Cane toads, Pauline Hanson and the Cobra effect
Put this in the ‘How to earn extra money at home’ category. But only if you live across the northern parts of Australia. One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson has proposed the Government pay welfare recipients 10 cents for every cane toad they collect alive and hand to their local council. The idea is that the council would kill the toads humanely in large freezers.
We’ve done it before – for better and worse – with foxes and feral cats, even the wedge-tailed eagle, the Tassie Devil, the wombat and koala. But is Ms Hanson’s idea to put a speed bump in the path of the toad’s relentless expansion across the country worth considering?
The cane toad, introduced in the 1930s to control native beetles eating sugar cane crops, has prospered and there are now more than 200 million across Queensland, northern New South Wales, the Northern Territory and the north of Western Australia. But the effect on native flora and fauna has been devastating.
David Smerdon, assistant professor in the school of economics at the University of Queensland, says humans react to incentives, but that the key is to get the accounting – and the ethics – right.
Writing for The Conversation, he says: “In NSW and Queensland, you can earn 10 cents by returning an empty drink container to your local supermarket. That’s a task exponentially easier than catching a cane toad and delivering it alive to your local council chambers.”
He went on to explain why Ms Hanson’s idea is a poor one through the Cobra effect.
“The Cobra effect is named after a curious incident from British Colonial India. Faced with a cobra outbreak, the local government of Delhi enacted a cash-for-cobras scheme, with initial success. But as cobras became harder to find, the locals responded to the incentives in a completely logical way: they started breeding the snakes to claim their bounties. When the scheme was scrapped, breeders released their now-worthless snakes, resulting in the city having more cobras than before the scheme.”
Your thoughts?
She means well