If a PM announceable falls in a forest, does anyone care?

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!