Senator Andrew Bartlett
Monday, May 02, 2005
 
Albatross!! (+ a Holiday Treat)
Today was a public holiday in Queensland to commemorate Labour Day. I marked it by sleeping in. I must say, all these public holidays do make it hard to get work done.

In keeping with the holiday spirit, I placed a bet on an albatross race. I put out a statement about it, which you can read by clicking here, but basically it is an event aimed at helping conserve these birds, whose survival is threatened by longline fishing. I backed “Voyager”, which currently looks to be well back in the field of 17, although it's early days. The best way to help the albatross is for people to stop eating fish and encourage other people to move towards doing the same, but encouraging ways to reduce by-catch is certainly better than nothing.

This week also sees the holding of the British election, so I thought I’d mention a couple of UK political survey websites. If you’d like to find out who you should have voted for if you were a UK citizen, have a go at http://www.whoshouldyouvotefor.com/. It seems to me on the surface to be a reasonably good attempt at providing a genuine guide to voters. (In case you’re interested, I came up as a Liberal Democrat voter).

As a special holiday treat, here’s a second survey - http://www.politicalsurvey2005.com/ - also UK focussed. It doesn’t suggest who you should vote for, but instead plots your political position against all the other respondents. (I’m not telling what my result for this was, because it would just get me stuck in a political pigeon hole).

It appears Labour is as close as you can get to a sure bet at this election. According to Ladbrokes, the bookies for the bird race, if you bet $1.00 on Labour, you’ll get a return of $1.03. These are about the odds you would have got for the incumbent in elections in the USSR or Saddam’s Iraq, but it does help if the electoral system is massively stacked in your favour. It is ironic that while Britain was a pivotal nation in founding parliamentary democracy, it has such a primitive and blatantly unfair electoral system.

PS Despite my musings on election odds, my betting on an albatross race, and previous comments about punting on the Pope, I don’t think gambling significant amounts is a terribly smart thing to do with your money.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Monday, May 02, 2005 Permalink
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