Terra Tasmania: Empty post boxes fronting empty houses

On the north east coast we'd noticed that most of the houses, cottages, even businesses were For Sale.

We thought this might have been a regional thing. We even thought there may have been an inclination to sell because the properties were not close enough to a big town, regional roads were narrow and hard to negotiate, and improvements hardly likely to happen fast. But, in all honesty, nothing in Tasmania is more than a couple of hours from the two big cities: which is not like Queensland where you can drive for 500 kilometres and be lucky to see even a single old ruin.

But to drive down the D'Entrecasteaux and the Huon valleys to remote Cockle Creek and find much, if not most, of the property and the businesses there also For Sale, set our alarm bells ringing. Not only the North East is For Sale, but the Southern sections, too. And this is, give or take Wineglass and Coles Bay over on the Freycinet Peninsula, arguably, the most beautiful part of Tasmania.

Much of it looks in many parts like a scruffier version of any rural English county countryside. Even blackberries, planted by homesick English settlers in days long past, grow wild as hedgerows along dusty roads, but rich with hard, tiny, sweet, thorny, stain-filled berries that taste of England.

Despite this, despite the beauty of the D'Entrecasteaux waters and the Huon river which most properties overlook, most properties in these southern regions are also For Sale. Why? We explored the question and local opinion varies. Some say the sellers are trying to cash in on mainlanders who may be willing to pay top price for properties around here. They tell you of Joe Bloggs who sold his place down the road for $1.2 million dollars last year, enticing others to post their properties as well, hoping to score the same price.

Trouble is only a small proportion of these For Sale properties look to be worth anything like that sort of money. Many that are for sale are even empty: the houses are vacant, windows have been smashed by vandals, grass is growing out of the gutters, the acres surrounding them are fallow. These have been on the market a long time, and no one appears at all interested in buying these. So, that is not a good look for the region either.

Some locals tell us Tasmania is broke, and that the For Sale signs are just one of the symptoms: that the government is attempting to run the state on a big deficit, which is only getting bigger. Public spending has dried up and the GST funds are not sufficiently forthcoming. The timber industry is on its last legs and unemployment is higher here than anywhere else in Australia. On and on goes the litany of woes.

Some 3,000 timber workers we are told, who are being laid off now that the timber contracts have crashed, will shortly have to move states to find other work in other fields.

Tasmania looks like it has been a long time on this road to gloom and doom. But that is not new. It doesn't help that the state seems ridiculously over-governed. With a population of barely 500,000 people (a quarter of the population of the city of Brisbane) the coffers have to cover the expenditure of something like 26 regional councils throughout Tasmania, along with all the public servants and politicians who govern Tasmania, and those who occasionally represent them in Canberra.

The unnecessary multi-layers of governance, and the hideous expense of all that bureaucracy, for such a tiny population, is simply ridiculous.