Gunns: New Year, same old bloody pulp mill.

Once featured weekly on front pages across Australia, Gunns’ Tamar Valley Pulp Mill in Tasmania has almost disappeared from view. The company is still going ahead with the project, still solidly backed by both Labor and Liberal in the Tasmanian Parliament and more or less similarly supported, albeit with frilly caveats, from Canberra.

No longer the media-preferred fast evolving story with apparently clear lines dividing right from wrong, local and national activist groups are reassessing their campaigns to have the issue dealt with once and for all.

Public interest lobby group GetUp has declared a small victory. Working with international sister organization Avaaz.org, it has secured commitments from Swedish bank Nordea not to finance the project in its current form. The bank has also reaffirmed its adherence to international environmental standards that have seen many financial institutions globally promise not to invest in the $2.2 billion project as currently proposed.

Domestically GetUp has also noted a more direct victory with Gunns apparently committing to use only 100 per cent plantation-sourced timber when/if the mill gets up. But the group acknowledges that Gunns still has a 20-year contract with Forestry Tasmania for native forest wood supply, “so we’re not done yet”. To mark the start of 2010, GetUp launched a user survey hoping to better define and sharpen its campaign against the mill.

Meanwhile in Tasmania long time campaigners, Tasmanians Against the Pulp Mill (TAP), have launched their 2010 campaign by producing an online newspaper and delivering hard copy to more than 38,000 households in the Tamar region, including Launceston.

Spokesman Bob McMahon hopes the newspaper will reinforce and invigorate Tasmanian resistance to the project.

“TAP has provided hard information on the damaging socio-economic impacts of the proposed mill on the Tamar region as well as on the whole island of Tasmania,” he said. “These impacts have been deliberately not assessed in the whole corrupted pulp mill approval process.”

McMahon said the Tamar region had paid a ‘huge’ social and economic price as the Gunns proposal threatened the viability of the region and led to a collapse in the property market in the lower Tamar Valley.

“Because of the threat of the proposed mill there has been a moratorium on investment. The result is that for more than five years the region has not been able to progress as it should. The health impacts of [all this] accumulated stress is incalculable,” he said. “What Labor, the Liberals and Gunns have put the people through is unforgivable.”

Have your say at https://www.getup.org.au/campaign/NoPulpMill or look at TAP’s newspaper online at http://tapvision.info