwi Islands just off the coast from Darwin. The Committee was scheduled to submit it’s report by Monday 26th October but there is no sign of the report at the Committee’s website and it has yet to be tabled in Parliament.

I’d heard a few weeks ago that the Committee would not make that deadline, in part due to the sheer complexity of the matters it has been charged with investigating, and also because there is a fair likelihood of separate reports from the Committee members.

You can see the Committee’s Terms of Reference here.

I’ve previously examined the mess that is left of the Tiwi Forestry operations here and here.

Most recently I looked at the predictable failure of the MIS schemes promoted by Great Southern Plantations, the operators of the large-scale Acacia mangium plantations on the Tiwi Islands that have been left to rot after its collapse in May this year.

It is clear, to me at least, that the collapse of the forestry operations on the Tiwi islands represents not just a failure of an ambitious agricultural scheme but also a failure of good corporate governance and highlights the need to conduct appropriate risk, economic and environmental analyses of the overall project – particularly in environmentally and culturally sensitive areas.

And it is not just in Australia that the Tiwi Forestry operations have drawn attention.

In late September Verlyn Klinkenborg editorialised in the New York Times and pointed to the broader impacts of the collapse of the forestry scheme on the islands:

…this is not just another forestry project gone awry — 75,000 acres of bankrupt monoculture where there used to be native tropical woodland…What’s left behind is a sense of desolation and distrust. I talked with several Tiwi Islanders — over a dinner of mud crab, local barramundi, local mussels and magpie goose — and it was clear that many of them doubted the good faith not only of Great Southern and the Northern Territory government but also their own Tiwi Land Council, which had encouraged the partnership

...

The question that night at dinner wasn’t just the economic loss involved — the loss of jobs and royalties and individual investments. It was the meaning of this failure, its demoralizing effect on a people who have been striving to find a way toward economic self-determination. Like traditional owners on the mainland, the Tiwi have had to struggle with the cruel vicissitudes of Australian policy toward its aboriginal population — everything from the brutality of official racism to the confused tolerance that has come in more recent times with cultural and political empowerment.

Apart from the social fallout from the failure of the arrangements between the Tiwi Land Council and Great Southern Plantations there are the very real questions about what will happen to the trees in the ground – will they be left to rot or is at least some part of the project capable of being salvaged?

On 16th May 2009 Administrators were appointed to Great Southern Group. Subsequently, on 18 May 2009 McGrathNicol were appointed Receivers and Managers of Great Southern Limited and certain subsidiaries of Great Southern.

In September McGrathNicol issued Circulars to Investors advising that the Tiwi Island forestry schemes (which consisted of a large number of tree-plots leased by small investors) would be unfunded after 30 September.

On 2 October McGrathNicol issued a further Circular to Investors in the Tiwi Leases, advising that:

The Tiwi Island operations are commercially unviable. The operating costs and capital expenditure requirements are extremely high. As we have been without funding for the Tiwi Island operations from 30 September 2009, we have commenced cessation of these operations. We also wrote to the landlords, the Tiwi Land Council, on 30 September 2009 advising that we will not be accepting any liability for the lease costs from 30 September 2009.

On 1 October 2009 the Tiwi Land Council terminated all head leases on the Tiwi Islands, relying on a clause contained in the head leases which entitled the landlord to terminate in the event of the insolvency of GSMAL.

In June the Tiwi Land Council had told the ABC that it needed a total of $120 million in order to:

…make the forestry plantations on the Tiwi Islands viable following the collapse of Great Southern Plantations…the land council’s Cyril Kalippa says he has asked the Federal Government for help because Great Southern’s account estimates show substantial money will need to be found to keep it going. “We need about $80 million for the next three years – that’s for the wages and the things that we need to operate the forest. “And also we need $40 million to extend the wharf or the jetty so that 50 tonne ships can come in and pick up the chip wood.”

Apart from the huge sums to keep the trees in the ground and alive – and the money to rebuild a ruined jetty – there remain very real questions about the viability of the whole scheme and who might front the large sums of money in a very tight market to a project with a troubled past and a far from certain future.

In early October The Australian reported that the Tiwi Land Council was optimistic that the project was still viable:

Despite the withdrawal of support from a banking consortium last month, Tiwi Land Council chief executive John Hicks said global demand for woodchips indicated the scheme was “clearly a viable operation”. “We have got it debt-free,” Mr Hicks said. “And it has a minimal rate of return of between 15 and 30 per cent.” The plantations will be harvested on decade-long cycles and landowners now have title to all fixed assets, including the camp headquarters, sewerage farm, port infrastructure, and airstrips. The TLC estimates it will need $80m to manage the plantation to maturity in 2013 and fix the Melville Island wharf so the trees can be exported.

Mr Hicks said at least 15 private investors had indicated they were prepared to support the group in the run-up to the first harvest in 2013. Mr Hicks said the 20 staff on the operation had been retained and that the plant had the potential to create 660 jobs in associated industries.

The controversial venture has already fallen victim to a cyclone and Great Southern was last year ordered to pay $4m for breaching environmental guidelines.

On 2nd October – the same day that McGrathNicols described the Tiwi Forestry project as “commercially unviable”, Dr Judith Ajani gave evidence to the Senate Committee’s Inquiry at Hearings in Canberra.

Dr Ajani is an economist specialising in forest and plantation research at the Fenner School at the ANU, where she has worked since 1996.  She is the author of ‘The Forest Wars‘ (MUP 2007) and is well placed to comment on the Tiwi forestry schemes.

Dr Ajani’s evidence to the Senate Committee centred on her assessments of the short-term propsects of Australia’s woodchip production and exports, the likely demand for the low-grade woodchips from the Tiwi Islands over the period 2010 to 2014 and the looming glut in supply caused by the rapidly increasing supply of plantation hardwood chips from plantations planted under the MIS schemes.

This is a glut that Dr Ajani says will require Australia to double the volume of sales into a flat market (Japan) where we export up to eighty-five per cent of out chips and where we  already supply about one-third of their intake – and that this will commence as soon as early in 2010.

Responding to questions from Greens Senator Rachel Siewert, Dr Ajani told the Committee that:

Dr. Ajani: What we have at the moment, and it is the really crucial issue here, is a very big volume of hardwood chip resources coming on stream from [Australian] plantations and we also have the native forest resource hanging in there as a continuing significant supplier of hardwood chips.

…

So what we are looking at here is Australia’s plantation chip resource increasing from our current level of production of around 4 million cubic metres per annum—that is the volume of that resource that we export currently from hardwood plantations—to around 14 million cubic metres per annum by 2010-2014. Native forest resources in there at the moment are supplying around 5½ million cubic metres. We have inevitably some very big resource volumes coming on stream very quickly. Some people might say that this is not a glut situation. I think they are not being open in their assessment of the reality here.

…

…with a glut we have a problem that happens in any commodity industry. Lower quality resources are the ones that always struggle to get market share and, in particular, to get market share at the price they expect.

…

…the Tiwi Islands chips using Acacia mangium are of a lower quality. They are of a lower quality, according to Great Southern plantations, because they have a lower pulp yield—in other words, you need more wood to make the same volume of pulp—and they are of a lower quality in terms of the additional costs that are required with respect to bleaching for paper production. That is information that Great Southern itself presented.

NT Labor Senator Trish Crossin asked Dr Ajani how the Tiwi might deal with their very real practical problems – they have trees in the ground that will cost a lot to maintain before they can be harvested and sold into an uncertain market:

Dr. Ajani: …it is a complicated problem…the Tiwi Island issue is embedded in a much bigger problem, which is the plantation MIS arrangements as a whole. The first job is to contain the problem. It is not just for the Tiwi islanders but also Australia wide—that is, in my view we should terminate the plantation MIS arrangements, because the last thing we want is greater havoc being played because we have more investment going into these operations while we are facing the market as I have described. The issue you raise is: what then happens to the trees?

…

…given the information that Great Southern itself provided some time ago and given the market conditions, there should be a great care about further expanding the plantation estate.

Liberal Senator Ian McDonald, in previous governments a Minister that provided no small measure of support for the plantation industry in general and MIS schemes in particular, asked a number of forceful questions of Dr Ajani, concluding with a question that revealed his belligerence and inability to comprehend her evidence:

Senator IAN MACDONALD—Chair, I am at a loss to understand the evidence Dr Ajani is giving.

Chair of the Committee is the Liberal Senator for South Australia, Simon Birmingham asked Dr Adjani about the prospects of the world hardwood chip market.

CHAIR— Dr Ajani, is the global hardwood chip market still growing?

Dr Ajani—The global hardwood chip market is largely flat…The trade figures are largely flat. The current downturn also is not presented in this graph on page 4. I do not see the hardwood chip trade globally recovering to such an extent that the wood volumes that we have coming on stream, virtually immediately, are going to be cleared easily and without putting pressure on the price.

Dr Ajani—…We are seeing globally a very strong separation of wood into wood products—paper and sawn timber—and the actual production trends of those products. In other words, what we are seeing globally are resource saving technologies coming through such that the strong growth in wood products is not flowing through to strong growth in wood input.

CHAIR—Recycling technologies and so on are substituting for plantation and native woodchips—is that your contention?

Dr Ajani—Yes. The main play here in the paper market is the role of recycled paper dampening the demand for wood despite strong growth in paper consumption.

Senator McDonald returned for one last unsuccessful shot at Dr. Ajani:

Senator IAN MACDONALD—What is your concern about the Tiwi Islands, from the Tiwi Islanders’ point of view?

Dr Ajani—I think they have a product which is not well placed in the play that is going to unfold over the next few years as our hardwood plantation resource comes onto the market.

In short, it seems that the Tiwi have been landed with a white elephant of monumental proportions – large swathes of pristine, high conservation-value tropical forest have been stripped and burned – or sold off in curious deals that have only made a loss to date.

The Tiwi have now been forced to go cap-in-hand for money from a cautious market and Governments that, understandably, have little inclination to throw good money after bad for a resource of dubious sustainability and diminishing value.

Many think that Tiwi Forestry is just another Northern Myth – an ambitious but poorly-researched and managed scheme that will – if it has not already – see large tracts of precious tropical forest land laid to waste for no good end.

As I indicated above, the Tiwi Islands forestry case is complex and I have only just touched the surface here.

I don’t expect everyone to agree with me – so if you have a view contrary to mine please register, and leave a (hopefully constructive) comment.

Similarly if you feel you may have something to add to or support my comments then please do the same.

You can read some background material (from a blog run by the NT Environment Centre in Darwin) here.

And I’d encourage you to read the Submissions and Transcripts of Evidence given to the Senate Committee at the Committee’s website here.

Thanks for taking the time to get this far!!

The political response has been limited to hand-wringing stop-gap measures and to paying for a series of failed attempts to plug the spill and some apparently ineffective mopping-up operations.

Atlas West oil rig. Photograph: Chris Twomey, office of Ausralian Greens Senator Rachel Siewert

This is a disaster of not only local, but regional and international proportions. And, while the weather conditions in and around the Timor Sea are relatively stable at present, the impending arrival of the seasonal monsoonal cycle in the coming months will substantially change the nature and location of the impact of this massive spill.

The Jakarta Post reports today that the slick is already in Indonesian waters and is causing illness and will have a substantial economic affect on traditional fishers and harvesters on Rote Island:

Four weeks after the oil spill, the Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) submitted an official report to the Indonesian government mentioning that volumes of crude oil had entered the Indonesian Exclusive Economic Zone, some 51 nautical miles from Rote Island.

Traditional fishermen operating off Pasir Island found an oil slick resembling a pool around 20 miles from Tablolong beach in Kupand, or around 30 nautical miles from Kolbano, South Central Timor regency.

Last week, fishermen on the coast of Rote Ndao regency started complaining of illnesses as a result of the oil spill that had reached land and damaged thousands of hectares of ready-to-harvest seaweed.

“Seaweed, which is one of the province’s prime commodities, has been polluted. If the farmers fail to harvest their seaweed, they would incur losses of up to billions of rupiah,” said the West Timor Care Foundation NGO director Ferdi Tanoni.

And the Timor Oil spill has been picked up by East Timorese bloggers here and here.

The West Atlas oil rig in the Timor Sea, operated by the Thai-owned PTTEP Australasia, blew on August 21 and has leaked over 400,000 litres of oil, gas and condensate into the Timor Sea at a rate of reported variously as being from 300 to 1,200 barrels a day.

The Fairfax Press reports that Greens Senator Bob Brown believes those figures underestimate the true position – though no material was provided in support of his claim that:

The Greens believe anywhere from 10 to 20 million litres of oil has spilled into the ocean since the leak began on August 21.

Three attempts to plug the hole – by means of intercepting the pipe more than 2.5 kilometres below the sea bed – have been unsuccessful.

A fourth attempt had earlier been abandoned but was apparently to take place sometime yesterday, Sunday October 25.

Photograph: Debra Glasgow/WWF

As Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett told the ABC he is:

…confident everything possible is being done to stop the oil leak.

“The fact of the matter is, it’s a fiendishly difficult exercise – a little bit like threading the needle – to try to get this oil spill stopped,” he said.

And a fiendishly expensive one – estimates by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority given to the Australian Senate are that it has cost more that $AU5.3 million to date.

What 25,000 square kilometres of oil slick looks like. Photograph: MODIS/Terra/NASAS

The most comprehensive report I’ve been able to find on this oil spill is this article published last Friday in The Guardian by Toni O’Loughlin.

O’Loughlin’s article relies extensively on a series of reports by the World Wildlife Fund Australia.

Sea snake swimming in sludge. Photograph: Chris Sanderson/WWF

WWF are the only external independent agency to conduct a survey of the area affected by the spill.

WWF says that:

Dolphins, migratory sea birds and sea snakes were found in abundance in the area, in addition to marine turtles, and many of these species were recorded swimming through the toxic oil affected area during WWF’s recent expedition to Timor Sea…”We recorded hundreds of dolphins and sea birds in the oil slick area, as well as sea snakes and threatened hawksbill and flatback turtles,” said WWF-Australia’s Director of Conservation Dr Gilly Llewellyn, who led the team of ecologists.

Overall the expedition recorded 17 species of seabird, four species of cetacean and five marine reptiles including two species of marine turtle. At least eleven of the species were listed migratory and two – hawksbill and flatback turtles – are listed as threatened with extinction under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.

On Wednesday, PTTEP, the company responsible for the oil slick, reported high levels of mortality among oil- affected seabirds. “Clearly, wildlife is dying and hundreds if not thousands of dolphins, seabirds and sea-snakes are being exposed to toxic oil. The critical issue is the long term impact of this slick on a rich marine ecosystem, taking into consideration the magnitude, extent and duration of the event,” said Dr Llewellyn. “We know that oil can be a slow and silent killer…we can expect this environmental disaster will continue to unfold for years to come.”

The true impacts of this most serious regional marine disaster will start to be felt – and recorded – in the Timor Sea in the coming weeks and are already having severe impacts on some parts of the Indonesian archipelago.

Just what will happen when the monsoon season starts and most likely disperses the spill over a greater area in the region – including back onto the Australian north-western coastline, remains to be seen.

But by then it may be too late.

You can see more of the WWF reports and survey here.

And more of the photographs collected at The Guardian’s Environment site here.

“Rust In Peace‘ is scrawled on the side of the sorry remains of this poor little Jayco pop-top caravan abandoned about 50 metres off the Central Arnhem Road 460 kilometres ir so from the Stuart Highway.

The poor thing had obviously had a hard life and, having just dragged my vehicle up the same road, I know that it would have been having a very hard time of it – at least my vehicle is built to take these roads – this poor thing was built for freeways and suburban roads. That it lasted the best part of 30 years is some kind of testament to either the people that built it or the care of the drivers that owned it.

And the owners obviously got their moneys worth – as the shot below indicates, they had been dragging it around the countryside for the best part of 30 years until it finally expired on a dusty, corrugated stretch of road in the centre of Arnhem Land sometime earlier this year.

And as the good people at the East Arnhem Land Tourist Association reckon, there are at least two good reasons why dragging a caravan up the Central Arnhem Road is not recommended:

The Central Arnhem Road is not recommended for caravans, only sturdy off-road camper trailers. The Northern Land Council will not approve a permit to tow a caravan into East Arnhem Land and Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation will not issue a Visitor Recreation Permit to anyone with a caravan.

]]> http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2009/10/13/roadkill-of-the-week-jayco-poptop-caravan-central-arnhem-road/feed/ 6 http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2009/10/05/the-weekend-australian-nicolas-rothwell-and-the-art-of-fantastic-journalism/ http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2009/10/05/the-weekend-australian-nicolas-rothwell-and-the-art-of-fantastic-journalism/#comments Mon, 05 Oct 2009 01:28:57 +0000 Bob Gosford http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/?p=1903

Wadeye township

I’ve written here recently about the fantastic (in the original sense of that word) approach that The Australian and its dwindling number of northern correspondents take to just about anything to do with Aboriginal affairs here in the NT.

This past weekend The Weekend Australian continued this dubious tradition when it ran this piece from its northern correspondent, Nicolas Rothwell.

Rothwell examines apparently new economic and governance developments at the troubled remote township of Wadeye, in the west of the NT’s Top End.

And Rothwell, after many years in the NT, has apparently finally realised what anyone with any experience in remote Australia would have found out a long time ago – that Wadeye, like most small townships in the NT, and elsewhere – is a town that is “mostly ordered and peaceful”.

If you take the assertions in Rothwells piece at face value you would think that the good citizens of Wadeye had turned their backs on all forms of Australian mainstream governance and were boldly charting a course of their own, free from the controls imposed by Australian governments at all levels.

As Rothwell says:

“…what bureaucracy gives, it can also take away. Not only did the federal intervention of mid-2007 sweep through Wadeye; the Thamarrurr local council was wound up as the Northern Territory unveiled its new regional shires. The council, though, gave birth to a new Thamarrurr Development Corporation, which was bolstered by strong support from the Rudd government. The upshot of this administrative upheaval was a deepened desire among the Wadeye leadership group to pursue their own path.
…
“The idea aims to assert control over their own region and in time to supplant the long-established Northern Land Council, which is widely seen as a moribund arm of the Territory Labor Party. “We will set up our own council,” Nganbe says bluntly. TDC’s Berto says: “There’s a lot of people here not happy with the NLC and its complete lack of service, and its standing in the way of progress. We want to set the political agenda from the ground.”

And notwithstanding the brief reference to “strong support” from the Rudd government, Rothwell reckons that the people of Wadeye:

“…don’t like the deal on offer from mainstream Australia’s authorities. They want to keep their own culture, they want economic development and they want it on their own terms, under their control.”

What Rothwell is of course talking about here is localised Aboriginal self-determination, an aspiration that he has frequently, and as recently as six weeks ago, condemned to the dustbin of Australian political history:

“For some time it has been clear Aboriginal self-determination has had its day.”

Due credit should be given to the good citizens of Wadeye for getting their act together in what are incredibly difficult circumstances. By all accounts they have established a range of business enterprises that will provide real jobs and offer economic opportunities to locals.

Rothwell implies that the people of Wadeye have achieved these successes in spite of the bureaucratic and administrative barriers set up by governments at every turn. But it may be that a few inconvenient facts – for Rothwell’s thesis at least – might explain a somewhat different basis for some of Wadeye’s recent successes.

The bureaucracies that Rothwell says have taken so much from the people of Wadeye with one hand have been very busy giving bucketloads of money to the recently-established Thamarrurr Development Corporation Ltd (the TDC) with the other.

The TDC is a non-profit commercial operation limited by guarantee with no shareholders – just members that represent the 20 clan groups of the Wadeye region.

In the 2008/2009 round of funding for the Indigenous Heritage Program announced on 7 July 2008, the TDC was given two grants to a total of $62,704 for “the investigation and management of cultural heritage” of the Thamarrurr region.

On 8 October 2008 Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin announced that TDC would receive $500,000 as “an establishment grant to deliver a range of business services” to the Wadeye region.

At it’s meeting of 10 February 2009, the Victoria Daly Shire Council (the Council), the local government body that replaced Thamarrurr’s predessor, the Thamarrurr Regional Council, passed the following Motion:

“That Council agrees to lease for one dollar ($1.00) to Thamarrurr Development Corporation for the period from the 10th of February 2009 to the 7th of December 2009 all non – fixed assets.”

At the following meeting on 7 April 2009, the Council, in the course of the Confirmation of the Minutes of the previous meeting, amended that Motion:

“The minutes of the ordinary meeting, item (8) TDC were amended with a further dot point
added, saying that if all the above conditions were met the vehicles would then be sold to the TDC for the sum of $1.00. The minutes were  then taken as read and accepted as a true record of the Meeting.”

The value of the assets leased to the TDC for $1, according to the Report provided to Council, was $760,073.

According to the same report, the insured value of the vehicles to be sold to Tharmarrurr upon it meeting Council’s conditions was $482,273.

You can read the Minutes of Council meetings and the Report from Council staff for yourself here.

On 4 March 2009, by joint press release Minister Macklin and Member for Lingiari, Warren Snowdon announced that TDC would receive a total of $650,000 to provide painting services and the purchase of civil construction machinery.

On 11 June 2009, in another joint press release, Snowdon and Macklin announced that TDC would receive a total of $1.422 million to purchase a mobile concrete batching plant and to provide accommodation for “key staff” at Wadeye.

As the ABC reported last month, the Thamarrurr Association, (also based at Wadeye but a separate entity to the TDC) following representations from then NT Indigenous Policy Minister Alison Anderson, received a $250,000 grant from the NT government in circumstances yet to be fully explained:

“Ms Anderson secured $250,000 of taxpayer funds for a corporation run by the powerful Yunupingu family in Arnhem Land, including Galarrwuy Yunupingu. The only other organisation to get $250,000 for community consultation is the Thamarrur Association at Wadeye, which has never declared an income before. The Government has not announced the payments and is yet to explain how the companies were selected. It says the money will pay for consultation on the Working Futures policy to help the Government get its service delivery right.”

I’ve not yet been able establish any direct connection between the TDC and the Thamarrurr Association – other than that they both do the same kind of business in the same small town.

On my back-of the-envelope reckoning the TDC has received control over $760,000 worth of assets for the bargain basement price of a single dollar from their local Council and, including the grant to the Thamarrurr Association, close enough to $3.5 million from the NT and Federal governments.

Not bad for a group that Rothwell says, “…don’t like the deal on offer from mainstream Australia.”

And what of the assertions in Rothwell’s article by TDC’s John Berto of the Northern Land Council’s “…complete lack of service, and its standing in the way of progress” at Wadeye?

John Berto should know all about the NLC and service delivery at Wadeye. After all, he had been a long-term employee of the NLC and for a period up to late 2006 he was the NLC’s Deputy CEO.

But Rothwell and Berto would also be aware of the benefits to the Traditional Owners of the Wadeye region (and beyond) resulting from the NLC’s negotiations on their behalf over the Blacktip gas plant and pipeline.

The deal negotiated by the NLC has given, and will provide into the future, significant economic and social benefits to the traditional owners and residents of the Wadeye region.

Indeed, there is every appearance that Rothwell consciously excluded these well-known and readily available facts from his piece because they did not support his oft-repeated spurious claims about the NLC. I found all of the material noted above after about ten minutes of searching on the web and a bit of scurrying about in the backblocks of various websites.

Rothwell ends his piece with a dubious comparison between Longreach in far-western Queensland and Wadeye, implying that Wadeye should be accorded the same services, government support and facilities as Longreach.

Longreach is a service centre in a region with a long history of extensive & highly productive mining, pastoral and agricultural activity. It is also has roads that lead from somewhere to somewhere else.

Wadeye services only itself and a few small homelands. It is at the wrong end of a long and rough road in a region with no history of pastoral, agricultural or any other significant development – apart from the above-mentioned Blacktip gas project.

Pity about those annoying facts getting in the way of a fantastic story.

Declaration: Bob Gosford has worked for the Northern Land Council as a legal advisor, most recently in 2008. He had no involvement in matters at Wadeye apart from a single meeting with an early version of the Thamarrurr council in about 2000.

From Geoff Vivian's Kimberley Page

I’ve written about the Tanami Track/Road/Highway here before – but that was based on a couple of years of driving the  short stretch of one hundred horrible kilometres or so of occasionally-maintained dirt road between my home at Yuendumu and the end of the bitumen at Tilmouth Well, two hundred kilometres from Alice.

But this past month I’ve had cause to travel the rest of the road from Yuendumu north-west to where it ends, seven hundred lonely kilometres away, just outside of Halls Creek in Western Australia.

Image from David Grant's Holidays page

There isn’t a lot between the two points – occasional signposts point to station homesteads or outstations set well off the road, a cluster of mine sites – The Granites, Tanami, Coyote – and one roadhouse, Rabbit Flat.

I’ve driven from Lajamanu to Rabbit Flat and Yuendumu before – but twenty or so years ago – and my memory of the state of the road then has faded into a haze of dust.

As I’ve noted previously, one of the major impacts on the Tanami Track is the steady stream of fuel and chemical trucks that service the Granites Mine at about the six hundred kilometre point on the road.

Tanami fuel tanker

These massive trucks can drag loads of up to 140 tonnes and cause an enormous amount of damage to the roadway, which for large stretches of the Tanami Track have never been properly formed and sheeted.

In the long dry season the Tanami Track is a sandy, shifting surface of corrugations, dust and huge potholes, and in the wet the roadway turns into little more than a muddy ditch, with long pools of water lying in the many un-drainable sections of the road that have been cut down below the level of the surrounding countryside by the constant grading required to maintain some similarity to a road.

The Tanami Track falls within the jurisdictions of two large Shire Councils, the Shire of Halls Creek in Western Australia and the recently-constituted Central Desert Shire in the NT.

The Central Desert Shire, which has about 700 kilometres of the Tanami Track in it’s area, has had little to say about road  conditions and how it may affect local communities and businesses.

There is not much in it’s Plan of Management and the web home page is, at the time of writing, out of action.

The NT Government does most of the regular maintenance and is currently spending about $12 million to upgrade and seal a 14 kilometre section at the south-eastern end of the road that regularly floods in the wet season. That work is certainly welcome, but there will still be an awful long stretch of the Tanami Track that will continue to be maintained only by several grader skims a year.

The Halls Creek Shire appears to take its responsibilities to its residents more seriously than governments in the NT do.

Recently the Halls Creek Herald reported on the Shire’s recent efforts. Earlier this year the Shire commissioned a cost benefit analysis on the Tanami from Cummings Economics.

Shire President Lynette (”Jim“) Craig told the Halls Creek Herald that communities along the Tanami Track rely upon it:

“…for their supplies of food, fuel and services and the artists rely on the passing tourists for a substantial proportion of their livelihoods. The current condition of the road deprives them of income as well as adding to the costs of their stores, and the costs of doing business for the mines and stations.”

Shire CEO Warren Olsen told the Halls Creek Herald that:

“The Shire does its best within its resources to maintain and upgrade the road…But without sealing we know that after the wet season you won’t see where the money went, and that’s a heartbreaking waste of scarce materials and taxpayer’s money.”

In June this year the Shire released a report (Regularising Local Government Services in Halls Creek Shire – available by search at the Shire home page) into council services to the communities along the Tanami track.

A major part of that report considers serious legal liability issues for the Shire and the costs and lost economic opportunities arising from the road’s condition.

The report is refreshingly blunt in its assessment of the Shire’s capacity to provide services and of the state of funding from other levels of government required to provide those services.

For me this bluntness is rare and welcome – and certainly worlds away from the kind of comments that I have heard from either the NT Government or from the recently-established Shire councils that operate in remote areas of the NT – where there are similar concerns about roads of of the same nature and magnitude as raised by the Halls Creek Shire but that the NT Shires and the NT Government appear disinterested in.

It is worth quoting from the Halls Creek Shire report at some length:

The Shire of Halls Creek is particularly impecunious; it has a very small rating base and few other revenue opportunities, its remoteness causes it to have a very high cost structure both for labour and for the supply of goods and services, it is responsible for a very large road network that it does not have adequate resources to maintain at an appropriate level (including a major interstate road1 that should more properly be a state or federal responsibility), and its communities have been identified as among the most disadvantaged in Australia – consequently requiring a high level of local government services per capita in order to try to redress the high level of disadvantage.

…

Across the state, the funding available for maintenance of roads to remote communities is woefully inadequate for the work that ought to be performed to maintain the roads in a reasonable condition.

…

The poor state of the Tanami Road is a serious impediment to providing services of all kinds to the communities of Billiluna, Balgo and Mulan (as the poor state of the Duncan Road also impedes the provision of services to the Ringer Soak community).

And there is evidence that the state of the road not only results in highly inflated costs to offset expected damage to vehicles, but that in some instances contractors refuse to tender, or tender at unacceptably high prices, for work that involves use of the road.

There is also evidence that occupational health & safety issues are emerging as a barrier to service provision:

“…we have sought proposals from various contractors to either directly provide services to the communities or to provide backup services in the case of service disruption, we were unable to obtain any prices because potential service providers are unwilling to provide services to communities located along such a vehicle-damaging road.

The Department of Housing…advises that the condition of the road is causing the Department delays in having contractors undertake work in those communities. It appears that contractors regularly report vehicle damage on trips to those communities. While vehicle damage might well explain the reluctance of contractors to service those communities, it is reasonable to assume that it also affects the prices that contractors charge to service the communities.

The Department of Housing also expresses concern for the safety of its officers when they are travelling on the Tanami Road.

Mulan Community Store reports that it suffers from considerable damage to its stock, particularly fruit and vegetables, soft drinks, freezer goods, and some dry goods such as cans – which it attributes to the condition of the Tanami Road. On the morning the Store management wrote its letter to the Shire, they reported destroying 74 cans of Coca Cola due to road damage. They also reported fortnightly losses in the range $250 to $400 due to damage in transport.

The freight company that delivers to the community stores has reportedly given notice that it intends to seek a substantial increase in its rates when its contract expires in September 2009, which will cause food prices to increase and add to hardship in the communities.

The Shire report also notes the direct and indirect economic effects that the road condition ha upon the remote communities in its area, particularly those enterprises that rely upon passing tourist trade.

Warlayirti Artists is the indigenous-owned Art and Culture Centre in Balgo Community. This art centre supports over 200 indigenous artists in the communities of Balgo. Mulan and Billiluna. Other than Centrelink payments and CDEP it is the major provider of the income for many of these artists. In 2007-2008 it contributed $ 1.5 million in direct payments to artists across these communities. The dry season (April to October) is the art centre’s busiest time of the year and when most of the income is earned to sustain the artists through the wet season…significant volumes of artwork are sold directly to tourists and collectors travelling to the Art Centre along the Tanami Track from either Halls Creek or Alice Springs.

Warlayirti Artists report that the condition of the road is discouraging tourist traffic and thereby reducing the potential sales that they would otherwise expect to sustain the local economies. They also report that a builder they had lined up to commence building work has pulled out of the job because of the damage the road is doing to his vehicle and the time it is taking to reach the community.

And the Tanami is also used extensively, particularly during the dry season, to ship cattle out and to carry material for pastoral, mining and exploration activities into the region.

…it is heavily used by road trains and other heavy vehicles that cause considerable damage to the road.

The Shire is in receipt of complaints from various pastoral companies along the road, including the owners and managers of Youga Walla Station, who state (inter alia) that: “Carriers of livestock, general freight and fuel are now refusing to come down the road and deliver our freight. If you can even convince them to come down it will be at a rate of 5 to 10 times the normal going rate. For example I was recently quoted $5500 for one trailer of goods from Halls Creek to the station. I can get the same goods from Adelaide to Halls Creek for $6500. A recent purchase of cattle has had to be stopped due to the carrier refusing to use the Tanami Road. This is obviously having a huge impact on the ability of us to run our business viably . . . We have had staff and visitors who have travelled here from Alice Spring on the Tanami who have commented that the road is in excellent condition until you get to the WA border. This is an entirely unacceptable situation and needs immediate attention.”

Not only is the Tanami Road a huge burden on the Shire of Halls Creek that it cannot afford, but it is an inequitable situation that the Department of Main Roads takes responsibility for two intra-regional roads (both the Great Northern Highway and the Gibb River Road) linking the West Kimberley towns of Derby with the East Kimberley towns of Wyndham and Kununurra, while leaving the Shire of Halls Creek with the burden of this important interstate road.

The Northern Territory end of the Tanami Road is currently being sealed to within 80 km of the state border. Upgrading the Western Australian end of the road to the same standard (at an estimated cost of $60 million) would not only provide the opportunity for alternative modes of service provision to the Tjurabalan communities, but it would also reduce costs significantly to the Shire and to the road users, and facilitate the economic development of Balgo, Mulan and Billiluna by reducing their transportation costs, bringing more tourist traffic, and making businesses in those communities more viable.

…

the estimated cost would be in the order of $60M.

I’ll be keeping an eye out for further news from the north-west about the state of this road – and also whether the NT agencies see fit to change their approach to the parlous state of the road and their reluctance to acquit their responsibilities.

And if you are interested in matters north-west I cannot recommend the many great stories and links at Geoff Vivian’s Kimberley Page highly enough. Not only does Kimberley Page have original contributions from Geoff but it pulls in all manner of articles and links on matters of current and historical interest from around Australia and the globe.

Well worth an hour or two of browsing.

And me, I wimped it – after driving up the road and spending a couple of weeks wandering around the Kimberleys I had the choice of taking the short route (700k’s) via Balgo home to Yuendumu – or going the long way round via Kununurra, Katherine, Tennant Creek, Alice Springs (approximately 2,500k’s).

I will admit to having lost my bottle on the Tanami Track – and I took the long way home after convincing myself that I had business in Darwin…and not being able to face the likely repair bills to sanity, health and vehicle after dragging it across the horrorshow that is the Tanami Track right now…

Got a story about the Tanami Track – send in a post and tell me, and the rest of us, all about it!

This is a not-so-short update on the Aboriginal & Torres Strait Island bird knowledge project I’ve been working on for – well, years now.

My initial interest in this topic was prompted by spending time with Aboriginal people soon after I moved to the Top End of the NT in the mid-eighties – it was soon apparent to me that Aboriginal people had a wealth of knowledge about the birds that they hunted and ate and celebrated in dance, song and art and that forms a rich thread running through their mythology, traditions and culture.

Fifteen years, a law degree and a temporary move to the south coast of NSW later I finally got to attend the post-grad certificate course at Charles Sturt University at the Thurgoona campus at Albury. There I asked lecturer, course coordinator and general all-round great guy Dr Dave Watson if he might have some thoughts about what to do about the apparent lack of appreciation of the knowledge and appreciation of Aboriginal birdknowledge by ‘mainstream’ (for want of a better term) birdwatchers and ornithologists.

Dave’s answer was short and sweet – “Well Bob, if no-one else has done it you’d better do it yourself!”. Little did I know what lay in store by my simple response that I’d do my best!

A telling fact that drove my interest in the early nineties was that the most substantial single source of Aboriginal bird knowledge in the mainstream ornithological literature was John Gould’s “Handbook to The Birds of Australia”, published in 1865. I’ve not been able to find a replacement candidate as the primary source – and much of the information contained therein was collected by one of Gould’s collectors, John Gilbert, who was taken from us too soon in 1845 while on a cross-country expedition with Ludwig Leichhardt.

Anyway, eight years on from Dave’s wise words I’m getting closer to producing my attempt at an overview of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander bird knowledge in a single volume. CSIRO Publishing will publish the book (with a tentaive and somewhat boring working title of “Australian Aboriginal Bird Knowledge”) in mid to late 2010 – dependent upon when I get the finished work to them.

One thing I do note is that it will not, indeed cannot, be a complete compendium of such knowledge – that would take more time and many more volumes than I have time for. But what I do hope is that it will start a broader interest and enquiry about local bird knowledge among the many distinct language groups and cultural blocs around the country – particularly in light of the growing importance of Aboriginal land management in many part of Australia.

I’ve spent a large part of the last five years (at least) collecting the literature – mainly from many hours in dusty (and not so dusty) libraries across Australia and across the globe (I’ve found some great works in libraries in Cambridge, Cape Town, Arkansas and New Orleans, to name a few), and have a stack – literally – of secondary research material.

What has occupied a large part of my time this year is organising and doing what I think will be the most important part of the book – travelling around the country talking to any Aboriginal person or group with an interest in taking part in my project. So far I’ve done a few trips up and down the NT – into the southern fringes of Arnhem Land – where I lived for a while in the eighties and nineties, around and to the west of Katherine and up and down the Stuart Highway.

I’ve also been into the east Kimberleys, South Australia (twice) and have just returned home here to Yuendumu (300 kilometres n-w of Alice Springs) from my latest trip that took me through eastern South Australia, coastal Victoria, southern and north-western NSW and central and western Queensland – a total of about 10,000 km.

In a week or so I’ll take off up the Tanami Track via Balgo and surrounds, then back into the eastern Kimberley, across to Broome and then down to the Pilbara – then back along that same route – that should take me the best part of a month.

After a week or so at home I’m planning a route that will take me up the Stuart Highway to just south of Katherine, where I’ll take the Central Arnhem Road via Wugularr, Bulman, Gapuwiyak to the heartlands of Yolngu culture around n-e Arnhem land. Then I hope to travel across through to Raminging and Maningrida in central Arnhem Land then back through Kakadu to Oenpelli and Jabiru. Depending on time and inclination I’ll either swing towards Darwin or south via katherine and the Barkly, eventually ending up here at Yuendumu for a few days.

By then it should be sometime in early November and I’ll turn my wheels eastward – if I’m lucky with time and weather I’d like to travel back into Queensland via the Plenty Highway – so much shorter, but rougher – than travelling via Tennant Creek and the Barkly) to Boulia – then back through s-w Queensland towards n-w NSW – eventually ending up in Walgett where I hope to spend some time again with the Dhariwaa Elders Group.

Then to the Australasian Ornithological Conference in Armidale in late November and early December. Then back through coastal northern NSW, up the coast to (about) Townsville then back across the NT and home.

That will be just about all of the field trips for this year – I have a couple of trips – by air – to Tasmania via Melbourne (to catch up on the excellent resources in the several libraries there) and then in mid- January hopefully to be in the Torres Strait islands about the same time that Dr Rohan Clarke from Monash Uni will be doing some field work there. And I may have a short road trip down to western South Australia and another up to the Gulf country.

And then – sitting down for a couple of months and putting it all together into some sort of shape that people – will want to read – and hopefully and more importantly – buy.

Finally, I’ve learned a lot about methodology for ethnobiology over the past that I hope to apply in a more specific PhD project looking at the application of local bird knowledge to local conservation and land management efforts here in the Tanami. And I’ll be talking about methodology at AOC 2009 in Armidale and at the back-to-back conferences of the International Society of Ethnobiology and Society for Ethnobiology which will be held on the magnificent Vancouver island in British Columbia in May next year.

And by the way – if you are interested in having a look at a great set of posters (that I’ve written about earlier here) in for central Australian languages have a look at the set of posters that my friend and colleague Myfany Turpin, of the University of Queensland and the Charles Darwin University School for Policy and Social Research, has produced. The series of posters are of bird knowledge in the Arrernte, Anmatyerr, Alyawarr and Kaytetye languages spoken throughout central Australia.

Individually they portray 25 or so birds found in the areas in which each language is spoken. As a set they reveal the depth of knowledge that Aboriginal people have of the birds that they hunt, share campsites and townships with and which are spiritually important or are involved in or related to traditional ceremonies and beliefs.
If you want any further information about my project please send an email to birdknowledge@gmail.com and I’ll be happy to send an Information Sheet or answer – as best I can – your queries. And please feel free to pass this email on to anyone you think might be interested in this project.

Cheers and I may see you on the road over the next few months.

Centrecorp is, as the Federal Government’s own Office of Evaluation and Audit (Indigenous Programs) noted in a Report of November 2008, a:

…very successful private organisation which has received approximately $25.1m in support from the Australian Government. As noted in its various establishment documents, Centrecorp has taken “advantage of investment and commercial opportunities” for the benefit of Aboriginal people in Central Australia and have built an impressive asset base over the past 23 years.

The Office of Evaluation and Audit (Indigenous Programs) provides the Commonwealth government with:

…objective advice to the Australian Government about the management and performance of its programs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. We make recommendations about how Indigenous-specific programs can be improved, and how the Australian Government can deliver better outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

Originally part of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), OEA was established administratively within the Department of Finance and Deregulation in July 2004 and confirmed in legislation by section 193W of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Act 2005.

Centrecorp was established in 1985 to, according to its Memorandum of Association:

“… undertake and implement activities which further the economic and social development of Aboriginals and which are conducive to the advancement of Aboriginals.”

Three of the five $1 shares in of Centrecorp are owned by the Central Land Council. Centrecorp operates two charitable trusts of which it is a trustee and through a combination of good management, fortune and circumstance Centrecorp has grown to be one of the largest investors in central Australia, with interests in a car dealership, a shopping centre, a real estate agency, supermarkets, a gas pipeline, tourist resort and various other small projects.

The value of Centrecorp’s investments are, on a national scale, relatively modest — however in the the poisonous atmosphere of small-town Northern Territory politics the combination of blackfellas, money and complex corporate structures are bound to attract some negative attention — particularly among the uninformed and those that remain wilfully blind to the objective facts.

The Alice Springs News is a freebie local weekly that usually runs to about 16 modest pages and is often more entertaining than informative. Like many freebie newspapers, on occasion the Alice Springs News can seem more like a hobby-horse for the proprietors pet peeves, predilections and prejudices.

And so it is, it seems, with Centrecorp and the three $1 shares owned by the Central Land Council.

On its own admission, the Alice Springs News has:

“… been covering the Centrecorp controversy in 44 reports and comment pieces since April 1998, and a dossier of Alice Springs News reports was a substantial part of the briefing NT Senator Nigel Scullion gave Senator Brandis.”

The reference to Senators Scullion and Brandis links to a series of questions asked by Senator Brandis of David Ross, Director of the Central Land Council, in Senate Community Affairs Committee Supplementary Estimates Hearings in late October 2008 and followup questions in early 2009.

On 14 May 2009 the Senate referred to the Finance and Public Administration References Committee a brief to investigate the relationship between the Central Land Council and Centrecorp.

The Terms of Reference direct the Committee to inquire and report by 11 August 2009 on:

1. the relationship between the Central Land Council and Centrecorp Aboriginal Investment Corporation Pty Ltd (‘Centrecorp’);

2. the committee must inquire into and report upon:

(i) the financial and management relationship between the Central Land Council and Centrecorp, including (without limitation) any equitable relationship between those entities,

(ii) whether taxpayers’ funds have been paid or transferred to Centrecorp and how those monies have been treated in the accounts of the Central Land Council and Centrecorp,

(iii) the nature and extent of Centrecorp’s business activities,

(iv) Centrecorp’s sources of revenue,

(v) the beneficiaries of Centrecorp business and other activities and any additional revenue it receives,

(vi) the nature and extent of Centrecorp disbursements to any charitable trusts or like entities,

(vii) the extent to which any Centrecorp beneficiaries and the Central Land Council are informed of Centrecorp’s business activities,

(viii) how Aboriginal Australians living in the Central Australia region benefit from Centrecorp’s business and charitable operations, and

(ix) all other matters considered necessary by the committee; and

3. the committee must hear evidence inter alia from:

(i) the Central Land Council,

(ii) the Auditor-General, and

(iii) Centrecorp.

One problem for the Senate’s committee is that not only has Centrecorp been the subject of a recent comprehensive investigation by the Office of Evaluation and Audit — which, while slapping it across the wrist on a couple of minor points, largely found it to be, as noted above, a “very successful private organisation”.

Another problem is that it seems that the bulk of the allegations against Centrecorp and the Central Land Council are based upon a long series of allegations promoted by the Alice Springs News .

Earlier last week the Senate committee published three of the submissions received by its inquiry – you can read them for yourself here.

The first submission, by the Commonwealth Auditor-General runs to a mere three-pages and notes that:

“As the trust deed specifically excludes CLC from receiving any benefit from the trust, CLC is not considered to have control over Centrecorp.”

That is a pretty succinct answer to the first of the Committee’s Terms of Reference – and something that anyone on reasonable enquiry would have been able to determine without wasting the Senate’s time.

The Central Land Council’s submission is extensive and notes the link between Senator Brandis’ question in Estimates of late October 2008 and early 2009 the persistent, and it says wrong-headed, coverage of the Centrecorp issue by the Alice Springs News since 1998, and the current Inquiry by the Senate Committee.

The Central Land Council notes, at page three of its submission, that:

Leaving aside for the present whether there has ever been a genuine controversy about Centrecorp, this claim that a dossier of Alice Springs News reports was a substantial part of the briefing provided to Senator Brandis, if correct, may explain how or why two Senate committees have been motivated to inquire into Centrecorp.

For that reason the multitude of factual errors and distortions evident in [the] Alice Springs News stories have been separately addressed in Appendix 2.

The CLC has appended this material in order to provide an objective measure, Hansard, to enable the Committee to see for itself how the Alice Springs News either distorts facts, or manufactures ‘facts’, in order to maintain its campaign against both Centrecorp and the CLC.

The Central Land Council refers to what it says may be evidence of the link between Senator Brandis and the campaign by the Alice Springs News against Centrecorp and the Central Land Council.

In Senate Estimates on 24 October 2008 Senator Brandis asked:

Question 126 — “Is it the case that the capital Centrecorp has used in order to acquire this large asset portfolio was seed funded from royalties paid by mining companies and other commercial entities with obligations to the central Australian Aboriginal people under the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) or other relevant Commonwealth and Northern Territory statutes?”

In response the Central Land Council notes in its submission that:

Question 126 picks up a theme of the Alice Springs News first published in 1998, and repeated many times since, to the effect that Centrecorp is the beneficiary of royalties paid by mining companies…The Alice Springs News has been told repeatedly that the CLC has never paid a cent of royalties to Centrecorp, and there is not a shred of evidence to justify its allegations. It makes no difference, it [the Alice Springs News] has continued to publish this false allegation as fact.

Embedded in this allegation is the necessary inference that the CLC as:

• A Commonwealth statutory authority;
• That is governed by a representative council of 90 Aboriginal people from throughout
central Australia;
• That is independently audited annually by the Commonwealth’s Australian National Audit
Office;
• That is subject to the Commonwealth Authorities and Companies Act;
• That is subject to the Commonwealth Financial Management Act;
• Whose budget is approved annually by the Commonwealth Minister;
• That lodges its annual report with the Minister; and
• The Minister tables the annual report in Parliament every year;

has, in spite of all of that scrutiny and all of those controls, year after year somehow concealed a series of unlawful actions involving the wrongful transfer to Centrecorp, of large amounts of compensation funds received on behalf of traditional landowners.

Setting the proposition out in this way demonstrates how ridiculous the allegations are.

Appendix 2 of the CLC Submission examines quotes from 22 articles published in the 11 years that the Alice Springs News has written about Centrecorp and lists the CLC’s responses and comments on those articles.

The responses, because this issue goes to the heart of the CLC’s business and public accountability, focus on the repeated allegations by the Alice Springs News that Centrecorp was overly secretive and that it’s revenue and capital were sourced from mining and related royalties the responsibility of the CLC, as per these examples from April, May and August 2006 respectively:

The foundation of Centrecorp’s fabulous wealth isn’t hard work but a never ending stream of “sitdown” money (sic) created by the strike of a government pen.

…

The main source of Centrecorp’s revenue is beleved to be royalties required to be paid by resource companies operating on Aboriginal land.

…

[Centrecorp]…founded as a charitable institution to invest mining, oil and gas royalties on behalf of the Aboriginal people to whom they are due…

A single CLC response, to the publication by the Alice Springs News (online) on 19 December 2008) of questions by Senator Brandis in Estimates in December 2008, serves to highlight their concerns with these claims:

The question closely follows the spurious allegation published repeatedly by the Alice Springs News since 1998, to the effect that Centrecorp has received royalties from mining activities on Aboriginal land.

It has not.

Whether the Senate’s inquiry into the Central Land Council and Centrecorp is yet another case of going off half-cocked on the basis of inaccurate or otherwise flawed information remains to be seen.

Hearings of the Senate Committee scheduled for Alice Springs and Canberra have been postponed — no alternative dates for those Hearings have been set.

Maybe the good Senators realise that there is nothing left to inquire about and that they’ve been sold a pup?

Marion Scrymgour has never been one to hold back from a firmly held conviction – she has been fairly quiet since she stepped down to the backbench from her position as the most powerful elected Aboriginal politician earlier this year but in the last week or so she has come out in strong defense of those she says have been left out of the benefits that may flow from resource developments on her homelands, the Tiwi Islands, just offshore of Darwin.

The ABC reported Scrymgour’s latest comments on 19 May:

The Member for Arafura, Marion Scrymgour, is calling on the Federal Government to investigate the Tiwi Land Council’s finances and its efforts to stimulate economic development on the islands. Marion Scrymgour says she is sick of seeing failed commercial projects on the islands, including the marine harvest fish farm and the Matilda Minerals project. Now the future of forestry projects on the Tiwi Islands, which are run by Great Southern, are in doubt after the company went into administration. Ms Scrymgour says the land council was unwise to set up the deal with Great Southern. “I know a lot of Tiwis don’t have confidence in their own land council,” she said. “They’ve never had that confidence and until the Federal Government steps in with a bit more commitment, they’re never ever going to move forward with any economic prosperity.”

And while Scrymgour might be less than happy with the conduct of the Tiwi Land Council, the ABC report of the same day from her Chief Minister, Paul Henderson, could only muddy the waters:

The Northern Territory Government has promised to help the Tiwi Islands deal with the collapse of Great Southern, which has plantations on the Tiwi Islands. The Chief Minister, Paul Henderson, says the Government is willing to pitch in. “We’ll offer any assistance we possibly can to make sure those jobs are maintained on the Tiwi Islands,” he said. He has spoken to the Tiwi Island Land Council and offered to send across a business analyst to look at options for the future of the plantation.

Don’t you just love it when the left hand and the right hand talk from the same page?

The following day the ABC reported that the Senate Committee currently investigating the Tiwi Islands resource industries was concerned that it had taken 3 days for it comprehend how payments related to the forestry program might be distributed and of a climate of ‘fear and intimidation’ on the islands:

The Senate committee inquiry, which is examining the impact of forestry operations on the islands, yesterday held an in camera session because a number of women did not want to put their names on record. The Member for Arafura, Marion Scrymgour, says the women are concerned about the environmental and social impacts of the operations. She says some women have been threatened with physical abuse if they speak out. “The fear and the intimidation is a real thing and that’s what I keep saying,” she said. “People deny that it happens.” Meanwhile, the committee has raised concerns that it has taken three days of hearings for senators to work out how payments from Great Southern’s forestry operations on the islands are distributed to islanders.

…

But Senator Trish Crossin says the land council has not adequately communicated the royalty payment process to confused islanders. “They certainly need to be getting their message out better on how that money is collected, how you can access that money and how that money is given.” Great Southern was expected to appear before the committee today but its appearance was postponed because of the company’s recent fall into voluntary receivership.

There is no shortage of shills, hucksters and flim-flam men in the NT – sometimes they sit on the Government benches, sometimes they operate businesses big or small and sometimes they walk into the offices of the largest landowners in the NT – the Aboriginal land councils that, between the four established under the Aboriginal Land Rights Act (NT), administer nearly half of the land mass in the NT.

The Tiwi Land Council is one of the smaller land councils and controls just about everything that goes on on Melville and Bathurst Islands to the north of Darwin. The Tiwi people have always regarded themselves, for good reasons, as linguistically, culturally and politically distinct from mainland blackfellas.

Those distinctions have been good for the Tiwi Land Council – they’ve been able to avoid some of the more egregious attention paid to the activities of their mainland counterparts by governments and the often rabid bites of the mainstream press and the Tiwis have been able to get political and commercial support because of their apparent readiness to do business – even it was business of dubious value.

The deal that is currently under the Senate’s spotlight are the arrangements between the Tiwi Land Council and Great Southern, the promoter of broad-acre MIS forestry schemes on the islands, which have seen vast swathes of virgin tropical savanna transformed into a monocrop of the fast growing Acacia mangium.

Crikey readers will be familiar with the controversy that arose around the Tiwi Land Council’s conduct in relation to the contentious 99-year lease deal over the largest township on the Tiwi islands, Nguiu, from reports from reports in Crikey here and here.

Crikey has also reported on the Tiwi forestry concerns before here and here.

In 2007 the ABC’s Background Briefing broadcast the most thorough media report on the timber industry on the Tiwi Islands to date.

Wendy Carlisle noted that the proposal had some serious problems from the start:

…in the ’90s, former Territory Chief Minister, Paul Everingham’s company, Sylvatech, restarted the dream. It was a grand vision of riches for all. They sought and gained under new Federal environmental laws, permission to clear 28,000 hectares of native forest. But there was no independent environmental impact assessment and no public consultation process
…
The reports also claimed that there would be a nett greenhouse benefit from replacing the forests with the acacias. Yet there was no reckoning with 9-1/2-million tonnes of greenhouse gases that would be emitted by clearing the forest in the first place. Or that they would be replaced with the acacias that would then be harvested for their pulp.

And an important, some say vital, part of the Sylvatech deal was that it would get to sell off the existing Cypress Pine plantations and Eucalypt logs felled by the clearing of the plantation coupes.

Wendy Carlisle spoke to Professor Brendan Mackey Director, ANU Wild Country Research and Policy Hub about the forests of the Tiwi islands. Mackey gives a clear indication of the importance of the forest cleared on Melville Island.

Brendan Mackey: That’s right, Northern Australia, taken as a whole, is one of the most intact natural areas left in the tropical world. Certainly most of the areas that are what we call tropical woodland and the eucalypt forests on Tiwi Islands, fall in that category. They’re not closed rainforest like you find in the Amazon, they have been severely degraded just about everywhere else in the world, and really Northern Australia, and this is the main point we’re making in our report on Northern Australia, is it represents one of the last chances to do something sensible in a tropical woodland environment.
Wendy Carlisle: Your report looks at all the top of Australia, from Cape York right across to the Kimberley, so in terms of the importance of the Tiwi forest, how significant are they in that huge sweep?
Brendan Mackey: They are the most productive, biologically productive forests in Northern Australia. They have the best rainfall and the best soil, so they really are the jewel in the crown.

Background Briefing again:

Wendy Carlisle: In 2003 Sylvatech and the Tiwi Land Council began exporting timber from the old pines, and the best of the timber from the cleared forests to China. There were wild estimates of the value of the deal to the Tiwis.

ABC News report: It’s a deal that’s worth about $1.5-million a year for the Tiwis who will fill more than half of the expected 250 jobs. Canberra says everyone’s a winner.
…
Wendy Carlisle: Over the next four years, seven barges of Red Tiwi sailed for China. But it was a fiasco. Instead of being worth millions, the shipments made a loss of over $700,000.

In 2005 Sylvatech was bought out by Great Southern Plantations – which collapsed in spectacular fashion nine days ago.

Tiwi Land Council Secretary John Hicks and the Tiwi Land Council appear to be comfortable with timber and other resource companies that fail. As The Australian’s Paul Toohey reported, Hicks told him that:

…the Tiwis had seen their forestry projects fall apart eight times in the past 30 years. They believe they can ride out the collapse of Great Southern, which acquired the project from Sylvatech in 2005.

“The pattern of these receiverships is not something we’re unfamiliar with,” Mr Hicks said. “Great Southern has far more impact upon us (than previous failures); however, Great Southern don’t own the trees. They’re owned by 2700 mum-and-dad investors and Great Southern managed the forests on their behalf.”

In December 2008 the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications and the Arts commissioned an “Inquiry into Forestry and Mining operations on the Tiwi Islands“, the major focus of which has been on the arrangements between the Tiwi Land Council, Sylvatech and, since 2005, Great Southern Plantations.

To date the Committee has received thirty-four submissions. Like all such inquiries the submissions range from the self-serving to the irrelevant, overly long, tedious or just wrong-headed.

But there are a few real gems, including that of Professor Stephen Garnett of the School for Environmental Research at the Charles Darwin University. Garnett points to a recent research paper that indicates the Tiwi may have been dudded big-time and would have been better off leaving their precious tropical savanna untouched rather than signing up to a tax rort:

The paper estimated that the Tiwi Islands forests that were logged by Great Southern Plantations in 2008 could have been worth up to $110 million under a REDD scheme under the Gold Standard of the voluntary carbon market.
…we recommend the inquiry determine why Tiwi Islanders appear to have been denied the opportunity to benefit from REDD opportunities…We think this is because of the way in which Great Southern finance their operations – that the tax savings available under a Managed Investment Scheme could only be attained if the forests were felled.

Dr Ken Eldridge has degrees in botany and forestry and, with more than 50 years experience of research and development in forest genetics and tree breeding, is well qualified to comment on the Tiwi forestry issues.

His submission expressed his personal opinions, and not those of the IFA or of CSIRO:

My impression of the Tiwi plantations, having seen industrial plantations of many species in several countries, was that ‘GSL have achieved good survival and weed control, and the trees were healthy with little damage from insects or fungi. However, stem and branch form was not good, many trees having forks, crooked stems or coarse branches. Such poor form is common when genetically unimproved ‘wild’ seed is used in Acacia mangium plantations elsewhere.’ Such form deficiencies reduce the return at harvest due to reduced yield and the extra cost of delimbing and debarking, prior to chipping for export at age 8 to 10 years.

In other words – they are planting and growing low grade seed-stock that will give poor returns.

Another of the very interesting submissions to the Committee is that of Peter Robertson, who for several years while living in Darwin and working for an environment NGO undertook investigations into the operation of the Tiwi (Melville Island) plantation project.

Robertson makes several important points about the administrative and corporate arrangements, sales and returns to the Tiwi, including that in addition to the MIS proponent Great Southern Ltd, and project ‘partner’ the Tiwi Land Council:

…there are at least four other corporate entities involved in
the Tiwi Island woodchip plantation project:
- Pirntubula Ltd
- Pentarch Forest Products Ltd;
- PenSyl Ltd; and
- Stratus Shipping Ltd.
There is a fundamental lack of transparency about the legal commercial agreements and contracts
that exist between the companies involved in the exploitation of the Tiwi forests and plantations.

…

There is far too little readily available information about these companies or the project’s
financial structure showing how much income each is making out of clearing the Island’s forests
and subsequent shipping and sale of high quality logs, or how much each will make out of the
woodchip export part of the project when it commences.
…
‘Commercial confidentially’ cannot be used as an excuse to deprive the Island’s landowners and
communities of clear and understandable information about the commercial involvement of these
companies in the exploitation of the Island’s natural resources, and the risks involved.

In relation to the valuation of the land used by Great Southern Robertson notes that:

There are two crucial issues here:
(a) how was the leasehold value of the Tiwi ‘Aboriginal Freehold’ land for plantation
establishment arrived at;
(b) how does it compare with leasehold land valuations for plantations elsewhere?
The Tiwi Islanders are being paid “~$17/hectare per annum (+ 2% of net harvest proceeds) for
plantation ready land and ~$1/ha pa for land that is not plantation ready”

There is ample evidence that this amount is a fraction of the amount landowners are paid by
plantation companies in southern Australia. An ANU research paper summarised lease payments
across Australia and found that they ranged from $75/ha/pa up to $300/ha/pa. The average is
around $150/ha/pa – or nearly 10 times the amount Tiwi TO’s are being paid. These are
already old figures and the current rates are likely to be much higher still.

Concerning the shipment and sale of logs clear-felled from the forestry site Roberston says:

According to GSL and the Tiwi Land Council, under the existing commercial arrangement the
Tiwi Traditional Owners will receive “2% of net harvest proceeds” from the eventual sale of
acacia mangium woodchips from Melville Island.
This means that only after all the other corporate parties involved – GSL and its tax minimisation
investors, Pentarch, Stratus Shipping, etc – have taken their cut of the income and profits will the
Traditional Owners receive a potentially miniscule residual income.
In fact, based on the log sale fiasco, it is quite plausible that they will end up receiving nothing at
all, especially if there is a fall in the overseas commodity price for woodchips, which is entirely
foreseeable.

And local MLA Marion Scrymgour, never one to suffer a fool gladly, has been concerned about the operations of the Tiwi Land Council for some time. As she said in a letter to yesterdays NT News:

There are many other things I have to say about the Tiwi Land Council and its governance but I will leave that for my submission to the Senate Committee.

Watch this space.

For those who know her I don’t need to tell you that she is a careful and impassioned thinker on contemporary life and politics in the NT and beyond. For those that don’t know her, all I can say is the you are the poorer for not having the privelige of doing so.

Sometimes her clear thinking and forthright statements rub up what passes for the ‘great and the good‘ in the Northern Territory the wrong way. More power to her I say!

This piece is an excerpt from Sue’s essay, Letter from Darwin, that was published in the latest edition of borderlands, which is:

…a refereed international journal that aims to promote transdisciplinary work across the humanities, work which might also intersect with diverse practices and sites in culture, policy and everyday life. Although our beginnings are modest, we hope that over time you will be able to view writings cutting across and between politics, media, literature, history, law, science, medicine, philosophy, economics, music, film and more, along with incisive debate about contemporary culture.

Sue’s essay in borderlands examines the condition of Aboriginal people affected by the NT Intervention and analyses the ongoing implementation of the Intervention and its related spin-off projects in an all-too-rare historical context.

Letter from Darwin begins with:

The Rex Wild and Pat Anderson 2007 report Little Children are Sacred provided the first chapter of the series in this modern adaptation of a 220 year old classic that might aptly be titled ‘The Native Tribes of Australia.’ The 21st century version provides for an update of characters as well as a generous documentation on sexual abuse and women’s violence as opening scenes and pivotal parts for special task force, police, troops, medical teams, “Aboriginal experts”-both non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal, but mostly non-Aboriginal. The new version of the old history of women’s violence and overall denial, indeed abuse of basic human rights is now contained in 500 pages under a misleading title termed “special measures”. The very latest and up-to-date manual on “Aboriginal legislation.”

The ultimate result has been the injection of enormous amounts of money into addressing the problems and issues that were interpreted as requiring urgent attention. This latest tilt at moral balance, after 220 years of colonisation, denial of rights and the absence of justice is just not convincing. Just as current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s symbolic rhetoric and well-rehearsed performance of apology to Stolen Generations offers promises of new beginnings and directions,
Aboriginal people, especially those at the lower end of the economic, and the rights scales, should remain highly suspicious and extremely cautious.

Sue notes at the conclusion of her essay:

Colonialism has an insatiable appetite – it is forever hungry, it can never be satisfied, and it recruits both unwitting as well as willing emissaries from the vast ranks and ever-growing number of colonised Aboriginal people. Sadly, there are those Aboriginal people who assist in the colonising of their own people as they have reconciled themselves to new arrangements and happily accept the status quo.

Perhaps Uncle Chicka Dixon was right when he named the 1970s wave of compliant natives “bourgeois blacks” and perhaps that name fits many today. While we cannot be guaranteed that central powers, at both national and state levels will not manipulate individuals or a national Aboriginal coalition of leaders, we must try something drastic if we are to survive as a People beyond the 21st century.

You can read the other contributions to the most recent volume of borderlands here and the rest of Sue Stanton’s Letter from Darwin here.

Other contributions from the current edition of borderlands, with the theme of “Acting Sovereign: Interventions in a Politics of Gendered Protectionism” include Goldi Osuri, Tanja Dreher & Elaine Laforteza ‘Acting sovereign’ in the face of gendered protectionism‘,  Nicole Watson ‘Of course it wouldn’t be done in Dickson! Why Howard’s Battlers Disengaged from the Northern Territory Emergency Response‘, Irene Watson ‘Aboriginality and the Violence of Colonialism‘, Goldie Osuri ‘(Im)possible Co-existence: notes from a bordered, sovereign present‘, Shakira Hussein & Alia Imtoual ‘A fraught search for common political ground: Muslim communities & alliance-building in post-9/11 Australia’.

Essays include Tanja Dreher,  ‘Eavesdropping with permission: the politics of listening for safer speaking spaces‘, Elaine Laforteza, ‘Speaking into safety: Orientalism in the classroom‘, Paula Abood ‘Race and the City: Series One‘

And finally the Interview with Sue Stanton, Shakira Hussein, Alia Imtoual, Nicole Watson & Goldie Osuri
‘Reflections and Insights: The Gender, Violence and Protection Workshops and Forum‘.

Enjoy!

The collapse of Great Southern and Timbercorp has only served to highlight the flaws in an industry that many believed was unsustainable from the beginning. “The original plan was to get city money into the bush,” says Liberal senator Bill Heffernan, a long-time critic of the MIS industry. “But it quickly grew into an industry of greed that relied on the generosity of the Australian taxpayer.”

And he might have added the venality of the promoters and the rank foolishness of the so-called investors.

Not long ago, just before Great Southern really went south, Michael Pascoe had this to say about the banks that have supported these rorts and the mug punters that invested in them:

So ANZ has a $500 million exposure to the failed Timbercorp tax deduction empire. What fools. It’s hard to know for whom to feel the most scorn – bankers stupid enough to back inherently flawed businesses or the mugs suckered into buying products on the lure of tax deductions – and the salesmanship that tends to come with particularly fat commissions. And then there’s Great Southern Plantations, trading presently suspended pending some further attempt at rescue. Ditto the scorn for all involved. Oh, and the various “independent” expert reports that have been purchased by management at various times, never mind alleged “investment recommendations”.

Angus Grigg also makes the following interesting comments about the impact of the MIS industry on the Douglas Daly region to the south-west of Darwin:

The Douglas Daly region of the NT provides a recent example of how quickly an area can change once the MIS industry moves in. The Queensland Country Life newspaper has reported a doubling of prices for cleared freehold land over a two year period.

…

It also estimates that 50 per cent of the 100,000 hectares of freehold land in the region, two hours south of Darwin, has been snapped up by the MIS industry. To many observers the situation in the Douglas Daly neatly encompasses the advantages enjoyed by the MIS industry over traditional agriculture.

The ABC’s The Country Hour covered the controversy over the MIS schemes move into the Douglas Daly in March 2008.

Back then it reported that:

In the Daly, south-west of Darwin it’s believed cleared land that was worth about $1m a few years ago is now being sold for up to $14m. Herron Todd White’s Land valuer Frank Peacock says he’s heard the same thing, but he couldn’t be specific about which properties are changing hands because many of them are still being settled. He can confirm though, that there has been huge interest from forestry companies. “The majority of land sales over the last 18 – 24 months has been to timber plantation companies and I’d estimate close to half the freehold area in the Douglas Daly would have gone to tree growers.”

He says freehold land, as opposed to pastoral land, has risen to $2,500 a hectare, and some sales have risen to $4,000 a hectare. “It’s unprecedented really for cleared freehold land in the Daly. It’s just a matter of supply and demand and there’s only 25 or so properties in the Douglas-Daly and they have the rainfall and the close proximity to the Port of Darwin and they also have the well-drained red soils and when it’s in tight supply that will underpin demand.’ The Northern Territory government’s moratorium [on land clearing] on the Daly has also seen prices elevated, and Mr Peacock expects values will hold because there are up to five plantations companies vying for freehold land in the Daly.

The Country Hour believes the forestry companies buying up land are Great Southern Limited, Timbercorp, Northern Tropical Timber, and Plantation Tropical Timbers. New South Wales Snowy River grazier Robert Belcher compares these companies to cancer. He’s dedicated his life to lobbying against corporate forestry companies because he says he’s seen the devastation they cause to rural communities. “The first thing you’ll see is a massive acquisition of land, that will displace population and you’ll start suffering population decline which means your infrastructure services will decline. For example educational facilities, health facilities, that sort of thing. I’ve seen it in every state in Australia. “It happens everywhere where there’s rainfall and decent soils. Anywhere from Grafton in New South Wales to Tasmania.”

…

But, one of Australia’s largest tree companies has rejected claims it’s driving farmers out of the Douglas-Daly region.

Great Southern Limited, has recently purchased land in the area, to plant African Mahogany trees. Communication manager David Ikin says the forest industry will strongly support the local region.

And at about the same time the ABC also reported the comments about the effects of the MIS industry from of the operators of a company established to produce biofuel in the NT:

But, Energy Crops Australia were more concerned with what’s happening in the Douglas Daly because they can no longer afford to invest there. “The Douglas Daly has been crucified by the managed investment scheme where the price of land has escalated beyond all reality. Come By Chance (sic – should be “Kumbyechants”) sold for $15 million dollars, purchased for $1.4m four years ago. It’s out of anyone’s price range who hasn’t got massive tax deductibility.” He says these companies will crucify the community and have devastating social implications. “The Douglas Daly as a farming community is finished. When people are getting that sort of money they’re just taking the money and running so there’ll be no farming in the Daly, there’ll be just trees.” He says he’s aware of Great Southern Plantations, Timbercorp and another two forestry companies buying up land in the region.

And, as that icon of independent journalism, the NT News reported as recently as January this year, a lot more land in the Douglas Daly was being acquired, or was targeted for acquisition, to be turned into plantations:

The Northern Territory’s timber industry is likely to undergo a rapid expansion following the buyout of four cattle stations. Up to 40% of the newly-acquired stations will be planted with African mahoganies and the rest of the land kept for cattle. The stations are the 5000ha Stray Creek, 16,000ha Gypsy Spring and 5000ha Kumbyechants in the Douglas Daly region and the 5000ha Rocktear Park near Katherine.
Plantation Tropical Timbers paid $5.9 million for Kumbyechants and Willmott Forests paid $5.5 million for Rocktear Park.The stations are all small but further buyouts are expected.

As recently as three weeks ago the voice of the Australian plantation timber industry, the Australian Plantation Products and Paper Industry Council was trying to put a brave-faced spin on the imminent collapse of the MIS house of cards :

Timber plantations funded through managed investment schemes (MIS) will continue to grow a large proportion of Australia’s future wood resource, despite the decision by leading agribusiness MIS manager, Timbercorp, to go into voluntary administration. Richard Stanton, CEO of Australian Plantation Products and Paper Industry Council (A3P) said today that Timbercorp’s decision was a response to the convergence of several factors directly affecting that company’s business, and did not indicate an impending collapse in plantation forestry investment or some inherent problem with the MIS business model. “Forestry remains a sound long-term investment, negatively correlated with other asset classes, which many regard as an important element of a diversified investment portfolio,” Stanton said…”Up from about 5% in the late 1990s, MIS forestry now accounts for more than a third of the national plantation estate – nearly 700,000ha of 1.97m ha at the end of 2008 – and over 80% of the annual establishment of new timber plantations, as well as a substantial and increasing area of replanting following final harvest.

It is a little too early to tell what the medium-term effects of the collapse of these schemes will have on the viability of what is undoubtedly a valuable and useful agricultural enterprise – there is nothing wrong with growing high-value fine grade timber, for which there is a growing market – but it remains to be seen how many of the trees that have been planted will ever be harvested – or just be left to rot in the ground.

But back to Blinky Bill Heffernan – the ABC reports today that:

Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan has announced the Senate’s current inquiry into food production will now also consider the impact of MIS. He says startling evidence has already come forward.

Looks like the Senate Committee are going to be very busy in the NT for a while – the Senate Environment, Communications and the Arts Committee is currently conducting an inquiry – with Hearings on the Tiwi Islands as I’m writing this post – into “forestry and mining operations on the Tiwi Islands”.

You can see the Terms of Reference for that Committee here and what appear (because I haven’t got around to looking at them…yet) to be a very interesting set of Submissions – here.

The collapse of Great Southern is of great importance to the Tiwi islanders – Great Southern bought out the previous operators, Sylvatech, a few years ago and the forestry scheme, which will produce pulp from about 30,000 hectares of Tiwi lands, has been mired in a web of controversy since the beginning – a coming attraction here at the Northern Myth.

The forestry operations on the Tiwi Islands are a very complex issue to tackle – so bear with my while I get my head around it!