The Irony Party of Australia, Oblique PR, and parent company The Honxqp Corporation are delighted to congratulate John Gay on winning the December 2004 Corporate Slut O' The Month award.
Mr Gay receives this accolade for his perseverance in furthering a wonderful dream - the dream of making Tasmania a beautiful garden State, free of both geriatric flora and irritating native fauna such as the Pesky Wombat. In Gay's vision, rapidly being realised in Tasmania, fresh young saplings and bright-barked adolescent trunks improve the landscape, replacing the gnarled old trunks of ancient trees neglected by human hand for centuries.
GRAHAM DAVIS: How do you feel about protected species dying for your business?
JOHN GAY: Well, there's too many of them and we need to keep them at a reasonable level.
- Gunns CEO John Gay in interview for a Channel Nine Sunday report (transcript here )
Hugel River
the tarkine
Irony Party Corporate Slut o' the Month
the Irony Party congratulates December 2004 Slut
John Gay
managing director , Gunns Tasmania
Gunns Tasmania is Australia's largest native-forest logging company, and the largest hardwood-chip company in the world, with an annual turnover of more than $600 million and 1200 employees.
Most of Gunns profits are derived from exporting woodchips. Mitsubishi, Nippon and Oji are among Gunns customers in North Asia, where woodchips are sold for paper-production. There are four export woodchip mills in Tasmania, all owned by Gunns. Ninety per cent of old-growth logs extracted from forests on public land in Tasmania are exported as woodchip.
Woodchipping is not Gunns only line of business - sawmill and veneer logs bring substantial revenue to the company. Gunns owns 60% of Tasmania's eucalypt saw-milling industry.
Picturesque regions such as the South-West wilderness (Weld, Picton, Huon, Florentine, Upper Derwent); the Styx Valley of the Giants; the Great Western Tiers; the Tarkine; the North-East Highlands; and the Ben Lomond National Park are a recent focus of tireless and intrepid Gunns foresters and their chainsaws as the search continues for suitable trees for transport to mills at Smithton, Austins Ferry, and Western Junction.
Expert lawyers ensure that difficult legal questions and are prevented from holding back Gunns good works, despite the occasional infraction. In December 2001 the company was fined $50,000 for breaches of the Forest Practices Code, after there were complaints of the devastation of a stream during the harmless widening of a road on the Tasman Peninsula. In August the following year the company was charged with illegally logging an area in Middleton, south of Hobart, straddling the Kingborough and Huon municipalities. Kingborough wanted the company punished, but fortunately the Huon Council gave retrospective approval for the logging.
a tributary of Savage River in the Tarkine
Gunns will go anywhere and remove even the most difficult, intransigent, and deep-rooted trees. In the Styx Valley and North-East Highlands impressive, straight eucalypts - the world's tallest flowering plant - grace steep slopes that are impossible to log conventionally. But Gunns is undeterred, employing 'cable logging' methods that allow the sides of mountains to be cleared.
So effective has the logging of eucalypts been in Tasmania that an estimated 10% of the original forests remain today. These last stands of Eucalyptus regnans in the Styx and Florentine valleys are undergoing rapid conversion to plantation.
Unfortunately the transportation of ancient trees across Tasmania for the processing of logs is a fraught and difficult business. Despite all the best efforts of Gunns' cautious and conscientious workers, 70% of all logs that arrive at the sawmills end as export woodchip.
an improved site already renovated by Gunns
Gunns - Plantation
Many of the difficulties involved in logging ancient Tasmanian forests are eradicated for the whole future when the old forest is successfully replaced with plantation trees, mostly eucalypt. Gunns, Tasmania’s largest private property owner in terms of area, has over 130,000 hectares in the State . A 90,000 hectare block in Tasmania’s north-west has been cleared and reseeded for Eucalyptus plantation. Woodchips from the extensive artificial forest pile up on Burnie's wharf for export after being processed at the Hampshire mill.
Gunns employs efficacious, hi tech methodologies such as clearfelling and burning to maximize benefits for community, worker, and stockholder. Effective poisons are used to redirect local wildlife (wallabies, possums) away from seedlings in new plantations. Carrots poisoned with 1080 bait also assist in reducing numbers of bettongs, quolls, and owls.
New projects planned include the renovation of Recherche Peninsula south of Hobart, beginning with the construction of a new logging road across the Southport Lagoon Conservation Area. The peninsula is currently covered in swathes of unproductive shrubbery, some of which is centuries old. Gunns will make a lucrative plantation of the straggly forest, adding value for all Tasmanians.
Gunns most significant investors are The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (8.6%);. Perpetual (11.19%); Permanent Trustee (8%); AMP (7.21%), and Concord Capital (7.54%). The ANZ Bank has a substantial relationship with Gunns, having lent the company in excess of $250 million for the purchase of three woodchip mills from North Forest products in 2001.
In 2003, at least, one notable individual investors in Gunns Tasmania was Jerry Harvey, who held 609,748 shares in the company in August 2003 (worth $8.6 million then).
By a happy coincidence, Gunns Tasmania's Managing director John Gay is also the company's second most significant individual shareholder. At board meetings he humbly supports modest, substantial increases in his own salary, and the awarding of powerfully effective incentives such as substantial share and options packages.
The incentives provided for Gay to facilitate further growth and expansion at Gunns are, however, both generous and gratuitous. Personal recompense means little to this stalwart community pillar. John Gay is driven not, or not only, by a desire for financial gain, for feathering his own nest, but by his concern for the future of his State and country, for Tasmania's children, and generations as yet unborn.
Critics claim John Gay's purposeful reimagining of the Tasmanian landscape, realised with the chainsaws and earthmovers and cranes of Gunns Tasmania, could undermine the natural beauty of the State. But these short-sighted naysayers are blind to Gay's lucid, utopian dream of Tasmania as a future idyll, a gleaming, tamed, lucrative garden paradise where today there is only a tangle of random shrubbery.
Like all Australian corporate chief executives and managing directors, Gunns managing director John Gay has an extraordinary mind, his superb intellect forever probing the minutiae of corporate governance, and always maintaining a sharp focus on the implementation of his vision for the future.
Gay's character was shaped in the forge of St Virgil's College, Hobart. Like many of the world's greatest thinkers, Gay was, by his own humble admission "always more sport-orientated than academic" (from an interview in The Examiner during his school years. And as is invariably the case with the more brilliant and gifted among us he enjoyed and responded to the discipline and routine of the traditional boy's school:
"It was a typical regimented boarding-school life, and I fitted into the regimented life pretty well. Some people find it easy, some don't. I liked it."
After school, Gay worked at his father's sawmill, and began to develop his passionate love for turning proud and ancient trees into woodchip and toilet paper. He struck out with his own sawmilling operation before he was 21, and was hired by Gunns a few years later, becoming a protege of wily executive John Gunns.
While some would consider Gunns and Gay financially successful, with a 42 per cent increase in annual profits in 2004 to $105 million, in fact, as John Gay understands, the company is struggling to become viable in a fiercely competitive, cut throat, dog-eat-dog, global marketplace. It's not easy to maintain a toehold in a tenuous industry where turnover and profit are often no more than 20% to 50% above those of the previous year. Managing director John Gay strives day by day to keep the company solvent for the sake of workers and shareholders alike, and for all Tasmanians, each and every one reliant upon his leadership and the success of the State's flagship company.
It was Gay's genius to realise that the squabbling of as many as five or six large industry players in the Tasmanian resource sector could prove detrimental for all concerned. He recognised that only through a process of industry consolidation could a viable timber sector continue to give Tasmanian citizens the economic viability and export strength they prize above all else.
And so a series of substantial acquisitions for Gunns began in mid-1999 when Tasmania Board Mills was bought from Boral for $23.3 million. Boral relinquished all of its chipping and forests interests in Tasmania to Gunns in August 2000 for an additional $72 million. Then North Forest Products was bought out the following year at a price of $335 million.
Gunns Tasmania has gone from strength to strength with John Gay at the helm. But this inspiring farmer-executive has barely begun. He knows that the corporation must continue to grow its plantations by thousands of hectares a year until 2012 before it suddenly attains economic sustainability.
"Well Gunn's itself has about 110 to 120,000 hectares under plantations. We believe that we have to have 150,000 hectares to have a sustainable business long term which means that we will not be at that peak till probably the year 2010 to 2012."
Eliminating all of Gunns Tasmania's competition in forestry in the State for the good of Tasmania's economy and its people has brought significant benefits and greater happiness to all, as Gay had realised it would. But increased security for Tasmanian citizens as a result of the consolidation of the industry has created a new set of difficulties for Gunns, and for the man in charge of this essential operation.
When there were many logging operations being conducted in Tasmania, the concerns of the loggers were well understood, and they were well represented as lobby groups . But now, with a single operation dominating the State's forestry, it falls to John Gay, as head spokesman for the company, to do the networking, lobbying, and schmoozing of an entire industry.
Gay meets this potential catastrophe with alacrity. Despite a cleverly cultivated boorish and vapid facade that conceals a lack of hidden charm, the Gunns chief has over decades established close links with industry partners, and with the firmly entrenched Labor State Government. Critics accuse Gay of cronyism; of ignoring, when it suits him, the tenets of the Regional Forest Agreement that determines woodland management in the State; of strong-arm tactics that flout the law, and of employing the same legal channels, when it is in his interest, to pursue the greater good of the company. In fact, though, the company that dominates the industry, exporting 95% of woodchip produced in Tasmania and controlling 75% of sawmilling operations, enjoys such complete trust from all parts of the Tasmanian community that it is largely self-regulating, rigorously investigating its own methods and practices for ethical or material breaches.
TICKY FULLERTON: So you're not logging old growth forests?
JOHN GAY: We don't log deliberately old growth forests. We have an area given to us as an industry by the RFA, the Regional Forest Agreement that sets out an area for Tasmania to have a sawmilling industry, a veneer industry and that is what we log today.
Tasmanian Senator Bob Brown of the sinister Australian Greens (dealt with elsewhere on this site) is one of the most ardent of John Gay's insidious detractors. Hellbent on achieving political power, the Greens fabricate and propagandise endlessly on emotive issues through which they believe they can successfully manipulate the public. The trees of Tasmania, ludicrously, gnarled bits of wood, have become one such issue.The Greens themselves are cynical power-hungry un-Australian, elitist, theoretical, neo-fascist autocrats, with little respect for democracy, as detailed by Senator Brandis in Parliament last year, but they have by their machinations convinced a small, eccentric proportion of Tasmanians and Australians that the disorganised muddle of present-day forests should be retained.
TICKY FULLERTON: What frustrates you about what the Green's say about this?
JOHN GAY: Well the Greens are using it for political purposes and they have no other way of getting a political agenda up other than using forestry in Tasmania so they say we're logging native forest and old growth which long term is devastating the forest industries in Tasmania. Which is not true.
Frustrated by the difficult Greens (and by bandwagoneers who have also seen the potential political capital to be gained from attacking a prominent institution of the Tasmanian community, John Gay has recently begun to offer a civilised resistance through the courts.
Activists such as the Tasmanian and Australian Greens, the Wilderness Society, and others have made public relations an increasingly difficult task for John Gay and associates.
Prior to the 2004 Federal election, in particular these groups were determined to gain credibility and purchase in the political system by making the improvement of Tasmania's forests an issue of significance. When the Wilderness Society arranged for 100 shareholders in Gunns to call an extraordinary general meeting, Gay was reluctantly forced to move to prevent the meeting taking place, aware that militant activists would do their best to make it a media circus, to the detriment of all decent people everywhere.
So-called 'environmental' groups have also taken their propaganda to those who provide the necessary fiinance for the continued growth of Gunns. In 2003 the ANZ Bank, which had provided hundreds of millions of dollars to Gunns for the acquisition of competitors, sent a delegation to Tasmania to investigate invented tales of environmental disaster, negligence, and destruction surrounding Gunns activities.
Gunns Australia is now taking legal action against its detractors, suing 20 individual activitists for a total of $6.3 million. The company claims its commercial viability is threatened by the actions of its critics, and that such effective criticism is, in fact, illegal. Gunns is also suing over damage to property, and villification of the company both during protest actions organised by feral demonstrators at the site of logging operations, and in the international media, including, significantly, in Japan, where millions of tonnes of profitable woodchip are delivered annually from Tasmania.
The intractability of some of those Gunns hopes to silence through legal action is evidenced in their defiance of the charges.
"They can take every penny. They can take every peaceful night's sleep. They can take ever home comfort. They will never stop me campaigning against their vile destruction of Tasmania's forests and its wildlife. Not ever." - Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown, Gunns, Gags, and the Greens, 730 Report 16/12/04
But as chief executive John Gay said, in a statement about the legal action against unofficial representatives of minor parties and tiny demographies "Gunns Limited and the majority of Tasmanians are sick and tired of the misleading information being peddled about our industry and our State."
John Gay is by turns neither commanding and imperious nor compassionate, insightful, or concerned. In dealing with employees, politicians, industry or the public, he is fair but cruel, preferring not to bully people unless there is absolutely no other means of denigration and humiliation to hand.
"I don't suffer fools ...If things are not done properly, I like to be informed. When I show toughness is when that doesn't happen."
Gay's achievements are usually measured in terms of dollars, hectares, or tonnes. But the leader's true worth is as a powerful advocate of a way of life, and of a vision for a progressive, productive, viable Tasmanian future. His philosophy and will combine powerfully to give direction to the efforts of the Tasmanian people to make something of their island State.
In an era in which an ideological tyranny arbitrarily proscribes the absolute virtue of complexity in ecological systems, Gay is a courageous voice raised in ardent opposition. He is an advocate of a simpler ecological model, of biohomogeneity, of an environment a man can get his head around and confidently stamp all over.
To this end, though starting small, John Gay has played a fundamental part in transforming countless* hectares of Tasmanian old-growth forest into leafy plantations, where the trees are sensibly equidistant, and the forest floor is unencumbered with troublesome undergrowth or assorted pointless animals. His sweeping schemes for the generation of a simpler, more manageable Tasmanian ecology involve not only the levelling of forests, but the culling of both individual animals and entire species, for the good of humanity and the economy.
GRAHAM DAVIS: How do you feel about protected species dying for your business?
JOHN GAY: Well, there's too many of them and we need to keep them at a reasonable level.
GRAHAM DAVIS: You're saying there's too many wombats and ring-tailed possums?
JOHN GAY: Yes, most certainly.
The 2002 profile of Gay in The Examiner suggests Gay is taciturn, and recalcitrant on the subject of his own life, but details his passions as "Gunns, trees, and an economically viable Tasmania." Happily these noble passions are interlinked, and shared wholeheartedly and unreservedly by the Tasmanian population. With Gay as an industry leader, a visionary, and an inspiration to Tasmania's young, there is every hope for the future of the State. Under the capable guidance of Managing Director John Gay, and his excellent friends in industry and Government, Tasmania of the next century will remain a blissful haven in a difficult, competitive world, but a haven vastly and permanently improved, with a hundred million shoulder-high saplings waving gently in the breeze.
The tarkine, 2004, before rezoning begins
. *rendered almost countless by freedom of information limitations and commercial in confidence provisions
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Contents
oldgrowth
Accolades and laudatory articles concerning John Gay and his fabulous company:
ABC TV Feb 2004
Gunns cosies up to Tassie National Trust
Crikey.com Oct 2004
Rainforest Action Network
ABC Dec 16 2004
