ScoMo was on the TV in the beachside café in Burnie, that face, half accountant, half Krusty the Clown, after hanging in front of the Hillwood Berries farm, rows of berry-viney brambly behind him, a rather nice biblical touch.
“We’ve been moving around the country, since Parliament has RISEN,” he emphasised.
He’s always proselytising and it gives his speechifying a blast. Preach it, preacher man!
There wasn’t much interest as he rolled out the new tropes:
What we’re doing is backing Australians in …
Backing Australians in and doing the heavy lifting …
Rolling it out, backing it in and going from strength to strength …
This was all wrapped around an attack on any tax rises: “It’s Australians taking care of Australians, doing the heavy lifting. We just back them in; they do the heavy lifting, family businesses like this one…”
So as usual someone knows what they’re doing in Team ScoMo. Strong, simple metaphors of work, repeated and rearranged like some sort of poetry, until they just go around in your head.
“Tasmania’s done a great job, that’s why Peter Gutwein and the team, and I’m not surprised he got returned as premier…”
“Noooo…” a chorus went up. Because this is Tasmania and though Gutwein was reelected, it was months ago. Gutwein has now pleaded exhaustion, flouncing back on a chaise lounge.
But Tasmanians are local types. They give you directions in a shorthand — “You go round Old Charlie’s, where it used to be, not the new one, and up the Nonce…” and they like to know you know what’s what here.
They didn’t seem much impressed by the appearance at a bourgeois berry farm, which would have been just about the first thing you hit out of the suburbs of northern Launceston. They hadn’t heard the earlier stuff, ScoMo promising hundreds of millions for new sustainable forestry development and research, but they weren’t that impressed when I told them about it. “Pffft” summed it up.
“Is that because of the Hampshire mill?”
“Yeah, on the never never…”
The saga of Burnie’s proposed Hampshire pulp mill would be one reason why north Taswegians will treat the prime minister’s announcement today with a great deal of caution.
Hampshire, just south of Burnie, is farmland area, and in 2018 Melbourne company Hermal proposed, through subsidiary CLTP, to develop a $190 million laminate timber mill using new technology and sustainable forestry of the sort ScoMo was spruiking today. The mill would provide 250 skilled and unskilled permanent jobs, and 250 construction jobs, a godsend for this town of 20,000, doing it tough, and would open in 2019 or 2020 at latest.
To facilitate it, the state Liberal government gave $13 million as a direct grant, and extended a loan credit of up to $30 million. Hermal, a moderate-sized outfit based in Melbourne’s upper-crust Beaumaris, is a family company that began as a timber products firm around south-east Melbourne decades ago.
There was much rah-rah and fanfare at the deal, and Braddon Liberal MP has-been Gavin Pearce rah-rahing for it since being elected in 2019 (and then, according to locals, disappearing again: “Gavin the Ghost” someone had called him at an event two days earlier to muttered agreement). Then Hermal put part of the grant to buy a small mill at nearby Wynyard, which is turning out a much smaller volume of product.
Then nothing more was heard about the Burnie mill until 2021, though the expansion of the Wynyard mill was spruiked.
Hermal said the mill was to develop techniques that would be adopted in the big Burnie facility. There’s no reason to doubt that, but it can’t be denied that Hermal has managed to add a boutique sawmill to its portfolio — which includes Sullivan Cove whisky distillery, and a thing called “Mancave” (possibly a drop-down menu item for that leads you to nothing) — while there hasn’t been a single job appear in Burnie, construction or milling.
In 2021 Hermal released a statement saying that the Hampshire mill was back on track and that COVID had made progress impossible. Also reasonable, but this appears to be the first public communication for a year or so. Since then there has been silence. In response to Crikey’s request, Hermal’s chief operating officer, James Lantry, gave us a statement (after having a bit of a sulk first, when I suggested the mill might be a “white elephant”, and saying he might not send any response, an interesting approach to media liaison):
It is unfortunate that the project has been delayed, however much of this has been beyond our control. Having now proven what’s possible with young plantation hardwood, Hermal are progressing to the next stage of the project which is the major investment in the large-scale mill and manufacturing facility.
That will be good news to the people of Burnie, when it happens, since nothing appears to have been communicated to the general population and there has been no concrete progress.
Burnie’s a solid Labor town, but the hinterland of it is more mixed, and would be a feeder for the mill jobs. Its citizens have some of the lowest incomes in Australia, and many are Year 10 school-leavers. This is their best chance at well-paid industrial work, and they are going to be a lot more sceptical about forestry announceables than ScoMo thinks, and he may need to do a lot more to hold on to Braddon for Gavin the Ghost. If ScoMo’s going to back it in, he better have something on the… truckback um flatthing… tray! that’s it, the tray, to deliver.
Crikey asked Pearce for comment, but he did not talk to us by deadline. Although yesterday he pledged $1.5 million for Slipstream Circus in nearby Ulverstone, so we guess there are many paths to the industrial regeneration of a region.
In the meantime perhaps ScoMo could send the citizens of Burnie a crate of Sullivans Cove Tasmanian single malt? It’s far beyond the budget of most while they wait out the time until the Brigadoon of industrial plenty reappears out of the mist. Back it in baby.
For it is Easter, the spirit moves, and he has RISEN!
Scomo and his minions running around the Country doing what he does best – making Announcements.
Dollar Pledges that when it comes to Delivery, either don’t happen at all, or are nothing like originally spruiked.
I think Smirko would like to say that he “promises to do something about the roads around Burnie” before the Taswegians remind him about the longstanding requests made to Infrastructure Australia.
More of the arvo cancelled and the PM left his security in hospital and took the government jet back home for Easter..
He jetted into the hostile territory of the People’s Republic of Victoria to go to church with Gladys Liu in one of the most marginal seats in the country. Nothing political he said(?). Regarding the timber lamination mill development wonder if the Black Summer bushfire-generated timber shortage across eastern Australia had some part in halting plans?
Please do not use ScoMo which was a Crosby Textor (now CT) name dreamed up after BoJo brought home the ability to fire UK crew on the P&O ferries in the English channel, a feat indeed.
Scummo created it in the run-up to May 2019 – it was criticised by Blot & the Poison Dwarf during their 4 nights pw mutual tongue baths on 2GB as lacking decorum for such high office.
It shows how out of touch and lacking in self awareness he is – nobody with a shred of normality creates their own nickname.
Only someone in certain knowledge that, being Norm NoFrendz, no-one else would bother.
This forestry research institute has now been announced at least five times: 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021 and today. I think there was another announcement in 2020 – but can’t find the link. To date, nothing has actually happened. I wonder how many times an announcement can be recycled before it expires? (Like carbon paper, for those old enough to remember such things.)
The old election promise . Promise you everything, give you nothing, and then before you get it they take it off you .It’s the PM’s magic pudding. A wave of the Pentecostal wand and abracadabra its another miracle.
The miracle can be used again and again as long as you believe in fairies .
Bridget Archer, needs to win this seat and then resign from this corrupt tin pot dictatorship, called the party for coverups and dodgy and stinky deals.
There are probably a lot of Labor people and Greens and undecideds in her seat of Bass, who will back her, just for the stand she has already taken against the big, mean mouthed, malignant wallpaper bully, currently leading the party.
Oh, and now that the leaking and backgrounding has commenced in ernest, against Rochelle Miller, the staffer, emotionally abused and physically kicked out of bed by Alan Tudge, (Yes, most women do believe Her), she has countered by releasing the Federal Government from the confidentiality agreement they never meant to honour.
Come on, Simon Birmingham the minister for talking points and finance, release the agreement, so that we can see just how nasty Tudge and possibly Cash were to warrant a $500,000 settlement.
Rather think you’ll find many people in the Bass electorate think Bridget should have already resigned from the Liberal Party, and run as an Independent. Both Labor and the Greens are saying to voters who admire Bridget for her stance on the indue card and ICAC, (arguably a deliberate if cynical ploy to raise her profile and appeal to Bass voters) that if they genuinely want to see a change of government, then however much they like Bridget, a vote for her is effectively a vote for Morrison. She only staggered over the line in 2019 on around 560 votes so it won’t take much to unseat her, and believe me the Greens and Labor are doing their best to see it happen.
A fair dinkum ICAC would see most of the coalition front bench in deep trouble.Easy to see why the PM is back peddling at a thousand miles an hour to scuttle any chance of one Another broken promise from the “Gold Standard ” world-renowned liar
Intro to article uses word “green”. LNP and friends do not believe in any green products. Ergo, no green mill.
They said it would use ‘young plantation timber’. I guess that’s the green bit – the wood is still green!!
The term ‘green’ applied to wood usually refers to it being dry than than aged.
A young/immature tree or an ancient oak when cut is green until allowed to season (‘dry’) naturally or kiln dried prior to secondary or further use.
Can I offer a correction to Grundles reference to a pulp mill. This is where young plantation hardwood usually ends up. A pulp mill is fairly mechanised and does not require a huge workforce. CLT – cross-laminated timber – is a highly processed and engineered timber usually using aged sawlogs. It is presently attempting to use younger pulplogs – diverting this lower value (than sawlogs) resource to a higher value use. It requires a sawmill (green mill) and a drymill to produce feedstock which is then made into an engineered timber product. 3 stages of processing – hence the labour force.
They probably needed a small experimental mill or trial phase to work out the problems with young sawlog.
This is conjecture – I know nothing about the project – but I am giving you a within-industry likely scenario given that I know what CLT is.
yes, used the word ‘pulp’ inadvertently once. it’s as you describe
Grundle is not a details bloke – he uses words as a drunk uses a lamp post, as a prop rather than for illumination.
For a ‘professional’ scribbler to claim ‘inadvertent‘ doesn’t cut it when it is the usual, lackadaisical mode of Master Malaprop.
My god you’re a tedious waste of space.
I love the high school grammar fail of “awaiting for approval “
It’s not farmland it’s forestry plantation. Burnie elects the LNP as much as ALP. It hasn’t been solid Labor for decades alas
They used the word “Green” hoping that no one looks at them closely.
Who owns Hermal?
Has anyone done the company directorship/ ownership trace, yet?
Put some faces to the grants and secured loans?
That $30,000,000 could have been a nice little grant for someone to tinker around the edges with and, yet, the company has a PR person who is not sure they need to answer legitimate questions.
Funny that ratty , could be another handout to a mate
it’s a family owned company, of melb family, the Goldschlagers