Has one act changed our course forever?

SIMON BEVILACQUA: If Kevin Lyons was bribed to bring down the Tasmanian government in 1972 as many now believe, the course of Tasmanian history was changed forever by an act of corruption of the scale and temerity usually reserved for tin pot regimes and despots.

IF Kevin Lyons was bribed to bring down the Tasmanian government in 1972 as many now believe, the course of Tasmanian history was changed forever by an act of corruption of the scale and temerity usually reserved for tin pot regimes and despots.

Lyons’s resignation as deputy premier brought down the Bethune Liberal minority government and delivered power to a Labor administration with a vastly different policy agenda.

The Tasmania we live in today would likely have been very different had Lyons stayed the course with the Liberals.

READ MORE: BRIBERY RUMOURS STAIN OUR HISTORY

Lake Pedder may not have been dammed. Wrest Point casino may not have opened. Without the casino, David Walsh may not have started gambling and there would be no Mona.

There may have been no pokies. Our communities may not have been torn apart along environmental lines over the past five decades.

But it is all speculation.

We cannot know what Tasmania would be today had the policy course charted so indelibly by Labor and Eric Reece in the 1960s and 1970s taken a different tack.

Sir (Walter) Angus Bethune led the first non-Labor government in Tasmania in 35 years when he took power in 1969.

He built new schools, reined in the state’s finances, introduced random breath tests and made wearing seatbelts compulsory.

Walkley Award-winning former Mercury political reporter Wayne Crawford says they were exciting days: “In my experience here in politics, and I go back to 1968, the best, most reformist government there has been was the Bethune government and for that to be crippled by Kevin Lyons was a travesty.”

The 1960s and 1970s were formative times in politics, especially in social and environmental policy. There was a progressive zeal in both major parties, set against a global backdrop of the civil rights movement, women’s liberation and flower power.

The environmental movement was not aligned to one party, as it is today with the Greens, and the major parties both had their green thinkers.

Caring for the environment was yet to be framed in political debate as the polar opposite of development and prosperity.

The Bethune government set up the Tasmania Parks and Wildlife Service, recognising the sense in conservation and paving the way for the wilderness brand that underwrites the economy today.

HUGH Dell, a senior adviser to Reece, was booted out of Labor, along with two colleagues, after he blew the whistle on the Lyons bribery allegations. They were regarded keys in the Left faction.

With the Left weakened, premier Reece reasserted Labor’s jobs-first industrial agenda and dammed Pedder, despite opposition from within his own party and from Liberals.

Dell went on to write, with academic Richard Jones, a charter for a new political party, the United Tasmania Group, that combined environmental concerns with progressive policies in education, welfare and health.

UTG was formed at a meeting of the Lake Pedder Action Committee and is regarded the world’s first green party. 1970s UTG candidate Dr Bob Brown went on to form the Tasmanian Greens.

The arrival of a party focused on the environment was a double-edged sword. It delivered victories for the natural world, and attracted support from disaffected Labor and Liberal voters.

However, without a mandate to govern, the presence of the Greens has helped marginalise the environment as a party-political issue rather than as a matter that should be front and centre of all human endeavour.

Anti-Green sentiment is now a factor in the voting patterns of a cohort of Tasmanians large enough to deliver power to whichever major party is prepared to harvest the negativity.

It is a vicious cycle. Divisions in our community are amplified by major parties competing for the anti-Green vote. Governing parties incite this conflict to maintain power. We have seen it all the way through from premiers such as Reece to Robin Gray and Paul Lennon, with overt displays of aggression and ridicule to green ideas in a bid to firm their voter base.

This has reached the farcical situation where some in power over the past few decades have recognised the need for good environmental policy and pursued it while trying to maintain the public appearance of being anti-green.

The wellbeing and prosperity of Tasmanians will not be fully realised until the major parties address this and being anti-green is seen to be akin to being anti-education or anti-health — plain dumb.

It is unsettling to consider this dysfunction may have had its roots in the bribery of a deputy premier to bring down a legitimately elected Tasmanian government in 1972 and the subsequent splintering of political factions and political power.

It is even more unnerving to consider that Launceston businessman Edmund Rouse was jailed for trying to bribe a state MP in 1989.

Tasmanians deserve to know the truth about the Lyons bribery allegations.

Two cases of political bribery in one generation would cast an enormous shadow over the Tasmanian polity.