Making Tasmania’s best even better

BERNARD SALT: Tasmania’s tyranny of distance is both a blessing and a curse.

Bernard says Tasmania needs more international students, more migrants, more visitors and more direct flights. Picture: TRICIA WATKINSON

IN THE mid-1960s a young PhD history student in Melbourne (who had a connection to Tasmania) coined a phrase that I think encapsulated the very essence of Australia.

The student was Geoffrey Blainey and his phrase was “the tyranny of distance” which neatly framed so many national issues from history to business, to culture, to demography. Blainey went on to publish a history of mining on Tasmania’s West Coast (The Peaks of Lyell). The reason why this is important is because I see the same kind of issue defining the future of Tasmania. But for Tasmania it isn’t so much the tyranny of distance, it is the tyranny of proximity to Melbourne — and it is both a blessing and a curse.

The blessing is that Melbourne is a vast city offering access to jobs, capital, culture and global connectivity. The curse is that since the 1840s first the Port Phillip District, then the city of Melbourne, has attracted talent and aspiration away from our modern nation’s original island home.

It’s as if geography and demography conspired in cahoots with the Melbourne behemoth to keep Tasmania in its orbit tithing talent, energy and aspiration in a largely one-way flow across Bass Strait.

I say it’s time to reimagine the Tasmanian relationship with the mainland. It’s not a matter of stopping the flow of youngsters heading for the hipster hot spots of North Fitzroy and Carlton, it’s a matter of changing the conversation, of thinking differently and boldly. This tyranny of proximity speaks to the concept of Tasmanian sovereignty over its culture and its future.

The Tasmania that I see by 2030 leapfrogs Melbourne with greater connectivity to the broader world. More international students. More migrants. More visitors. More direct flights to places beyond Victoria. International flights between Hobart and New Zealand (probably Auckland) and perhaps to Denpasar, Singapore and places like Chengdu and Chongqing. Flights that are perhaps backfilled with delicate high-value agribusiness product like, I don’t know, fungi?

It’s also time for Tasmania to participate nationally in the game that this island has given so much to, namely the AFL. This is part of the Tasmanian sovereignty debate. Tithing modern-day Royce Harts to the clubrooms of the MCG confirms the strictures of a colonial relationship. Dammit, no more. Not a decade more!

Tasmania is a proud state of half a million entrepreneurial, lifestyle-focused, globally aspirant people determined to preserve the best but who want to cultivate something even better for the next generation. That “better” is a free mind, a free spirit, an openness to ideas and influences that are not filtered through what people think on Collins Street.

Hobart needs a modern 1000-plus delegate convention centre. Hobart needs to be thinking about an appropriately scaled and conceived version of Southbank, of Barangaroo, of Queen’s Wharf to act as a spear tip projecting and showcasing the state’s best capabilities. Maybe Tasmania should host a Festival of Lifestyle aimed at attracting mainlanders and others fed up with rat-race living. After all, the more congested, the more expensive, the less safe Melbourne is perceived, the prettier Hobart looks.

I think Tasmania should start a global conversation with like-minded states in similar situations: smaller communities locked into larger federations. Places like Canada’s Newfoundland, Labrador, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia.

And to this list might be added America’s Alaska and the United Kingdom’s Scotland. I even think Reykjavik would have something to offer such a conversation. Surely there are leanings to be gleaned from places that have a commonality of interests with all Tasmanians.

I do think that Tasmanians must fight the slow-down in the state’s projected rate of population growth. A aspirational growth rate of no less than 1 per cent per year is not unsustainable. It renews and it regenerates. It creates opportunity and hope for the next generation. Tassie needs a roadmap that takes the state to a different destination, preserving its idyllic environment and unique culture, but augmenting this with a boldness, even a haughtiness of a people proud and confident of who they are, of where they live and of where they’re headed.

It’s time, Tasmanians, to break free from the tyranny of proximity and to assert your culture, your values, your entrepreneurship, your thinking both globally and directly. Let the time for this kind of thinking be the coming decade.

Read the full Future Tasmania series in today’s Mercury.

For tickets to the Future Tasmania luncheon got to: www.tcci.com.au/Events/The-Mercury-Future-Tasmania