LegCo Ices Forestry Peace/Surrender Deal

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.

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Process should not be confused with outcome, and while I have outlined some of the many reasons why the process was invalid, this does not mean either side would have been better off saying no to the final agreement or that it should necessarily be rejected. While out of sheer scientific purism I would have always liked to see the whole thing razed and restarted on a credible footing from the beginning, when it came to actually listening to the arguments on the floor of the Legislative Council, I found that I was not greatly enthused about the Bill’s ultimate fate either way.

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Had numbers remained the same as the apparent lineup on the bill itself, then I believe the Harriss motion would have been defeated on casting vote, and the Second Reading would then have passed on casting vote, and then it would have been up to those supporting the bill to try to amend it heavily enough to convince one of the seven opposing it to switch votes.

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The vote on both divisions is very consistent with what I published about Legislative Council Voting Patterns , conforming almost perfectly in one case and perfectly in the other with a divide between the left/centre and the right.

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Much of the anger has been of a populist and urgent nature. There have been calls for the LegCo to be abolished by referendum, which is not constitutionally possible without the LegCo’s cooperation as there is no mechanism in the Tasmanian constitution to hold a binding referendum (and since there is no mechanism, you can’t even have a referendum to install one). There was a call from Bob Brown for the LegCo to go to an election, which can only occur if all members resign together. Possibly this was a well-deserved and deliberately cheeky parody of the Liberal Party’s incessant and inane habit (both state and federal) of calling for new elections following pretty much any government setback. There is a lot of feeling about for the idea that the LegCo must be fixed and must be fixed now. But the instant reactions are ignoring this: that only the LegCo can reform the LegCo.

Read more: http://kevinbonham.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/legco-ices-forestry-peacesurrender-deal.html
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