Kevin Bonham Leaves Tasmanian Times (2012)

It has come to my attention that the Tasmanian Times website no longer includes my lengthy 2012 rant where I wrote about why I was leaving it as a regular writer and poster, and also the thread where the TT audience (plus one sad interloping chess troll from Melbourne) debated my departure.  (A very limited relationship persisted after that, which I completely ended earlier this year.)

The deletion of these articles, some time since January 2017, was never requested by me and I was never informed of it.  My request to TT, given that they were unwilling to publicly apologise for Ted Mead's garbage to my satisfaction (or publicly at all) was "remove the link to my site from the sidebar immediately and please cease linking to my site in future."  Even if it resulted from a misinterpretation of my request as a request to remove all existing links to my site, numerous other old articles linking to this site are still up.  

Disassociation From Tasmanian Times

Update (March 2020): Tasmanian Times has a new owner and at this stage the moderation problems I encountered with the site have not returned.  The current situation is that I am still not going to post on TT, but will now link to the site as appropriate.

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Until yesterday there was an image link to this website in the sidebar of Tasmanian Times (which I ceased writing for in 2012).  Such as it was (I'm no graphic designer!), it looked like this:

However I have now decided to disassociate this site from Tasmanian Times to the maximum extent possible.

The nature of this decision is as follows:

1. It is no longer possible to reach this site via the sidebar on TT as the link has been removed at my request.

2. I have asked the TT editor to cease promoting and linking to my site on TT.

3. Barring a major improvement in TT moderation or other satisfactory solution, I will not post any more comments to TT in the future at all.  (Since leaving the site as a writer in 2012 I have only commented there rarely anyway.)

4. All future links to TT that I may post here in the course of my coverage or debate will be to a Wayback Machine version of the content only.

2014 Ehrlich Awards For Wrong Predictions

This supposedly annual end-of-year feature is a little overdue, which I blame partly on the snap Queensland election and partly on the field being uninspiring compared to the 2012 and 2013 ensembles.  But while I wait for another poll to shed light on public response to what seems to be a ragged week for the LNP in the Queensland campaign, here we go. This site awards the Ehrlich Award early every year (unless I decide not to) to the "wrongest" public prediction I observe in or relating to the previous calendar year.

There are a few groundrules, for instance predictions need to be meaningful (in terms of being able to assess factually whether they have come to fruition), and predictions that carry a stated chance of falsehood are not included unless that chance proves to be ludicrously low.  The first of these, for instance, excludes Tony Abbott's pledge that in 2014 his government "every day [.. ] will keep building the stronger, more prosperous country that all Australians want and deserve" - not only are the terms of such platitudes undefinable, but those making them will continue maintaining they were true.  Likewise, I have so far been unable to find an empirical unit for measuring whether or not the President of Russia has been "shirtfronted".

ReachTEL: Giddings' Northern Problem

ReachTEL (State): Lib 49.2 ALP 23.2 Grn 14.8 Other 6.2 Undecided 6.6
Interpretation: Lib 48.2 ALP 29.4 Green 15.9 Other 6.6
Outcome based on this poll: Liberal Majority Win (13-8-4 or 14-7-4)
Caution: PUP not named in poll; PUP support level unclear.

New aggregate: 13 Liberal 8 Labor 4 Green

Another Mercury/ReachTEL poll is out (see David Killick's report here), with the Saturday release canvassing voting intention and preferred premier scores.  There will also be some questions rating the state government's performance on various issues.  You probably don't need me to tell you what the results of those look like. 

The poll comes as the Labor-Green government, which has to go to an election by June next year, is plagued by rumours of infighting, although these result mainly from the actions of renegade backbench lifer Brenton Best.  It might have been thought this situation would send the Labor vote to new lows, but in fact it has made very little difference.  Compared to the last ReachTEL in August the Liberals are down 1.9 points, Labor down 1.2, the Greens steady, and the winners are Other (+2) and undecided. The impression is that the latest internal tensions are not driving Labor's vote much lower because it was probably scraping along the bottom anyway.

A Spot Of Bother About Quolls

source

(This article is a pseph-free-zone, but you can always vote in my Not-A-Poll to the right on how many federal Tasmanian seats Labor will win.  For those more interested in polls than quolls, I aim to post poll roundup very late on Monday night.)

 The species photographed above is the eastern quoll (Dasyurus viverrinus).  It's very cute.  It comes in two colours (tan and black) and, if you believe some people, our limited supply is very nearly gone.  If you believe others, its numbers are just on the bouncy side. 

The species featured on 7:30 Tasmania this Friday with a lengthy headline report concerning the decision by Environment Minister Brian Wightman to reject an application to list the species as Endangered on the Tasmanian Threatened Species List, even after approval was recommended by the Scientific Advisory Committee.   For the time being, you can see the main report here and a following interview with wildlife biologist Nick Mooney here.  These may not stay up for all that long.

Tasmanian Devils Not On The "Verge of Extinction"

This extinction talk is all a bit of a yawn really.  (Image credit: www.waynemaclean.com)

Late last year, fifteen Tasmanian devils were released on Maria Island, an action that had been in the pipeline for many years.  You can watch cute footage of their cautious emergence into their new environment here.
Devil populations statewide are being ravaged by Devil Facial Tumour Disease (warning: link contains some remarkably ugly and potentially distressing images), a very unusual contagious cancer spread when animals bite each other during fights, that was first photographed in the north-east of Tasmania in 1996.   The Save the Tasmanian Devil website noted:

"As at February 2011, there has been an 84% decline in average sightings of devils across Tasmania during the annual spotlight surveys. In the north-east region, where signs of DFTD were first reported, there has been a 96% decline of average sightings."

A figure of 91% reduction in spotlighting results has been given in some recent media reports.

Are Foxes Widespread And Established In Tasmania?

Advance Summary

1. A recent refereed paper claims that foxes are widespread and established in Tasmania and likely to become increasingly so.

2. This paper uncritically accepts some data items that, while not discredited entirely, are in some cases very dubious.

3. This raises concerns about whether the authors are familiar enough with all the data they use to be very confident that most of the data items are valid.

4. Similar concerns relate to the continued presentation of some dubious fox data items as hard evidence by the Tasmanian government.

5. On this basis, both scientists publishing on the question of foxes, and the Tasmanian government, need to present data accurately and with reservations properly discussed and explored if their claims about foxes are to be considered credible.

6. At present neither the claims that foxes are widespread in the state, nor the claims by some "sceptics" of a conspiracy to import fox evidence in order to fabricate fox presence, are convincing.

LegCo Ices Forestry Peace/Surrender Deal - Updated

UPDATE:  This is an old article with a now dated title that has been updated.  For the updates scroll to the bottom.

(Admin notes: 1. Thanks to readers who voted in the jump breaks poll; poll has closed and preferences have been distributed!  2.  On or about 1 January 2013 this site will award the inaugural Ehrlich to the maker of the most wrong prediction in or relating to the year 2012 in any field that interests me.  The winner has been decided already, but nominations are welcome!  3. This article concerns (i) my views of the Tasmanian forest "peace deal" (ii) my comments about the voting behaviour that occurred during the LegCo vote on it and the (iii) possible future electoral and reform impacts.  As there are some out there who may not be interested in (i) and only wish to read (ii) and (iii), I advise them to scroll down to the point marked "It is safe to come out now".)

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In the beginning, there was the Acronym, and the Acronym was HCV.

And HCV stood for "High Conservation Value", and was a term employed to imply that certain forests were objectively so important that it would be unconscionable to log them.

In fact, HCV is a term with no objective scientific standing, since there are many different conservation-related properties that different people think are important, and valuation is a subjective process.  One person might think the forests that are most important are those that are the most scenic, another might most prefer those that shelter rare animals, and still another might prefer those that they believe best capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  Any forest might be found very valuable by someone who in some sense cares about "conservation", and of little value by someone else who meets the same description.

The term, however, formally derives from its use by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an international forest certification agency.  At the time of writing Wikipedia has what appears to be a sound coverage of this term and if you fancy a detailed look at implementation possibilities the High Conservation Value Forest Toolkit is also worth a look.

Negotiations between environmental groups known collectively as the ENGOs (Wilderness Society, the umbrella group Environment Tasmania and the Australian Conservation Foundation) and industry bodies began in 2010, against a backdrop of the desire by the now under-administration Gunns Limited to get out of native forest logging in order to obtain a social licence for its proposed Bell Bay Pulp Mill, one of an endless series of pie in the sky development proposals for the state, most of which never eventuate.

Tales from the TT Departure Lounge I: The "Umpire's Verdict"

I don't intend to devote all that many threads to the things going down on TT in response to my departure.  Further thoughts may be posted in comments to this one.   I strongly believe my departure is permanent, but there are negotiations going on that may enable excerpts from my future articles and alerts about live blogging (which, once I master it, will hopefully become live-means-live) to appear on the site down the track.  Just without the author of course; if you want to ask him questions you'll have to do so over here, or wherever I am at the time.

My original brief announcement that I was leaving can be seen here, with comments.  As full an announcement of my reasons as I could manage before making a failed attempt to get significant sleep before work today can be seen here and comments on that entry have very wisely been closed.   Strangely, single quotation marks have appeared around the title of my piece that were not there in the otherwise apparently unaltered submitted version; I'll take it as some gremlin paying accidental homage to Bob Dylan's ' "Love&Theft" ' and pass on by. 

I'd like to thank those who've posted intelligent and thoughtful comments whether they agreed with me or not ( two thoughtful comments for every braindead troll in the first 12 posts is not too bad).

I'd like to take up just one thing that interests me in all this so far; the metaphor of the "umpire's decision" used in Bob Hawkins' generally friendly post #4.