The Apple Isle is searching for answers to a record budget deficit and the highest youth unemployment in the country
There's a pub in Beauty Point, northern Tasmania, called the Riviera Hotel. You can just about imagine Brigitte Bardot draped across its sleek balcony because that's what the 50s-style architecture and riverfront location evoke.
But this is 2013. It's Saturday afternoon and two middle-aged men sit alone on each side of the L-shaped saloon bar, cupping their beers and betting tickets, waiting for their numbers to come up. They look at home in front of the big open fireplace, in a place where wasting time and money on gambling is a right like any other, especially as it gives the working man half a chance to get richer. Except it's not even half a chance.
Ambitions seem as frozen in time at the pictures on the Riviera's walls. Along with the surf-and-turf menu, they've hung here for so long they're fashionable again. Despite the hotel's prime position at the top of the Tamar Valley wine region, the wine on the blackboard is Jacob's Creek and the sparkling of choice a piccolo Yellow. Two friendly bar staff seem more keyed up for Keno than vino. The electronic bingo game is played more in Tasmania than any other state, real expenditure totaling about $25m in 2009-10.
It's a different story for the company with exclusive rights to run Keno and pokie machines in Tasmania. The Federal Group developed the $32m Saffire resort at Coles Bay on Tasmania's east coast as part of the deed of arrangement it made with the Tasmanian government in 2003 to develop tourism while making profits from the pokies. But with room rates starting at about $1500 a night, it's out of reach for the average Tasmanian who earns less than that per week. With a "Guests Only" sign at the front gate, most locals haven't even seen reception.
If happiness equates to money in your pocket, you can understand why some would want to move somewhere else – Western Australia, for example, would put an extra $400 into their weekly pay packet. It's one of the reasons why, according to a Launceston City Council report, an estimated $100m in wages was lost in the wider north of the state between 2006 and 2011.
With the downturn in forestry and construction particularly acute, chambers of commerce want far more emphasis on economic stimulation and new industries like new manufacturing, renewable energy, wineries, tourism and, more controversially, mining.
University of Tasmania political analyst Tony McCall has long been an advocate for new knowledge and creative economies, but after last month's state budget, he told ABC Local Radio's Leon Compton he was starting to think a brighter, greener future was not possible.
Instead, another Tasmanian budget has been tabled and with it mostly not the kind of news that has filled Tasmanians with hope or glory. The state has just recorded its biggest budget deficit ever ($426m) and is expected to stay that way until at least 2016-17. Last summer may have started optimistically with the premier, Lara Giddings, delivering her vision of "Tasmania's Place In The Asian Century". But by next summer, ABC election analyst Antony Green predicts a Labor wipeout in Tasmania.
If you care to look around the Riviera pub, the most recent decoration is a wall dedicated to heroes Brant Webb and Todd Russell. When the two former miners were rescued from nearby Beaconsfield gold mine seven years ago, the family men came here to celebrate and had photos taken with their buddies on that balcony. Their stories from magazines are sticky-taped on walls now scrawled with handwritten messages from friends and admirers. "Cazza" and Rachel's autographs are signed straight onto the faded blue wall paint: "The Wives".
Pubs like this feel warm and safe, but any way you look at it, a bet at the Riviera Hotel does not represent the future for Tasmania. Despite racing minister Bryan Green holding great confidence in the gambling industry (betting is a significant earner for the state government with almost 12% of tax revenue coming from gambling taxes), it's mostly thanks to high-spending interstate and international punters having a bet via their mobile phones or online, according to the Social and Economic Impact Study into Gambling in Tasmania (a report to the Treasury by The Allen Consulting Group).
Even without the economic sustainability of local gambling, and despite Tasracing reporting a net loss of $10.4m for the last financial year, the Tasmanian government has committed $28m a year for 20 years. Even so, Green told The Mercury newspaper last month, it was "a funding guarantee that is unmatched anywhere in Australia".
It's debatable exactly how helpful this is when almost a quarter of young people in the state are unemployed – Tasmania has the highest rate in the nation. This month the state also recorded its highest unemployment rate in a decade, with 8.9% of the population now out of work.
When last month, an estimated 2000 people turned up at a pro-mining rally in the remote west coast town of Tullah because the community was worried about so many of its young people leaving to find jobs interstate. Not even the $83m earmarked in the latest state budget for Gonski education reforms could address their concerns. Stripping money from universities to give more to primary schools is neither here nor there if young people can't find a job when they leave school.
While it's not easy to get a job in Tasmania, it is increasingly difficult to attract some professionals to work outside of Hobart. At the fishing and tourist town of St Helens, a few hours' drive north-east of Hobart, the medical centre relies on short-term locums. Mayor Bertrand Cadart told reporters recently: "Not everyone likes the surfing way of life so at the end of the day it's still rural. You work more for less money, your hours are longer. It's almost like a priesthood vocation to a degree."
But what if Tasmanians were to turn things around and ask themselves a different question: Are we happier?
Imagine a place where you can buy a three-bedroom house for $300,000, where the stars come out at night, where children walk home from school, front doors are open all day, traffic jams don't happen, broccoli grows in your garden and a platypus might live in your backyard. No one moves to this place to get rich; they come to feed their souls. For some it's a place of their dreams, nourished by a desire for a better quality of life. People who think this is a form of retirement from life are wrong. More like the exact opposite: an honest embrace.
This place is Tasmania, but it could be anywhere in regional Australia, where people live in a natural landscape, make the things they need and respect the land. It's a place that won't necessarily generate dollar millionaires or make you powerful or famous, which is exactly what makes it special. With its natural regionality – it's the smallest state, with roughly the population of the Gold Coast – Tasmania could be at the forefront of promoting this different way of life. Not old-fashioned or fashionable – just real and human, with expectations and government in proportion to its size and way of life.
Former prime minister Julia Gillard recently promised $100m of federal funds to be spent over the next four years on regional development in Tasmania. Jonathan West, author of the controversial Griffith Review essay Obstacles to Progress, was employed to help direct the funding. In his essay, West wrote that "demographics and income sources have coalesced to create two cultures – one of a substantial 'underclass' with a culture of low aspiration, and the other of a smaller, comfortable, government-dependent middle class". Many Tasmanians, busy making their own livelihoods, are critical of this jaundiced view and wonder how West might now be fit to judge where funding is directed given his predetermined view of the state's class system.
The prime minister Kevin Rudd made a flying visit to Tasmania on Thursday to reveal the list of 31 projects to benefit from the $100 million forest peace deal funding but did not say how many jobs would be created. Meanwhile Opposition Leader Tony Abbott was also in Launceston to attend a forum of undecided voters in the electoral battleground of Bass.
Tasmanians are intuitively good at living well on less than most Australians deem necessary. It's a recipe for survival that deserves far more credit from those who take waste and excess for granted and for whom consumption and spending are signs of success.
And if a greater proportion of Tasmanians could believe more in the natural virtues of their own backyard, and slightly less in those of distant shores, then the Riviera Hotel might yet be open to serving Tasmanian sparkling wine with freshly shucked Tamar River oysters, to cherish the river view instead of a bar that faces inwards, and encourage school leavers to come here for Schoolies Week; perhaps even pretend to be Brigitte Bardot or Errol Flynn on that balcony. He was a Tasmanian, after all.
Hilary Burden is a Tasmania-based writer and journalist whose memoir, A Story of Seven Summers, was published last year by Allen & Unwin.