Toad offers big lesson
IT was with a sense of deja vu, that I read in Saturday’s Bulletin that Professor Peter Ridd is to be sponsored on a “speaking tour” of Queensland, backed by Canegrowers Queensland. Firstly, despite the trumpeting by reef sceptics, may I point out that Professor Ridd’s claims were shown to be baseless by a cool, evidence-based and rational rebuttal by Schaffalke et al in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, Volume 129, Issue 1, April 2018, pages 357-363.
I realise, however, that facts and evidence will do little to convince the diehard deniers; so instead, may I remind readers of a similar scenario in which industry and populism pressured politicians to override scientific consensus, with disastrous results.
By the early 1930s, the cane beetle had been wreaking havoc on the Queensland sugar cane industry for some years.
The State Government established the Queensland Bureau of Sugar Experiment Stations (BSES) in part to seek a solution to the problem. At this point, the work of Dr Raquel Dexter proposing that the cane toad might be an effective biological control for the cane beetle (based in part on some initial successes in Honolulu and Puerto Rico) came to the attention of canegrowers, and was brandished about by the sugar industry with great fanfare, much as the claims of Dr Ridd are waved about today, and Reginald Mungomery of BSES caved in to pressure to import a batch of toads from Honolulu.
Retired government chief entomologist Walter Froggatt, however, had grave concerns, writing prophetically “this great toad, immune from enemies, omnivorous in its habits, and breeding all-year round, may become as great a pest as the rabbit or cactus.”
Despite being castigated in newspapers as “decidedly pessimistic” and “holding radical apprehensions” (much like the accusations lobbed at climate scientists today) Froggatt lobbied the Federal Government to exercise caution, and succeeded in persuading the Director-general of Health to ban any further release of toads in December 1935.
But the ban was short-lived; cane growers subsequently lobbied the Queensland Premier and Minister for Agriculture to allow the toads’ release, who in turn pressured Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, and the combined industry and media pressure caused Lyons to succumb and rescind the ban in September 1936. The rest is history; and a lesson for us all in what can happen when industry is allowed to influence the science on which public policy is based.
As the saying goes, those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
JACK MUNRO,
Aitkenvale.