Quantum Forest

George W. Bush proves that the USA is an extremely democratic country, where almost anybody can be president (even Dubya). Almost because it is necessary to be ‘a natural born Citizen’, despite the USA being a country of immigrants.

Yesterday started the amend for Arnol campaign, looking to amend the USA’s constitution to allow Arnold Schwarzenegger (or, actually, his alter ego) to be candidate for the president job.

If Ronald Reagan (a third rate actor) was able to get the job why wouldn’t Arnie have a shot at it? Go for it Arnie!

Environmental discussion in Tasmania is plagued with false dilemmas. As I described before in Conservation or production: a false dilemma, the reduction of environmental issues to ‘two unpleasant mutually exclusive propositions’ shows either dishonesty or lack of imagination (maybe both). In that case, I pointed out that the false dilemma was being presented by environmentalists.

This time around the false dilemma comes from the pro-forestry camp. It is now phrased as ‘pulp mill or woodchips’. Considering the diversity of forests and of their management in Tasmania (species, ages, silviculture, etc), it is conceivable to feed a range of industrial processes (e.g., pulp mills, sawmills, veneer mills, energy production, etc) to obtain, again, a range of products. However, the discussion is presented as we either build a large pulp mill or keep transforming part of the forests into woodchips. Either you support a pulp mill or you support woodchipping; bollocks!

There are, of course, many possible alternative scenarios: large pulp mill, no pulp mill, small pulp mill and other mills, etc. When searching for optimal solutions for Tasmania there is no point on discarding options a priori just because they do not boil down to a simple message or slogan.

I know. I may expect too much from politicians…

Watching the coverage of the USA’s presidential election reminded me of García Márquez’s Chronicle of a Death Foretold (Crónica de una muerte anunciada). The end of the story was known from the first pages — well, unless you were a die hard Democrat, but the flavour was in the details. Is the world any better because George Bush won? Probably not, but Kerry winning would not have made much of a difference. As The Economist put it, the choice was between the incompetent and the incoherent.

Given that the election was not that interesting, and that I was confined home with a cold, I decided to do something ‘useful’. I went through some old fan and hate mail for this blog and my Forestry in Tasmania site in an attempt to select the ‘all time classic’. The winner was the chap from the United Kingdom, claiming that there was a conspiracy to hide the environmental problems in the Stix Valley. He would look for it in Google and could not find any references to the problem. Surely the forest industry was exercising undue pressure on Google to hide the truth. Hint: look for Styx Valley, with y, and get over 6,000 hits. What can one say about that? Illiterate comes to mind. He added ‘what can we do about this? Maybe we should boycott Circus Oz, which is financed by Forestry Tasmania’. Of course Circus Oz has no relationship with the forest company, except for participating in 2001 in the Ten days on the island festival, which at the time was sponsored by Forestry Tasmania. The festival had dozens of artists participating, and none of them would claim that they were financed by a forest company. Loonie.

Continuing with loonies, I just read a letter written by a Rambo wannabe representing Doctors for Forests, explaining that the ‘civil war to defend Tasmanian forests’ must continue. I hope he uses a different definition. Should we now start shooting each other over some trees?

These two weeks since the federal election have been filled with analyses, post-mortems and other psephological practices. The losers have been in a combination of depressive state, scapegoating (is this a verb? Yes, it is) and soul searching. The winners have been thinking of all the legislation that can go through a parliament were they have majority in the two houses.

There were two interesting — and related — phenomena after the election: the idea that the election was a referendum (particularly on Tasmania’s old growth forests and their use) and the concept of a mandate for very specific issues.

The referendum issue was floated by several sides of politics in Tasmania. The basic idea is that people preferred the forest policy of the party (or parties) with most votes. The Liberals argue that, given that they won the election, their forest policy was the preferred one and that everything is business as usual. The Greens claim that if we put together Labor and Green votes, the majority of Tasmanian want to protect old growth forest, in some sort of average of forest policies. A referendum is the submission of specific issues to popular vote. A general election is hardly that (see below), so the claims are nonsensical.

Politicians have also claimed that they have received a mandate (Latin for command) from the people to tackle specific policies. The fact is that people vote for a combination of policies, even when they may not like some of them. Thus, I know people that voted Labor despite its forest policy, Liberal despite its treatment of refugees or Green despite its economic policy.

Can then parties claim specific mandates? Yes, clearly they can, although they should not do it. Parties try to reduce the electorate to a mono- or oligodimensional state. However, I think we voters are much more complex than that.

Last Saturday the coalition Liberal/National Party easily won the election, despite polls predicting a very close result. However, the market (i.e., betting odds) was giving a probability of 0.6 for a Liberal victory.

This reflects an interesting phenomenon: one should trust more where people put their money than what they say will do. I call this the ‘footy tipping effect’, where most fans will bet against their team if that means they can win the tipping competition. Thus, one can extract more reliable information from tipping than when there is nothing to loose (like in an opinion poll).

Coming back to election policies, Labor was unable to sell its forest policy in Tasmania and did not get anything in exchange in mainland. Labor lost two seats — Bass and Braddon — in Tassie (at least in part because of that policy) and failed to gain the marginal seats in urban mainland that were the reason of being for that policy.

I expect that now that the election is over, political pressure on the forest industry will reduce a bit. Despite of this, I think it is a good idea for industry to use this post election time for making changes that enhance community support in urban areas. This would reduce the ability of its adversaries to put again forestry in the spotlight at federal level. Finally, it is clear from the election results that rural areas are certainly behind industry, as it has been suspected for a long time.

Finally yesterday the Liberals anounced in Launceston their policy for Tasmanian Forests. No big surprises, no big policy. On one side, it is not very different from Labor’s policy, adding 170,000 ha to conservation areas. However, it promises much less money and—here is the big difference—to support the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement (RFA).

A quick glance to the major parties’ forest policies:

I still have not decided which policy is best for Tasmanians. I would love to see a policy that, on one side answers the environmental concerns of the bulk of the community and, on the other, sets clear guidelines for a modern industry, providing appropriate ‘carrots’ for guiding change.

A completely different issue is that I still find strange to have a special ‘Tasmanian Forests Policy’, where it would make much sense the existence of an environmental policy, covering all ecosystems in the country based on biological importance rather than on beauty alone (although I leave room for cultural values here). Particular policies are like having a specially high taxation policy for sexy underwear in King Cross, Sydney. It may be relevant to attract conservative votes somewhere else in the country, but it would certainly not be of national interest (and not necessarily in the best interest of King Cross’s residents).

This post expand on my previous post on Labor’s and Greens’ Tasmanian Forests policies.

We are getting closer to federal election day in Australia and we keep getting new promises and plans for Tasmanian Forests. The Australian Greens are playing the ‘we may hold the balance of power’ card and plan to sell their preferences¹ to the highest bidder. The Tasmanian Greens recently released their Forest Transition Strategy to Protect Forests and Create Sustainable Jobs. It is an interesting document, although with much more emphasis on protecting the forests than on creating jobs. I do not know where they did get the overestimated plantation productivity figures, while underestimating the value of native forest.

Meanwhile, Australian Labor—the main opposition party—released Labor’s Plan to Save Tasmania’s High Conservation Value Forests. The plan is aimed to attract Green preferences in urban seats, although it has managed to annoy the forest industry and the rural electorate dependent on forestry activity.

We are still waiting to hear from John Howard (Liberal Party) and see if he puts forward a plan for Tasmania’s Forests. My feeling is that he may be astute enough to avoid controversy—there is no much to win for the liberals in this front—and will not release any forest policy, cashing on angry rural Labor votes.

This will be an interesting week heading towards election day: Saturday 9^th of October.

¹ The Australian Federal Parliament has two levels: the House of Representatives and the Senate. Members of these levels are elected using a preferencial voting system—called proportional representation—which is slightly different for the Representatives and the Senate.

P.S. 2004-10-07. The Liberals’ policy is discussed on a later post.

In June I made some comments on how chemists (pharmacies) were stifling competition. That was a comment solely based on my experience dealing with them. Ten days ago Choice Magazine, owned by the Australian Consumers’ Association, published a report on the quality of advice and pricing provided by pharmacies.

Access to the report requires paid subscription (which I have), but the main findings were made public. The study included 87 seven pharmacies in Sydney, the Wollongong area and Adelaide, and found that:

• Advice given in 58 out of the 87 pharmacies we visited was rated ‘poor’ by our experts. The pharmacy profession needs to improve the quality of advice being given to consumers.
• Speaking to a pharmacist rather than a pharmacy assistant didn’t guarantee good advice.
• In a price spot-check of two of the products our researchers bought, the most expensive of each product in a supermarket was still cheaper than the cheapest pharmacy price for the same item.

The report also claimed that:

…there’s some evidence that restricting pharmacy ownership may be limiting competition and make prices for some medicines higher than they would otherwise be, and the results of our spot-check seem to support this.

Sadly, it seems that my experience with pharmacies was not an exception at all.

Last Sunday I was watching Chilean news in SBS, a multicultural TV station in Australia. One of the news was that thousands of files documenting the violation of human rights during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship are slowly disintegrating. This is mainly due to the original poor quality of the documents and lack of proper care. This situation affects many documents archived by Vicaría de la Solidaridad (The Solidarity Vicariate) — an organisation to defend human rights created by the Catholic church — and the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos (a group of family of missing people).

The news produced a deep sadness on me. It reminded me of “In the name of the rose” by Umberto Eco, where a library is completely burned and there is a feeling of irreparability: there is nothing that can be done to recover what was lost. In the case of the Chilean files, they document part of terrible recent history and the papers are fading in the same way that people’s memories vanish. The first things to go are the small details, they are followed by the names and finally we are left with a mosaic of pictures standing in a poster.

Yesterday John Howard (Australia’s Prime Minister) called for federal elections on the 9^th^ of October. This is my first time voting in a federal election and makes life a bit difficult for a classical liberal (libertarian) individual supporting small government, market freedom and personal liberties.

Although Howard’s government economic policy is freer market oriented than the opposition’s, I find its social conservatism and pro-war stance difficult to digest. In addition, I feel that the current government’s position on issues like the treatment of asylum seekers is disgusting, bringing the worst out of Australians.

On the other hand, the Australian Labor Party’s (the main opposition party) positions in many issues are quite controlling (economic policy, environment) or conservative (discriminating against same sex couples). This only leaves the small parties, with loonies like the Greens (and their totalitarian view of the environment) or the Australian Democrats (and their constant internal chaos), which are ‘issues’ parties more than organisations with a coherent vision and any chances of winning.

In summary, this leaves the old ‘flip a coin’ or ‘throw a die’ options open for October.