How The Greens Bungled The Tasmanian Forest Agreement

                   If it really was  a 'war' then why was only one side compensated?
It took 3 years but the final version of the Tasmanian Forest Agreement bill was designed to fail. Lets have a look at the creation of the bill? The brainchild of David Bartlett and Nick McKim in their first weeks in coalition government, it was spun as an approach by the industry to the conservation movement to achieve 'peace in the forests'. No evidence of this approach was ever produced. A consistent theme of the bill is the public commentary and the reality have never been the same.

Conservationists had been talking to Gunns but the rest of the Tasmanian logging industry had financially strangled itself by it's failure to reform. It's possible that a 'conservation outcome' often accepted to be half a million hectares was the price Labor paid the Greens to keep them in power. (in a 10-10-5 parliament.) It was more complex than that because the Liberals had managed to exert influence from opposition by refusing to share power with the Greens. You could say the Liberals defined the Greens. By doing so the Libs tied the Greens future to Labor. As a result, a Labor-Green coalition was the only possible outcome. This new coalition appeared bizarre to the electorate because during the election Labor had accused the Greens of selling heroin. This was just shrugged-off as over-zealous electioneering.
From day one the Labor-Green coalition had the majority needed to amend the native timber quota and put any amount of forests they liked into reserves. But why didn't they? Maybe Bartlett was scared of the unions, maybe he thought the upper house would reject it. This is the point where Nick McKim went wrong. Rather than taking an honest approach by declaring his intentions and establishing how much forest could reasonably be reserved, the Greens became a party to a classic Labor hatchet job on itself. (remember grocery watch, BER, cash for clunkers etc?) The secret negotiations became a revolving door of vested and conflicted interests, with Federal Ministers Burke and Crean acting as patrons. People lined up to be paid-out, compensated and financially assisted with exit packages.  For awhile everything Gunns did was dependent on a favourable outcome to them of this farce. Eventually the Greens supported a golden handshake for Gunns and their whole debt to Forestry Tasmania paid by the taxpayer. Nick McKim's reputation slowly disappeared along with hundreds of millions of our tax dollars. By the time Simon Crean's mates Kelty and West were called-in, this was no longer a rational process. It could have gone on for another three years but somebody had to call time because they were all coming up for election again. The final 'agreement' sailed thru the lower house but stalled in the upper house. Eventually Liberal donor Tony Mulder dissected the bill with a mattock and wrote-in enough amendments to cripple the Labor-Greens. By now the Labor-Greens didn't have the luxury of more time and they were forced to pass the bill.
Consider this? If this was really a 'war' then why was only one side compensated with 'exit packages'?  The government claim that environment charities were representing the 'community' but didn't the community in the form of taxpayers provide the financial compensation to the industry? In other words the community were supposed to barter with the loggers to save the forests the community already owned. Then the community had to pay the loggers not to destroy those forests. Unbelievably, the Greens and enviro charities thought this was a reasonable proposition and refuted all criticism over a 3 year period. Now they are divided on the issue.