Poll says no more taxpayer money for Gunns pulp mill

From the Tasmanian Times here

Gunns’ planned pulp mill on the nose for voters

Rod Hutchins, TAP Into A Better Tasmania.

“Internal polling of the northern Tasmanian 63 telephone district shows a clear majority of the electorate is less likely to vote for a political party that intends to support Gunns proposed pulp mill with taxpayer funds,” said TAP Into A Better Tasmania spokesman, Rod Hutchins.

The poll was carried out in late July 2010 by TAP Into a Better Tasmania. Voters were asked, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for a party intending to use taxpayers’ money to support Gunns’ proposed pulp mill?” Of the 258 Tasmanian voters surveyed, 55% said they are “less likely”, 26% said they were “more likely” and 19% were unsure.

If the undecided are either excluded or distributed in the usual manner for polls, some 68% of voters are less likely to vote for a party that intends using taxpayer funds to support Gunns’ proposal.

Rod Hutchins said, “The conspiracy of silence on the pulp mill from the major parties belies the continuing strong resistance to the proposal. This is the latest in a long series of polls that shows Tasmanians overwhelmingly don’t want it and don’t want governments to support it.”

“A corrupted government pulp mill assessment has delivered a toxic lemon and the proposal must be axed now or resubmitted to the planning system for a complete and independent assessment at Gunns’ expense. The assessment by the RPDC was foreshortened to supposedly avoid severe economic losses, and we now know that the project information was ‘critically deficient’, said Mr Hutchins.

“The pulp mill proposal continues to threaten thousands of existing jobs in tourism, fishing, wineries and organic food production. Further investments and jobs in these clean industries of the future remain frozen while the pulp mill remains on the books,” he concluded.