1. Bullying Gunns enters Tasmanian election fray
By Stephen Mayne, Gunns shareholder
John Gay, the executive chairman of world champion tree lopping outfit Gunns Ltd, has teamed up with boofhead Tasmanian Premier Paul Lennon to provide a key diversion from the integrity questions that are swamping him, which even got a good run on The 7.30 Report last night.
Gay yesterday threatened to take his $1.4 billion Tamar Valley pulp mill offshore if enough Tasmanians vote Green to force a minority government. Former television journalist and Tamara Valley councillor Les Rochester could yet join our list of former hacks in Parliament as he is leading the community action against the pulp mill and is running as an independent in the seat of Bass.
Gay's threats to take his project to Malaysia or China is a classic scare tactic for a community that is still scarred by past minority governments with the Greens and therefore tends to strongly endorse majority Liberal or Labor governments. Fear and uncertainty is the strongest card that Lennon has to play, so his mate has got out of the gates early.
John Gay is a bully of the first order and aggressive conflict is the only way he knows to do business. The contrast with the way Dick Pratt got his pulp mill up in Tumut, NSW, with Green groups working as consultants is stark indeed.
I've got $3,000 invested in Gunns and was a failed board candidate at last year's AGM who ran on the platform that John Gay should not be the only prominent executive chairman of an Australian listed company who refuses to subject himself to election every three years.
Unfortunately for Gay, his mate Paul Lennon can't avoid elections so the two of them have cooked up this major diversion although it might backfire because of the controversy about Gunns doing some renovations on the Premier's historic home.
The Tasmanian election will be the first state poll since Jeff Kennett's 1999 defeat when the integrity and character of the Premier will be an important issue.
Benefits for relatives, special deals with the Packers and controversial home renovations are just three things that Lennon and Kennett, both large and intolerant men, have in common.
Gunns shares fell 12c yesterday but recovered 5c to $2.83 this morning, still a long way shy of its 12-month high of $4.67. Indeed, some shareholders think the stock will recover if the project is abandoned because the risks are large when you have a company capitalised at just $950 million building a complex $1.4 billion pulp mill.
Gay knows how to slaughter trees and export woodchips, but building a huge pulp mill is in another league and some in the market think this simple but aggressive man doesn't have the ability to deliver.
6. Tollroad fiascos and Bob Carr's unravelling legacy
By Stephen Mayne
Wasn't that an unfortunate juxtaposition, to have Foreign Correspondent plugging tonight's Bob Carr interview with Gore Vidal from Hollywood immediately after Four Corners have just given his legacy another belting with last night's program on tollroads deals that have gone wrong.
Carr is fast going the way of Bob Hawke in soiling his reputation by behaving badly in the first year out of office. Hawke never recovered from taking $10,000 to announce his retirement from Parliament on A Current Affair, taking more Packer cash as a reporter for 60 Minutes, drunkenly declaring Alexander Downer would be the next Prime Minister and trying to do grubby TAB deals in Vanuatu. Dumping Hazel and that bath robe appearance with Blanche didn't help either.
In Carr's case, people are angry with the indecent haste in which he landed that $500,000-a-year consultancy with Macquarie Bank – the biggest beneficiary of private-public partnerships that have screwed NSW taxpayers and motorists whilst hiding the true state of the budget.
On top of that, Carr joked around at the Cross City Tunnel inquiry about being a journalist by profession and is now taking some coin off Aunty to interview Gore Vidal, whose ego is on a par with Bob's.
The Cross City Tunnel debacle has been a huge blow to Carr and the public private partnership industry, despite the ridiculous spin being put out by the likes of Nick Greiner and Mark Birrell last night.
Greiner was the father of these deals with the original contract he and Bruce Baird did in the early 1990s with Macquarie Bank's Hills Motorway Group to build the M2.
The PM's older brother Stan Howard was Hills chairman and as former NSW Auditor-General Tony Harris pointed out, this was a deal in which "the investors in the M2 got 100% of their money back in the first year and 100% of their money back in the second year and a car still hadn't driven on the road".
Transurban ended up buying the $1 Hills units for more than $11 in a $2 billion takeover that showed how stupid the Greiner Government was, yet there was Greiner defending the Cross City Tunnel last night as chairman of German construction company Bilfinger Berger.
And what about this rubbish on Four Corners from Kennett's former Major Projects minister Mark Birrell:
Early '90s, Victoria, it was a disaster. There was literally no debt option – you had to get debt down. You can't imagine Melbourne without CityLink because CityLink has solved so many of its urban issues. But CityLink could not be afforded by government – it had to be brought down on the basis of private investment. There was no more debt option, there was no more tax option, so you used the third option.Err, the contract was let in 1996 Mark, at which point the Victorian budget was already comfortably in surplus and the government was predicting it would fetch $20 billion from energy privatisation.
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