The politics of Tasmania's world heritage area: Contesting the democratic subject

Abstract

Giving some 20 per cent of Tasmania's land surface World Heritage status has created major tensions in the politics of this Australian state, where the world's first green party was born. Within these tensions, the conflict between those who hitherto used the wild places for ‘interventionist’ recreational activities on the one hand and the proponents of World Heritage listing on the other portrays in dramatic miniature the essence of the conflict between green paradigmatic assumptions and those of conventional liberal democratic politics, highlighting the intransigent nature of the difficulties inherent in accommodating the former to the latter.