Not everyone likes greens - lessons about popular politics from Australia

Not everyone likes greens

Every place is different. We're told this - don't take what's happened in Australia or Texas or Greece as a guide to what might happen in England or Tuscany or Austria. But maybe there is something happening? Here's Tyler Cowen:

Sometimes political revolutions occur right before our eyes without us quite realizing it. I think that’s what’s been happening over the last few weeks around the world, and the message is clear: The populist “New Right” isn’t going away anytime soon, and the rise of the “New Left” is exaggerated.

Cowen frames this in the context of the Australian election where "an evangelical Christian who has expressed support for President Donald Trump" won despite every prediction saying the Australian Labor Party with its achingly 'new left' agenda (identity politics, climate change, immigration) were going to win at a canter. Cowen then touches on the Brexit Party and the emerging contests in the early stages of next years presidential elections pointing out a similar pattern. The intellectual agenda may be left wing but politics is not - and politics is what people vote about.

We could equally have seen reference to Salvini's Lega, to the Gilets Jaune in France or to a host of other manifestations of this populist 'new right' - this week's European Parliament elections could see a host (Cowen says up to 35%) of MEPs from these anti-establishment parties. Everywhere we look, we see people sticking two-fingers up at the established parties of the centre left and centre right.

Looking at Australia we begin to see where the problem is for "urban cosmopolitans" - here's urbanist Ross Elliot writing in New Geography:

The denizens of trendy inner city secondhand bookshops may have been filled with confidence, but not of suburban and regional voters. Struggling with flat real wage growth and having borne the brunt of a changing employment landscape, rising electricity bills and falling confidence in their future, this was not the time to tell them it was their duty to sacrifice even more to ‘save the planet’ by paying ever higher electricity bills, or buying an electric car they can’t afford. Especially when that message comes from smug sounding public servants or wealthy, entitled inner city residents who have been the beneficiaries of economic change, as well as overseas investors, rather than its victims.

The climate change warriors organised a convoy to protest against a new coal mine at Adani in central Queensland and got a frosty welcome when they arrived with locals organising a counter protest and stores, petrol stations and restaurants refusing to serve the protestors. This was rural Australia but the same sentiments will be heard is thousands of other places - everywhere but the places inhabited by what Elliot calls "the inner urban elites of government, the bureaucracy, media and industry" - the great and the good.

Telling people who don't think they've enough money that they need to make sacrifices to 'save the planet' is lousy politics yet this is precisely the tone we hear from those who share every one of Greta Thunberg's inane utterings as if they were on golden tablets received from god. Hardly a day passes without another initiative designed to 'save the planet' or 'fight climate change' that mostly acts to add a little more mild irritation into the lives of people who are already mildly irritated. Maybe we do need to ban plastic straws but can we stop pretending it's any sort of vote winning political strategy.

Right now the mainstream of political opinion is more concerned about whether there'll be minimum wage labour from Romania to serve them in Pret, how terrible it is that a very well-paid and wealthy female news presenter is paid slightly less than her male colleague or if they'll have to fill a form in to drive a car in France. These opinion-makers are the sorts who can afford to pay a tax on flying, have the time (or staff) to fuss over recycling and are very keen to ban things that they don't use but disapprove of. And these people really do look down on the proles - here, quoted by Ross Elliot, is Elizabeth Farelly from the Sydney Morning Herald:

“The suburbs are about boredom, and obviously some people like being bored and plain and predictable, I'm happy for them … even if their suburbs are destroying the world.”

For a long while people hadn't noticed that the great and good didn't like them very much - why would they when their paths seldom crossed. But, with Brexit, with the climate change agenda targeting the less well off, with an identity politics that disdains the working class, people have now noticed. And when it comes to voting those people are going to kick the inner urban elite's snobbery right in the ballot box.

....

Can't afford to buy a house? You really should blame the planners...

Or so research from the Reserve Bank of Australia says:

...we find that, as of 2016, zoning raised detached house prices 73 per cent above marginal costs in Sydney, 69 per cent in Melbourne, 42 per cent in Brisbane and 54 per cent in Perth. Zoning has also raised the price of apartments well above the marginal cost of supply, especially in Sydney. We emphasise that this is not the amount that housing prices would fall in the absence of zoning. The effect of zoning has increased dramatically over the past two decades, likely due to existing restrictions binding more tightly as demand has risen.

So next time someone tries to tell you it's the banks or the housebuilders or immigrants or mortgage lenders or some other of the myriad excuses for high house prices, smiles sweetly and say:

"Nah, it's the planners."

....

In the end bans usually make things worse - the case of cigarettes

The problem with banning things is that it seldom stops them. Even when you take the sort of extreme and violent steps we've seen recently in The Philipines. Yet politicians, policy-makers and their friends in academia still champion bans - de facto or de jure.

One of those bans - although it doesn't look like one because no-one's passed a law with the word 'ban' in it anywhere except Bhutan - is that of tobacco. This is a ban by stealth implemented by steadily raising the price of fags to the point where more and more people can't afford to buy them. Or at least this is the theory.

The problem is that the bigger the gap between the cost of production and the post-tax retail price, the bigger the incentive for people to (illegally) arbitrage that gap. Why take the risk smuggling heroin or cocaine when you can smuggle tobacco! Check out your local paper and you'll see a steady stream of stories about illegal cigarettes (interspersed with stories about cannabis factories). With each increase in tobacco duty, we see an increase in criminal activity around tobacco.

And this is where it ends up - with violence:

The BAT manager was stabbed and bashed by at least three men, after he refused their order that he get into a car. The kidnappers arrived at the man's Sydney home at around 10pm on Saturday June 4.

A source said the manager was forced to "fight for his life" to ward off the kidnappers, who have not been identified. He was rushed to hospital after the attack.

The attack appears to be an unprecedented escalation in the struggle between policing agencies and the syndicates driving the illicit tobacco trade. Evidence suggests the attack was linked to BAT's support of police inquiries.

The manager in question was employed (by that source of all evil, a tobacco company) to support the police in investigating smuggling and illegal tobacco. Why? Quite simply because it's a billion dollar plus criminal business.

Right now, our one-eyed approach to smoking is creating a new international criminal business smuggling cigarettes and tobacco. In the UK, trading standards departments are advised that tobacco companies are the bad boys:

Tobacco companies continue to approach local authorities and local Trading Standards teams in particular with offers to support their tobacco control strategies primarily around tackling illicit tobacco but also in relation to other areas of enforcement including age of sale regulations. Local Authorities are recommended to examine such offers critically in the light of Article 5.3 and its guidelines and only engage in any collaborative work with the industry where this is considered strictly necessary.

That's right folks - the Tackling Illicit Tobacco for Better Health Partnership (essentially a bunch of trading standards officers) thinks it just fine to refuse to work with tobacco companies - businesses selling a legal product - in catching criminals.

So what we have is a new and lucrative business for organised criminals created entirely by policies designed to promote public health. And, rather than recognise the problem, public health and its agents refuse to co-operate with the tobacco companies in reducing the criminal impact of their (public health that is) policies.

Now I call this stupid.
...

Quote of the day - on the consequence of political decisions

****

From the incomparable Dick Puddlecote:

My personal favourite was a story of a politician who was offered a drink late at night and chose a single malt. His companion went to the bar but was told he couldn't be served that particular drink because it counted as a shot and the law said they were illegal after midnight in order to tackle binge-drinking. "What a stupid law that is!", raged the politician, to which his friend replied, "yes, but you voted for it".

Thus we are reminded that firstly many politicians are stupid and, secondly, that Australia has some of the most controlling, nannying and downright offensive government in what we still call the free world.

....

Vegemite - a reminder (if you needed one) that prohibition doesn't work

****

OK it's Australia, home to some of the world's most intrusive fussbucketry but it's a lesson:

Australia’s government says Vegemite sales should be limited in some communities to prevent the yeast-based spread being used to make home-made alcohol.

Nigel Scullion, the indigenous affairs minister, said the spread – which is considered something of a national culinary staple – was a "precursor to misery" in communities suffering from alcohol abuse.

He said he was not proposing a ban but wanted to restrict excessive sales of high-yeast products such as Vegemite in “dry” communities – typically remote Aboriginal townships where alcohol sales are banned.

“Addiction of any type is a concern but communities, especially where alcohol is banned, must work to ensure home brewing of this type does not occur,” he said.

See what's happened here? These 'dry' communities (apparently Aussie white people think Aboriginal drink problems relate to some natural predisposition not to 200 years of oppression) do what dry communities always do - they make their own booze. And, as we all know, alcohol is very easy to make.

You see, prohibition doesn't work.

....

Why Australia doesn't have California's problems with water - free markets

****

Lots of angry lefties tweet that slightly crass quote about water rights from the boss of Nestlé. They do this because they care about people having the water they need, something we can all agree with. However, the transfer of this concern from rhetoric into public policy is a problem. Quite simply because, as Californians have discovered, the supply of water is a really big deal. And it's down to the weather (you can all argue the toss about whether it's climate change or not if you like but that won't change a thing):

California has a history of droughts lasting as long as 200 years.  You can dam every canyon in California and line the coast with desalination plants, and you won’t solve the water shortage in a 200-year drought, or even a ten-year drought.  Under the current allocation and pricing system, California will simply consume every new drop of water produced. We will have a water shortage all the same. 

So the question is what to do to ensure that the need for water in the Sunshine State is met. And most solutions offered are either stupid (ban the extraction of water for bottling) or totalitarian (rationing the supply of water). The right approach is (and this is why the Nestlé chap has a point) about ownership of the source and pricing.

By way of contrast, Australia - just as dry and drought-prone as California - doesn't have the same supply problems:

Water markets equipped Australia to endure the 1995-2009 Millennium Drought. This was the worst Australian drought since European settlement. Total water stored declined to just 27 percent of capacity. Yet water trading allowed Australian cities to avoid the most severe water restrictions. It protected agricultural businesses, and it ensured that the country’s endangered habitats and species received adequate water.

Remarkably, in an end-of-drought survey, over 90 percent of Australian farmers reported that water markets were important to their businesses’ survival. There are many lessons for California here. A key one is that the tension between water users is completely the creation of policy. There is no need for the tensions between the agricultural industry and California’s cities, between growers and endangered fish, between Hillsborough and Westborough, between neighbors. Water markets can balance competing uses in a way that benefits all.

To work, markets need something to trade. The basis for trade in a functioning water market is exclusive access to a share of water from a specific body. Australian water laws provide this. California’s water laws do not.

Sadly the article concludes that politicians in California are unlikely to be liberalising water markets. Just goes to show how stupid us politicians are really.

....

Quote of the day: on plain packaging...

****

From Professor Sinclair Davidson of RMIT University in Australia:

“I have no doubt that the consumption of cigarettes has risen since plain packaging was introduced; we just can’t be sure whether it is by existing smokers or new smokers.”

The quote's from an excellent article in The Australian (via Chris Snowdon). We should be clear that the good professor isn't saying that plain packs caused the rise in consumption rather that there's no link between what the packs look like and levels of consumption. Something some of us were saying even before the Aussies introduced the policy.

 ....

More crime, more smokers, fewer jobs - hey let's do it! The story of plain packs for cigarettes.

I heard an interview on the radio about plain packs for cigarettes. The public health doctor being interviewed (I forget his name, they all blur into one hideous nannying blob in my mind) explained that it's a wonderful idea - lot's of words like'colours', 'cool', 'shiny' and 'children' were uttered capped off with the killer line, something like:

"...these are used to make people choose a particular brand."

That was it, a statement of advertising truth - it's about brand choice not product choice. And this is the basis for introducing plain packaging. There is absolutely no evidence at all that supports the idea that the shininess or otherwise of the packaging is the crucial factor in some thirteen-year-old's decision to try a fag. Indeed, if you think about this for a minute or two (especially if you were once that thirteen-year-old), you'll know it's nonsense. Of all the myriad reasons for someone starting to smoke, "it's in a gold pack" or "the pack is all pink and girly, I have to smoke" are such vanishingly small reasons as to be irrelevant.

But that doesn't stop them:

The policy – designed to make smoking less appealing to young people — appeared to have been put on hold four months ago. But Government sources indicated that ministers had decided to implement the scheme after an outcry from doctors and the Opposition.

I'm guessing that the last two words in that quote are the crucial ones - we're having a review because the government want to close off another line of criticism from Labour. This is despite what evidence we have showing what an utterly stupid and ineffective policy 'standardised packs' is:

...the accountancy firm KPMG released a report on 4 November, which highlighted how the Australian government has lost $1 billion Australian dollars in the 12 months ended in June, as a consequence of the vast jump in black market sales of cigarettes.

There was also a rise of 154 per cent in sales of manufactured counterfeit cigarettes and fake brands (known as ‘illicit whites’). One of these is called Manchester; it has a market share of 1.4 per cent, which is staggering considering they are illegal. In terms of total shipments, illicit sales of cigarettes have increased from 1.5 per cent to 13.3 per cent. And most significantly – cigarette consumption has not changed.

So there you go - these public health idiots and a ministerial class more bothered by headlines than whether a policy works propose an idea that will increase crime, cost jobs and, at best, have no effect at all on rates of smoking. It makes me want to scream - partly because these idiots still don't understand brand marketing (or even bother to ask people who do understand brand marketing what they think) but mostly because this is policy-making based on prejudice masquerading as science.

....

The lunacy that is Australia...

****

It's a joke surely? A silly joke...

The state government is preparing to ban solariums and the private sale of sunbeds.

Government and opposition MPs supported a motion in Parliament for the bans, introduced by Greens MP Colleen Hartland in the upper house on Wednesday night.

This is Australia right? Where it's sunny all the time? So first, why are Aussies using sunbeds? And second isn't the burning hot sun more of a problem for the skin cancer?

You see those 447 sunbeds in the State of Victoria were wandering the land shooting people with their skin cancer rays.

People know the risks - they're on the label so to speak. Yet they still prefer to be brown. Their choice.

.....

Friday Fungus: unwanted immigrants - a comment on death cap mushrooms

It would seem to me that, besides knowing which mushrooms are tasty, knowing which ones will kill you is pretty important. And mushrooms can kill you:

Lui Jun was a hardworking 38-year-old Chinese chef who made a fatal error of mistaking the toxic "death cap" mushrooms for a common edible variety used in Chinese cooking.

This was in Australia which raises an interesting point – Australia has thousands of native fungus species but the Death Cap (Amanita phalliodes) isn’t one of them. Like cane toads, rats and rabbits this particular killer arrived with the white man:

Amanita phalloides, commonly called the Death Cap, is a strikingly beautiful mushroom and the number one cause of fatal mushroom poisonings worldwide. Originally found only in Europe, it has proved to be highly adaptable to new lands and new mycorrhizal hosts.

It is our love of the good old oak tree that causes the problem – when we took oaks to North America and Australia, we carried with them traces on the Death Cap. And in California, the death cap loved its new home:

If we can assume (and trace through the literature and herbaria) that its earliest arrival in Central California was around 1938, it is remarkable to think that in a little over seven decades, Amanita phalloides can be found throughout California, from the Sierra foothills to the Channel Islands, wherever live oak is found. Death Caps have recently been documented growing with pine in Marin County (pine is its preferred host on the East Coast of North America) and with Tanoak (Lithocarpus densiflorus) in Mendocino County, and may be expanding their California tree hosts.

So – to avoid the tragic fate of those Chinese chefs, you need to know how to spot a Death Cap:

The defining features of this gorgeous mushroom are: the sacklike white volva around its base; the white ring; the white gills; the white spore print; and the smooth (rather than lined) cap margin. Cap color is not the best thing to rely on in identification, since it is fairly variable. Older specimens have a distinctive, foul smell to them, but smell is never a very objective determiner.

These mushrooms are usually (but not always) associated with oaks – but always in mixed or deciduous woodland:

Cap 6-15cm across, convex then flattened; variable in color but usually greenish or yellowish with an olivaceous disc and paler margin; also, paler and almost white caps do occur occasionally; smooth, slightly sticky when wet, with faint, radiating fibers often giving it a streaked appearance; occasionally white patches of volval remnants can be seen on cap. Gills free, close, broad; white. Stem 60-140 x 10-20mm, solid, sometimes becoming hollow, tapering slightly toward the top; white, sometimes flushed with cap color; smooth to slightly scaly; the ball-shaped basal bulb is encased in a large, white, lobed, saclike volva. Veil partial veil leaves skirt-like ring hanging near the top of the stem. Flesh firm, thicker on disc; white to pale yellowish green beneath cap cuticle. Odor sickly sweet becoming disagreeable. Spores broadly ellipsoid to subglobose, amyloid, 8-10.5 x 7-9µ. Deposit white. Habitat singly or in small groups on the ground in mixed coniferous and deciduous woods.

....

Friday Fungus - Australian Truffles

The truffle has long been viewed as the emperor of fungi (I hesitate to say mushroom since the truffles we worship aren't fruiting heads) so it was a delight to discover that there are antipodean relatives of this exquisite delicacy - and that enterprising Aussies also took spores of the classic black truffle (Tuber melanosporum - see picture) and established truffle colonies in Tasmania. The primary (but not only) producer of black truffles is Perigord Truffles of Tasmania - nothing like saying what it does on the tin!

However, as well as growing these imported delicacies (a reminder yet again that you can transfer European - even French - classic produce elsewhere in the world and keep up levels of quality) there are also a fascinating range of truffle type fungi native to Australia. These pseudo-truffles are also edible and perhaps our antipodean friends might like to share some of their delights with those of us stuck in the Northern Hemisphere! There's a great deal to learn about these fungi and the Australian Fungi Website is a great place to start.

Finally, mycologists in Australia have identified a whole new bunch of truffles - related to the Amanita fungi that give us fairy rings and magic mushrooms (as well as some edible delights). The Amanita truffles are pictured above and are about the size of a marble. Finally, if you're wanting to experiment with eating mushrooms you gather yourself, truffles are a good place to start as none of the main truffle groups are poisonous (which isn't the same as saying they all taste good)!