The shadow environment minister didn’t make his name by keeping mum on matters of national importance. 

Yet having swapped his microphone for a seat Kevin Rudd’s shadow ministry, Peter Garrett appears to have lost his voice on a range of matters that would have caught his eye as the former, highly-principled lead singer of a band noted for its social conscience.

In search of policy detail, Crikey has compiled a series of questions for Peter Garrett on Gunns’ controversial pulp mill. They have been sent to Mr Garrett’s office and we hope to run the answers tomorrow.

  1. Would you, as Environment Minister, support the native forest-based pulp mill that Gunns is proposing or would you require it to be plantation-based at inception?
  2. According to Gunns’, the pulp mill will be 80% based on native forests when it opens. That violates the forest policy of ACF, the organisation of which you were President. It will necessitate the logging of high conservation-value forests throughout northern and south-eastern Tasmania. Why haven’t you opposed this aspect of the pulp mill?
  3. The consumption of such large quantities of native forest by the pulp mill (over three million tonnes per annum) will make it one of the biggest contributors to climate change in Australia. How does that fit into Federal Labor’s climate change policy?
  4. As Environment Minister, would you repeal the changes to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (which Labor supported in December 2006) that preclude a Federal Environment Minister from considering the feedstock for a pulp mill in the assessment process?
  5. In your view, are the permit conditions as applied to the project by the Tasmanian parliament sufficient to protect local businesses – tourism, fishing, wineries, and otherwise – from any harmful environmental effects of the mill’s operation?
  6. Do you believe a pulp mill using chlorine-based technology can be world class, or would you require it to be totally chlorine-free?
  7. When Senator Bob Brown’s legal action in the Federal Court exposed the fact that logging in Tasmania was threatening endangered species and was therefore illegal, the Tasmanian and Australian Governments simply changed the law to make the logging legal again. Will a Rudd Labor government overturn those laws? If not, why?
  8. You said the Tasmanian government “did a very disappointing job in their first round of assessments” of the mill? Would you instigate a thorough, independent investigation into the actions of the Tasmanian government, and in particular premier Paul Lennon, in the assessment of the pulp mill?

Questions compiled with the assistance of Senator Lyn Allison, Senator Christine Milne, and the Wilderness Society.