Pulp mill that won over a community
By SUE NEALES
07nov05
PAT and Graeme Whatman live on a cattle farm overlooking the green grassy flats of the Gadara Valley near Tumut, NSW, and the soaring Snowy Mountains beyond.
Their small property -- where Graeme's family has lived for more than a century -- is, not surprisingly, called Pleasant View.
Except that it now overlooks the bustling timberyard, woodchip heaps, shiny metal walls, steaming boilers and belching smoke stack of the state-of-the-art $400 million pulp and paper mill opened by Visy four years ago.
"We joke that we should probably call our farm Visy View now," said Mrs Whatman, who has been one of the Tumut mill's most vocal neighbours.
"I was against the mill coming here in the first place and am still not convinced that an industrial site like a mill should be put in the middle of a farming valley.
"But, having said that, I can't fault anyone from Visy I have had dealings with during the nine years since we first learned a mill was coming here."
It's a common refrain around the farms of the Gadara valley and the streets and shops of the bustling twin towns of Tumut and Adelong, each about 8km distant from the mill.
The mill may have brought long-term jobs, wealth and prosperity to the depressed rural region.
But there remain continuing concerns about distasteful sulphur smell emissions from the mill and the dangerous state of the local roads overloaded with more than 200 timber, woodchip, chemical and paper trucks servicing the giant Visy mill each day.
Near misses and collisions, especially on the fast-deteriorating local roads linking Tumut and Adelong to the major Hume Highway, are frequent occurrences.
One driver recently died when his truck careered through the old Adelong pub.
Interestingly, traffic and road deterioration problems were not really anticipated as likely to be the major cause of consternation by locals, when Visy first floated its idea of putting a mill in the midst of the Tumut timber and farming region.
"Now, looking back, we as a group of neighbours were probably a bit silly. We became fixated on a couple of issues, and that probably meant we may have missed some other simple things that have ended up causing us even more grief," admits Pat Whatman.
"We were very concerned in the early days about the height of the smoke stack, yet really the stack is such a tiny part of the greater mill.
"We probably should have been asking more questions then about the entire size of the mill, the smells, the noise and the shocking condition of the roads which just can't cope with that amount of heavy traffic."
The first hint that locals in Tumut's Gadara Valley had that a giant pulp mill might be coming next to their homes and farms was not a good start.
Landowners started finding vehicles and people on their land without permission. It turned out to be an independent company that Visy had hired to seek out suitable farms to buy up.
Farmer and schoolteacher James Hayes, whose family has farmed in the hills above the mill since the 1840s, describes Visy's early dealings with the community as arrogant and shabby.
"Those head-kickers hired by Visy were very threatening. They said that if we didn't want to sell they could requisition our farms by law," said Mr Hayes, who is also a local councillor and now sits on the Visy mill Community Consultative Committee.
"Since the mill had been declared a Project of State Significance, by the NSW Government, we didn't really know if that was the case or not. But they just said we're here to build a mill and that's it.
"I think it was a bad beginning, the repercussions of which the company is still dealing with today."
The ramifications of such a poor start were immediate and two-fold.
Locals in the Gadara valley quickly formed a "Neighbours of Visy" group, to make sure their voice was heard.
On a broader scale, the Visy mill Community Consultative Committee was established, made up of Tumut locals and community leaders from all walks of life.
By 1997, Visy had acquired the land it wanted -- three farms on the Gadara Valley flats making up about 1619ha of land.
Now the company began negotiations in earnest with the community.
Locals say Visy made both good and bad moves.
Early on, Visy's founder and the billionaire "Cardboard King" himself, Richard Pratt, met with the Consultative Committee and made it clear that Visy wanted to be a good corporate citizen of the Tumut region.
Mr Pratt and other Visy senior executives made five golden promises to the Tumut community, all of which have stood the company in good stead even until today.
Mr Pratt committed that:
Visy public affairs manager Tony Gray said the company had never regretted making any of these promises, even though the final commitment in particular had cost Visy an extra $40-50 million in odour-reduction work since the mill had opened in late 2001.
"It is a fundamental belief of both Richard's and the company that good environmental practice can mean good business practice," Mr Gray said.
Visy worked hard during the next three years before the mill began to be constructed to win the local community over.
Many did not need much convincing. The local Tumut shire, for one, was enormously receptive to the arrival of a new major company, bringing with it job certainty and regional prosperity for at least 30 years.
But Tumut shire general manager Chris Adams disagrees that this eagerness meant the council did not push Visy hard.
In particular, the council was concerned about the amount of water the mill would need from the Tumut River and how it would dispose of its salty waste.
"But instead of letting environmental concerns stop things, we and the company took the approach of working them through together," Mr Adams said.
"The result has been a pulp and paper mill that is the most water-efficient mill in the world, where no waste leaves the site, and where the process used is so state-of-the-art that other companies are coming from all around the world to look at the Tumut mill."
Visy didn't stint in winning community goodwill in other ways.
It opened a shopfront in the main street of Tumut to educate and inform locals about its plans and published weekly information in the local paper.
It even flew six influential locals, including neighbour and by then vocal agitator Pat Whatman, to Brisbane to look at one of its recycling mills, to reinforce its commitment to the environment was more than just gloss and public relations spin.
Mrs Whatman was impressed.
"I think until we saw that private white Lear jet waiting at Wagga Airport, none of us had really realised how big and powerful Visy as a company really was," Mrs Whatman laughs now.
"With hindsight that sounds a bit naive, but actually it was probably a help not knowing in those early days, as it meant we didn't get daunted or scared."
When Visy announced the location of the mill, other tensions broke open.
Local farmers warned that the wind pattern of that particular spot would push the sulphur smell and stack plumes straight up into the fog and temperature inversion layer, over the ridge behind and directly onto to the Whatmans' and Hayes's homesteads.
The company claimed the locals were incorrect; that Visy wind studies showed emissions would move in the opposite direction across the company's own farmlands.
"They were arrogant, they took no notice of what farmers who have lived here for generations said, rubbished us and just generally treated us like local yokels," James Hayes explains.
"But exactly what we have said would happen has. And it turns out their so-called wind studies used data from Albury which is 200 kilometres away!
"I think the two lessons from that, which might have relevance to the proposed Gunns mill, are never build a mill in an area which is fog-prone or has temperature inversions, and don't always trust the primary data that these companies and their hired consultants use."
But Visy took other decisions which were conciliatory.
Most impressive of all, according to long-time Community Consultative Committee member Louise Halsey, was when Visy provided the Committee with $10,000 funding, even though many of its members were opposed to the mill and its location.
It meant the committee could afford to hire a specialist environmental lawyer and high-flying Queen's Counsel to represent the 20 nearby farm families and the broader community interests at the special NSW Commission of Inquiry into the proposed Tumut mill.
"I think that was enormously decent of Visy," Louise Halsey said.
"They didn't have to do that, but Visy said they wanted to make sure everyone felt they had been represented properly and their views heard at the Commission of Inquiry.
"They didn't buy us and we still make problems for them."
Ms Halsey also said that Visy, crucially, tended now to be prepared to listen and accept mistakes had been made.
That has meant trying to control the immediate bad-odour issues, at great financial cost to the company, and even though the smell is not caused by hazardous or too high levels of chemicals being emitted under the mill's stringent environmental emission controls.
In addition, local farmhouses have been supplied with air conditioners, to combat those days when the rotten-egg smell prevents windows being opened.
Other measures taken by the company to improve local issues and community relations have been:
Visy mill manager Lex Kingma said there was nothing magical about working well with, and within, a local community, as long as you can establish the company is adding value to the community as whole.
"We've taken a lot of time to build up trust, and have avoided anything that looks like we are being too self-congratulatory or people will be sceptical," Mr Kingma said.
"Instead we try to be out in the community, making it clear that we want to have open and frank discussions, that nothing is taboo to talk about and that we are prepared to tell them both the good and the bad stories."
Louise Halsey admits to now, four years after the mill opened, feeling somewhat schizophrenic about both its operations and Visy as a company.
"I hate the mill. It was built in the wrong place and there are people whose lives have been ruined and futures stolen because of the effect it has had on their farms and homes," she said. "But there are also many real pluses and benefits to the community of having the mill here."
Visy too is pretty satisfied with the outcome of its nine years in the Tumut region.
"Did the approach we took ... mean the mill cost us more to build than it otherwise would have?" Visy's Tony Gray asks rhetorically.
"I can't answer that, except to say what's the price of having a licence to operate in a relatively small community in a reasonably co-operative fashion? Because that's what we have achieved."
