IN Aleksei Popogrebsky’s film How I Ended This Summer, screening at Hobart’s State Cinema at the moment, the lone inhabitants of a remote Russian Arctic island – Sergei and Pavel – fall out. The problem starts smallish, with a fixable and forgivable failing of moral courage on Pavel’s part. Neither man fixes or forgives, however, and they become locked in mortal combat, driven by fear and suspicion to a kind of codependent madness. The ending – involving contaminated trout, and a final Slavic embrace – is bittersweet.

It’s a timely tale for Tasmania. As our own summer ends on our own remote island, are we poised to pick new fights or revive old feuds for the long, dark nights ahead?

There’s certainly cause for testiness. In recent years, Tasmania’s persistent socioeconomic cankers – its high rate of welfare dependence and poor educational retention rates – have been camouflaged by an unprecedented real estate boom, strategic pork-barrelling and the federal economic stimulus package. That feel-good factor flowed through much of David Bartlett’s premiership, which ran from May 2008 to January 2011. Bartlett issued a stream of announcements linked to the innovation strategy he’d commissioned from the University of Tasmania’s Australian Innovation Research Centre, most famously a food-bowl vision that’s back in the news now that the federal government has approved a massive irrigation scheme for the Midlands. More recently, the opening of gambler-philanthropist David Walsh’s Museum of Old and New Art has been a boon for boosterism – in just ten weeks, it’s attracted an estimated 130,000 visitors, promising new opportunities for Tasmania’s tourism industry.

But Tasmanians today are also staring down the multiple barrels of some very harsh realities. Utility bills are skyrocketing – and, with the recent privatisation of water and sewerage services, there are more of them. West Australian premier Colin Barnett’s recent jibe that Tasmania is a mendicant, anti-development state that’s become “Australia’s national park” – marginally more refined than his federal colleague Don Randall’s description of Tasmania as a “leech on the teat” of the national economy – has raised doubts about the security of Tasmania’s slice of the national GST pie. Fremantle could poach Tasmania’s Antarctic industry because of Hobart’s ageing port facilities, and the world-class Menzies Research Institute might lose staff and money in foreshadowed federal budget tightening. Tasmania’s Treasury is rumoured to be polishing very long knives for its own bone-deep cuts in the state’s June budget – over half of which is spent on public servants’ wages – and the early retirement incentive package just announced by the new premier, Lara Giddings, could be the thin end of a deep wedge. Speaking of wedges, a key challenge for Giddings is holding discipline in her own ranks – not so much within Labor’s dwindled parliamentary presence, but in her wider fowl-fish Labor–Green power-sharing government, which has been straining at a number of points, but has not yet fractured.

Last week’s news included the arrest of protesters at the site of the Brighton bypass, just north of Hobart. This federally funded project upgrades the Midlands Highway and involves construction of a dual-carriageway flyover at the Jordan River levee, a site named Kutalanya by Tasmanian Aboriginal groups. They oppose the project on the basis that sediment at the site contains up to three million artefacts dating back 42,000 years, making it the oldest known site of human habitation in the southern hemisphere. Both the precise heritage value of Kutalanya and the exact impact of the flyover are contested, and an alternative bridge location has been rejected as too costly by the state and federal governments. Commentator Sue Neales highlighted the irony of the premier and her heritage minister, Brian Wightman, celebrating the preservation of Tasmania’s convict heritage at the Cascades Female Factory on the same day police were dragging young Aboriginal leaders into paddy wagons at Kutalanya. In a related irony, Greens leader and Aboriginal affairs minister Nick McKim called for a halt to the project, evoking the “long-running shame” of the dispossession of the island’s Aboriginal peoples, while continuing to serve as a minister in the government that’s rolling it out.

That didn’t look good, and neither did the spectacle of Giddings being cornered into a public apology …

Read the rest HERE:
http://inside.org.au/island-on-edge/