Actor abused over mill stand
ACTOR Rebecca Gibney has revealed that her opposition to the Gunns pulp mill has led to abuse.
Gibney, a Tamar Valley resident for six years, told this week's Woman's Day
about being verbally abused when with her young son but said the
support she had received from locals far outweighed the intimidation. The article was written before this week's mill decision. "We
had our car vandalised and I was verbally abused while I was driving
with Zac . . . I had to think, did I want to expose Zac to that," she
told the magazine, which has a readership of more than two million a
week. "Basically I was told we weren't welcome here and to go
back to the mainland. But I was lucky, because on the back of that,
Richard Flanagan rang me up and said: 'Please, we need people like you
to stay.' " 
Gibney was told off in the local paper by Liberal
party figure and Launceston bottle-shop owner Sam McQuestin. Gibney has
to spend more time in Sydney this year to shoot the hit drama Packed to the Rafters. But she said Tasmania was home, especially for Zac, 4, who was born in the state. She said some people told her not to let "a very small percentage of people silence you" Comments:
http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2009/01/07/ 48411_todays-news.html Out of Control
The tragedy of Tasmania’s forests
Richard Flanagan may 2007 Huge money is being made out of destroying native forests, but to
maintain what to many is an obscene practice there has evolved a
culture of secrecy, shared interest and intimidation that seems to
firmly bind the powerful in Tasmania. When the actress Rebecca Gibney,
who moved to Tasmania two years ago to raise her family, said in a
television interview that she would leave the state if Gunns' proposed
pulp mill was built, the former Liberal Party candidate and bottle-shop
owner Sam McQuestin made headlines by publicly attacking her as "serial
complainer" whose family made no contribution to the Tasmanian economy
and who had no "right to tell the rest of us how to live our lives".
McQuestin's family is well known for its contribution: his father,
David, is a Gunns director. The attack on Rebecca Gibney was but a
public example of something far more widespread and insidious. I
witnessed a senior ALP politician make it clear that yet another
Tasmanian was no longer welcome in the clearfelling state when the
local corporate-communications consultant Gerard Castles wrote an
article in a newspaper questioning the government's policy on
old-growth logging. "The fucking little cunt is finished," the
politician said in front of me and my 12-year-old daughter. "He will
never work here again." To question, to comment adversely, is to
invite the possibility of ostracism and unemployment, and the state is
full of those who pay a high price for their opinion on the forests,
the blackballed multiplying with the blackened stumps. It is
commonplace to meet people who are too frightened to speak publicly of
their concerns about forestry practices, because of the adverse
consequences they perceive this might have for their careers and
businesses. Due to the forest battle, a subtle (and sometimes
not-so-subtle) fear has entered Tasmanian public life; it stifles
dissent, avoids truth. http://www.themonthly.com.au/monthly-essays-richard-flanagan-out-
control-tragedy-tasmania-s-forests-512
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