Over the next few weeks much will be heard about the sins and failings of former Premier Paul Lennon. No-one will cry and condemn louder than those Labor apparatchiks who over the past decade have said nothing, banked their fat paycheques, and happily gone along with the actions and behaviour of a Government now broadly perceived by Tasmanians as corrupt.
It will suit many to claim all this was the creation of Paul Lennon. But that would be untrue to political history. Paul Lennon’s greatest failing was that he had neither the political courage nor vision to break from the political culture and practice of his predecessor Jim Bacon.
It was Bacon after all who took the culture of cronyism, intimidation and blackballing to new heights in Tasmania. It was Bacon who sold Tasmania out to corporations – particularly Gunns and Federal Hotels. It was Bacon who mortgaged Tasmania’s future to the disastrous megalomania of the Gunns board.
In all these decisions Bacon was enthusiastically supported by his deputy Lennon. But it was Bacon’s own particular and often peculiar decisions whose political fallout Lennon would have to subsequently wear in his time as Premier, be it Basslink, the Sydney ferry, or Richard Butler as governor, to name just three of the 10 worst decisions of that government.
The disaster of the pulp mill became more about the erosion of democracy and public trust than it was even about the environment. If it was the most glaring example of Lennon’s contempt for proper governance and indifference to democratic process, he was here only following where Bacon had trod. At his ascension, Lennon made much of his determination to fulfill Bacon’s vision for Tasmania. How could he know it also portended his own tragedy?
For he lacked Bacon’s charisma. Perhaps his greatest political failure was to be too honest about all that Bacon covered over with his undoubted public charm.
Lennon is now gone. The pulp mill is almost certainly dead. And yet the political intrigue that has led to this is in the end the shadow thrown by popular will. The Tasmanian people overwhelmingly wanted Lennon gone and they overwhelmingly wanted the divisive idea of politics and development he embodied to end.
Finally this was a force too powerful even for Lennon’s own obstinacy.
Mike Smith as CEO of ANZ, formerly point man in Asia for HSBC, was reported in the AFR glossy recently as having survived, in ripping yarn tones, an angry mob in Argentina after currency meltdown under ex president Menem (notorious sell out leader). If memory serves Smith decamped in a car backwards down a narrow lane, or some such thing, but also more seriously took a bullet for his trouble in the leg. Those rabid lefties. Heroic Smith escapes to carry on and take the helm at ANZ master and commander of his ship on the wild capital seas of the Orient. But here’s the point of the story – Smith must know in his marrow when people start making grievance about sell out of sovereign govt to big business, albeit a credit crunch and all, he must know that it all ends in tears – for the market, for the government, for the public. Good decision Mr ANZ. Thank you for not buying into this awful project.// More here The Standard 18 Dec 2006: Tempers flared and ordinary, yet enraged people took their household DIY hammers to the bank doors.
Buenos Aires was on the boil.
Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corp chief executive Michael Smith remembers 1999 in Argentina, not the least for a bad experience.
I survive, he says, matter-of-factly.
At the time, he was CEO of the largest foreign bank in the country.
Amid the political tension in Buenos Aires, he says he became a target.
It was about seven years ago. I got ambushed on my way home one night and my car got shot at.
Smith had his own driver but he was off for the night, which was fortunate.
[If the driver was there] they would have gone straight for his gun and killed him and I would have left in the car without anywhere to go [and] they would have got me. I used my own car as a weapon and I smashed through them, says Smith.
But he was not unscathed. One bullet pierced through the car door penetrating his thigh.
Two years later, when the masses rallied and vented their anger against the countrys political class and the banking class, he was trapped in an HSBC branch, also in Buenos Aires. A mob waited outside.
But no one was hurt. It was amazing, he says.”
Lennon will be rightly reviled by all, including his former remoras, for a truly atrocious regime. But he also deserves thanks for finally making the corruption of Tasmanian politics obvious to nearly everyone
Blessed with only modest skills as a huckster, but almost almost free of an effective opposition or critical press, ex-BLF masher Jim Bacon posthumously became a hero to many Tasmanians.
The sublimely charmless Lennon managed to shed close to 50% of Bacon’s approval rating in the following four years, while maintaining a constant stream of ham-fisted scandals. The clumsy PR efforts to ingratiate him with the public invariably ended in embarrassment.
Like a dose of smelling salts, Lennon seems to have temporarily roused a state being handed out the back door to Gunns Ltd. The question now is to whether the moderately competent salesman succeeding him can return the realm to its normal stupor.
Paul Lennon, that blundering mustache said it all, trod in Jim Bacon’s footsteps. Does this mitigate his behaviour?
Ever since the days, perhaps before, of the HEC Tasmania has been as corrupt as QLD under the iron hand of the even more corrupt Joh Bjelke Peterson and NSW under Robin aka Bob Askin.
Now the island state has the chance of cleaning up its act. Will they? Yeah, as soon as the Victorian Liberal Party becomes devoid of factionalism.
If the Gunn’s paper mill project is stopped dead it ins tracks, the whole of Australia will be forever grateful.