tasmedia.org

JULIE MACKEN, Australian Financial Review:
A controversial election tactic involving a secretive group has surfaced in the Tasmanian election …

"I guess I should have been shocked, but I wasn’t because that’s how business is done in Tasmania.”

Bob Cheek, former leader of the Liberal Party in Tasmania, is referring to the night he was summoned to the Launceston office of John Gay, chief executive of Gunns timber company.
In his book Confessions of a Ferret Salesman, Cheek says that just weeks before the last state election in 2002, Gay offered him a donation to the Liberal Party.
“$10,000 no strings attached and another $20,000 if I could guarantee we [the Liberal Party] would continue with our policy of supporting logging in old-growth forests and clearfelling,” Cheek says.
Cheek took the $10,000 donation on behalf of the party.
But he says he declined the $20,000 offered by Gay because he personally wanted to change the policy, even though he knew his Liberal colleagues would not — “they were all too subservient to Gunns, especially Rene Hidding” — now leader of the Tasmanian Liberal Party.
“I didn’t see [the $20,000 offer] as a bribe because I was only leader of the opposition, and that’s how things are done in Tasmania,” Cheek tells The Australian Financial Review.
With Tasmanians going to the polls on March 18, Gay is unwilling to comment on Cheek’s claim. But a spokeswoman for Gay says: “That is not how Mr Gay remembers the night.”
Gunns owns 185,000 hectares of freehold land in Tasmania and manages more than 110,000 hectares of plantations. The company employs about 1700 people and has a turnover of about $700 million.

Tasmanians for a Better Future has funded the two commercials, and print and radio ads to follow.
The only authorisation at the end of the ads is by Tony Harrison, head of Hobart advertising agency Corporate Communications.
Harrison told the AFR he was employed by “a group of concerned Tasmanians. The group began with about 20 people and it’s grown to about 50 or 60.”
He refused to name anyone involved in the group or what kind of budget the group had to run its political campaign. But he confirmed the group was not incorporated, was not a political party and was not a business or a charity.

Harrison’s public relations company works for Tasmania’s best known organisations including, Powerco, Gunns, TT-Line, TasPorts and Hobart Airports and he has previously worked for two Tasmanian premiers, Doug Lowe and Robin Gray.
The commercial features property owned by timber giant Gunns. The AFR asked Gunns if the company, or any of its directors, had been involved in the ad campaign and if, apart from allowing Harrison to use one of its properties, it also contributed funds to the campaign.

The issue is controversial in Tasmania because of the way it echoes the 1989 royal commission’s investigation of a group called Concerned Citizens for Tasmania.
The commission found this “fictitious” group was conceived by then-premier Robin Gray, who is now on the board of Gunns. “The deception which attended the placement of the advertisement and petition was deliberate … “ the
commission found. It “was deliberately designed to mislead the community into believing that a group of well meaning and concerned people had come together spontaneously to express their concern, and to invite others to join them in voicing their protest about the Labor/Green Accord”.