Australians aren't very good at donating their organs. A comparison ORGAN DONATION RATE FOR SELECTED COUNTRIES with other countries puts us at the bottom of the list. Why this is so is uncertain. I don't think that we shy away from giving our body parts on moral grounds, indee...

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I hope all Troppo writers and readers have a wonderful 2005. May all your resolutions be kept and all your hopes be fulfilled. No doubt it will be a good year for the Australian blogosphere. It's nice to be able to welcome back Georg , formerly of Psephite , who's returned wit...

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The Currency Lad challenges "Laborite bloggers and columnists" to discuss the AWU's opposition to Chinese workers as guest workers in the fruit picking industry . I'm happy to take him up on it. The Labor Party was rightly condemned for some marginal seat campaigning in the el...

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2004 has been a political year par excellence , with elections in the US and Australia. As the turning of the year is always a good time to reflect, it's interesting to note some thoughtful posts appearing in the blogosphere of late. Don has posted a stimulating piece on the p...

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They've always been an entrepreneurial lot in the West, especially gifted at separating the fool and his money. This perception has been reinforced by Pierpont's dubious distinction awards for 2004. Following in the footsteps of the fellow who successfully claimed the stolen p...

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Charly Harpole went to Andaman Island to pursue his hobby. He found himself in the middle of a crisis. The Andaman and Nicobar Islands are among the most sought after contacts for amateur radio operators. So when the National Institute of Amateur Radio-sponsored DXpedition to...

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In the comments to this post , Geoff Honnor got a bit cranky, and it provoked the following exchange: At this time of year, I think the probable deaths of upwards of 50,000 people in an horrific natural disaster might rank higher than what Gerald Henderson - or even someone ot...

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John Quiggin's left wing conservatism Environmentalism has changed the way leftists think about government led social change. Like the natural environment, the social environment is complex and poorly understood. With their oversimplified models, reformers accept serious risk...

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'The Soothsayer', Giovanni Batista Piazetta (1683-1754) Or, The Tiny Hendo Hendo doesn't seem to have taken a break for the Christmas season, turning his talents rather in an increasingly mystical direction . In other media news, I've already complained about the tired trope o...

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I concur wholeheartedly with Scott's condolences for those affected by the terrible tsunamis. I've posted the links for readers in Scott's thread, but I'll repeat the post here of some links to bloggers advising of appeals which can be accessed online as well, as it's easier t...

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Via Suzoz at Personal Political , I've just discovered and read this interesting column about raising kids without any religion by Adele Horin in the SMH . Some time ago, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens , until recently Director of the LSE, noted that one marker of a p...

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Terrible earthquake in Indonesia has claimed an estimated 14,000 lives although it is quite possible that this number could climb much higher. See Tim Blair for many links about what is going on. There are estimated to be close to 6,000 Australians in the affected areas. If yo...

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Revellers on a Hot Hill End Night That's me in the middle. I don't normally wear Hawaiian shirts but it's a good troppo look. Well, all the presents are bought and only the grog remains (though I made a start on the bubbles on my partner's back deck last night relaxing with a...

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Just popped by to wish everyone a Merry Christmas etc. Jen and I have been doing battle with swimming pool installation and assorted other home establishment tasks, while Telstra finally informed me the other day that we can't get ADSL at our new home because it's on a "rim" a...

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The trouble began when Denis Diderot received a new dressing gown as a gift from a friend. It was far more luxurious than his old gown and he took to it at once. But next to the new dressing gown the furnishings of his study looked shabby. One by one Diderot replaced them. Soo...

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Tim Blair has put together some of the quotes of 2004. The year's nearly over. But the Currency Lad is writing some fine stuff as well. Me? I'm stuffing my face, and drinking lots of beer etc. Writing? Pfft.. I'll be back sometime after Christmas, but before New Year. Merry Ch...

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Or, Keep the Wolfe from the Door lest Western Civilisation fall... Shocking news from a US survey that college students are having casual sex. Chris McGillion writes: Research into the sexual practices of American college students has identified a new phenomenon known as "hook...

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At last, some insight into why John Quiggin is a Professor (I mean apart from all those publications, research projects etc...). New research has shown that academic promotions often go to the hirsute . ELSEWHERE : I missed my daily dose of Prof. Quiggin for a week or so, due...

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Via Saint , we learn that the Government has broken (or at least significantly tweaked) one of its big spending promises for the election. The "unlimited" child care rebate is now limited to $4000, you'll need to keep your receipts, and you won't see anything til 2006. Ross Gi...

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I've been keeping an eye on the nominations for the 2005 Australian Blog Awards . Good thing too. Courtesy of one of the nominations for Troppo (thanks everyone!), I discovered a fellow Brisvegas Blogger, Observant Little... , and one with good music taste and a shared fondnes...

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Tim Dunlop is reviewing Keith Windschuttle's latest potboiler, The White Australia Policy over at Road to Surfdom . So far Tim's got through the first two paragraphs. If he's going to review it paragraph by paragraph, I don't envy him the task!

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Just in case you were wondering if there was a "Single Girl's Guide to Dating Donald Rumsfeld" available on the Internet, Troppo can help you out. Read it here . It's worth the click.

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Continuing a much loved blogosphere tradition , Saintinastraightjacket and Sedge provide the minimalist deconstruction of Hendo this week ... I note that Hendo has a swing at the "Keating haters" and at "conservative inspired alienation". Maybe he's following the Governator in...

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Julia Baird asks : If God was a DJ, as smooth-bellied songstress Pink has claimed, would the disco version of the national anthem be four-to-the-floor? Would crowds swell and sway on the dance floor to a revved-up Advance Australia Fair, as they did some time ago to the disco...

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I've been looking for work. It is one of the things that keep me busy, busier then I like to be. I find the job-hunting task to be an exceptionally frustrating and difficult experience. It brings out the total 'procrastinator' in me. Applying for jobs requires an individual to...

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If my reckoning is correct, I've missed Gaudate Sunday. I was horribly late this year in purchasing Advent candles. I'm normally a very observant cultural Catholic . It should be the third Sunday of Advent, that is to say, a week ago. The great thing about Advent candles (a bi...

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Some of us were wondering in the thread about the SBS Movie Show what Zoe was on about when she compared Fenella Kernebone to Roger Waters. She's now provided a case for Ms Kernebone to answer at her blog Crazybrave . Go see for yourself and decide if Zoe's onto something here...

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I was a law student once. There's a fair bit of tedium in reading case reports, but I always enjoyed reading judgements by Lord Denning MR. Tim Dunlop over at Road to Surfdom thinks a citation from a recent judgement by Lord Hoffman is the quote of the year. Lord Hoffman think...

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"Angelus Novus" - Paul Klee Mein Fl¼gel ist zum Schwung bereit, ich kehrte gern zur¼ck, denn blieb ich auch lebendige Zeit, ich h¤tte wenig Gl¼ck. - Gerherd Scholem, 'Gruss vom Angelus' The Currency Lad has been busy ranking Australia's Prime Ministers . Gary Sauer-Thompson ov...

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Head down in heavy revisions of a forthcoming novel of mine (Malvolio's Revenge, a supernatural/mystery/melodrama of a story, set in 1910's New Orleans, with a cameo appearance by one of my favourite artists and cultural heroes, the great Louis Armstrong) I'm afraid blogging's...

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Australian film might be in strife but Oz Music is in good form. I'm taking a break from the thesifying to clean the ap't up in time for Christmas. That requires music! I'm listening to Beth Gibbons' Out of Season , the wonderful Sia (originally from Adelaide)... and something...

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There's been some lively debate, including a contribution from Rowan Atkinson , over planned British government moves to criminalise religious vilification. You can read about it here at Crooked Timber . It looks like we might soon be having an antipodean version of this debat...

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I am shocked and horrified. Clover Moore is not Scrooge, the Howard Government is! The parliamentary Christmas tree is no more. It's been sold to the ACT government and is now somewhere in Civic (alert Canberra readers, please tell us where!). It seems it was too expensive to...

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I wasn't going to bother with Hendo this week . In any case, Rowen at Sailing Close to the Wind has already posted 'The Smaller Hendo'. The Currency Lad has been on the case , or maybe at the awards ceremony, as well... But basically, Hendo was right about everything and all o...

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Having given up on wrestling with Leo Strauss' esoteric and exoteric meditations on the question of What is Political Philosophy? for the night and having exhausted the pleasures available from Letterman , it's a relief for this tired sociologist to read something in the paper...

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Andrew Norton has always been cynical about public displays of compassion. He can't bring himself to accept that the ' luvvies ' and ' worthies ' are motivated by empathic concern or moral principle. Like many classical liberals he's convinced it must be some kind of self-inte...

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Troppo Contest of the Week! Continuing the TV theme , I think I watched the worst ever American reality tv show set in Australia last night. Outback Jack . The host is called J. D. Roberto. The premise is that twelve "uptown girls" think they're going to a mansion to pick a ba...

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I caught SBS' Movie Show last night. I've only occasionally watched it since the departure of David and Margaret to ABC. I was half curious because the distinguished Mr Stratton has attracted some negative press in the right wing corners of the blogosphere of late . But the Da...

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Via Kick & Scream , I've just learned that the home-grown 2005 Australian Blog Awards have called for nominations. Interesting to note that Evil Pundit has already been nominated... I'm still wondering why he hates Sweden so much...

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Lately, we've heard an enormous amount about elites, (aka latte sippers) . A project for the future might be a post to put to rest this tenacious fallacy forever (I live in hope generally...). Often these dreaded elites are associated with universities. As the news breaks that...

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Rob Corr continues his excellent coverage of Indigenous issues at Kick & Scream . Rob picks up on Pat Dodson and Noel Pearson's critique of the Mulan 'agreement' : The Government had a role to play in increasing expectations in indigenous communities, but "more careful thought...

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Long before I started blogging, most of my online interaction with people was through chat-rooms. The first room that I made myself home in was a room dedicated to cricket fans, and through that room I met a lot of interesting people. It was great- we even did a get-together i...

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Writing in the SMH today , Edith Cowan Uni politics lecturer Peter Van Onselen and consultant Phil Senior call for Labor to focus on the bush. There are more rural/regional seats than outer metropolitan seats and Labor holds fewer of them. But Labor can't do that while the par...

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It's almost trite to point out that if you read the Latin poets of classical Rome, one thing you will come across again and again are laments about the moral standards of youth... and any readers of Robert Graves should be equally aware of Augustus' concern that sexual morals...

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Banning Santa is a great way to attract publicity With only 13 days left to Christmas it's time for newspapers and TV stations to track down politically correct kill-joys who want to ban Santa . If you're getting impatient for your 15 minutes of fame it's time to make your mov...

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In The Weekend Australian Magazine , Paul Kelly interviews the Prime Minister, in an interesting portrait of the very ordinary/extraordinary man who has dominated the political landscape of Australia since 1996. There is a online preview that can be read here . Left-wing reade...

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As promised, here are the awards for Mark's movie homage contest and my micro-story competition . Mark has passed me 3 envelopes. Here are the awards and the winners: Phil K. Dick Award (First Prize): Tie between Big Bob and Alan Dr Bloodmoney Award for the Commenter Who Alway...

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by commyxtion and mellyng, furst with Danes and afterward with Normans, in menye the contray longage ys apeyred, and som useth strange wlaffying, chyteryng, harryng, and garryng grisbittyng. That's Ranulph Higden, writing in 1352, and complaining in his Polychronicon about the...

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For as long as I can remember, I've been an aficionado of the spooky and supernatural in literature and film. Note, not horror exactly, or not as it's been interpreted in modern times, with altogether too much grue and gore, but the kind of spooky that evokes the strangeness o...

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It has been a long time since I wrote a serious post; many troubles have beset me, both in keeping this blog empire functioning, and away from the screen as well. Be that as it may, a serious post is in order lest this blog become known as the Daily Mark Bahnisch . The Left mi...

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Proponents claim that the precautionary principle is harmless but introducing it into public policy making may have dangerous unforeseen consequences Where an activity raises threats of harm to the environment or human health, precautionary measures should be taken even if som...

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Internet quizzes are always fun. Except for those pesky iq tests... Via internet quizzes, I first found out that I was 47% slutty , and that there was an 80% probability that I was a woman. Courtesy of Alex in a comment on a Catallaxy thread , here's a more serious internet qu...

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On the way home the other evening I was stopped at the round-about near home when a beautifully restored canary-yellow LJ Torana accelerated out of the corner and, with a delightful burble of the tweaked RED 273 cu inch six, carried it's pasengers off to enjoy life. Why does t...

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Coming up for air after an exhausting week in Sydney.. I was asked earlier if I had a list of recommended books for Christmas, so I thought I'd just talk about a few books I've enjoyed recently, suggest also some lesser-known classics, --and also note some books I hope I might...

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I told the story of Second Lieutenant Melissa Stockwell who lost her leg in Iraq because her Humvee had no doors. US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld was yesterday subjected to unexpected and critical questioning on a visit to US soldiers in Kuwait. One key point was that...

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Bloggers, of course! Commenter harry wrote a while back , in answer to my question, "To what degree do blogs represent a source of news or commentary on politics for you?": Great source of useful links to news. Good for breaking news but often this is surrounded by a lot of sp...

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Or, Yet Another Troppo Contest At Fafblog , the Medium Lobster has a post which begins: You're in a desert, walking along in the sand, when you look down and see a tortoise. This is standard procedure, designed and developed to protect you and the homeland. Do not be alarmed:...

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Since his death on the 8th of October, I've been planning to write something about Jacques Derrida . In particular, I want to write on his thought on politics, which has been key to my own work for some years now. But the time has not yet arrived. For the moment, The Nation ha...

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Geoff Clark, still Chair of ATSIC, asks today with reference to a new mutual obligation plan at the forefront of the Government's approach to Indigenous policy (aka the 'fuel for hygeine' plan ): "Who is going to stand at the gate and see whose kid has the cleanest face?" he s...

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Courtesy of the Sydney Morning Herald's new blog, Radar (note to SMH: if you're going to have a blog, please link to it on the front page!), some thoughts about why younger Australians are often working a 70 hour week. In Australia, contrary to a long secular trend (and in def...

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Posh and Becks feature in a nativity scene at Madame Tussaud's. Photo: Reuters. Continuing my musings on fame and its contemporary cultural significance, what's going on when our Nic is named UN Citizen of the World alongside Hans Blix and Lakhdar Brahimi, Angelina Jolie saves...

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Ross Gittins asks : Which do you think is more common: murder or suicide? If you think it's murder, congratulations - most people agree with you. But you - and they - are quite mistaken. Suicide outnumbers murder by far. That question is a cognitive psychologists' party trick....

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Brett Whiteley's ghost haunts BackPages In the week that a ghost fetched $65000 on Ebay , something spooky is also happening in the Australian blogosphere. It's not quite the face of ET in a piece of breakfast cereal, or the Virgin Mary on a piece of toast, but it's definitely...

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I agree with Hendo! Well, at least in part! Maybe it's because Hendo is trying to ward Chris Sheil off from a potential move back into the blogosphere by learning from Chris' frequent demolition of his logic to actually supply some, but last week I felt that Hendo made a bit o...

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Comments boxes not working? You might be using crap software. Thanks to ace technical consultant boynton , I learn that the cause of the comments box thing being forbidden is that users are using Internet Explorer! Oh, the shame! Get Real. Get Firefox! Of course, if you MUST u...

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I was chuffed today to discover that there is a tribute show to Leonard Cohen in Sydney headlined by Nick Cave and my absolute favourite songstress of all times, the wonderful Beth Orton . It's on over Australia Day weekend next year. I am so there. ESSENTIAL READING : Reading...

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Poor old Latho. In the wake of weeks of overwhelmingly negative press coverage , he's slumped in the polls and the party's slumped to lows not seen since Simon's leadership began to enter its terminal phase. But I don't think Ruddy's cause is going to be helped by an endorseme...

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Louise Dodson, writing in today's SMH , claims that the battle for the Catholic vote is not over. Bishop Kevin Manning, Catholic Bishop of Parramatta , had some acerbic and pointed remarks to make about the possibility of changes to the Industrial Relations laws by a coalition...

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Dresden after its WWII bombing. Thus, nuclear physicist Robert J. Oppenheimer after witnessing a nuclear explosion. In Ken's post on literature and world events, Stephen astutely cited the work of W. G. Sebald . A novelist, academic and critic, Sebald was born in Wertach im Al...

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"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." - George Orwell. Ken poses the question of why there seem to be so few writers tackling big issues of the stature of George Orwell . Maybe Orwell himself had the answer in his 1946 essay P...

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Where are the great popular novels, plays and films that grapple with today's major political and ideological issues? It's a question that occurred to me while watching a talkfest on ABC TV last night, where assorted pundits mused about a list of the ten most influential books...

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Is history really about psychological profiling? According to John Quiggin "There is only one real instance of political correctness in Australia today and that is that you are never, ever allowed to call anyone a racist." Why is this? For many people racism is a kind of psych...

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Many readers will have noticed that pressing the comments button will produce a 'forbidden' message. This is happening across the domain. I do not know why this is happening (it is not happening for me- everything seems fine here.) However, if this is happening for you, a way...

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Peter Beattie pictured in today's Sunday Mail . Taking photos is fun. I've recently bought a new mobile and being a nice boy, unlike some Coogee beach regulars , am avidly asking friends if I can have permission to take their photo. Being a newspaper photographer or an editor...

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Courtesy of Melbourne blogger Alex at Psephological Catechism (whose honours thesis on St Augustine looks to be really interesting), this news just in for Troppo readers. A Google search for the string fetishised armadillo only yields two results. And one is a link to a post b...

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Spectator Editor and former Tory Shadow Minister for the Arts, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson MP (pictured above with unnamed friends), provided the Oz blogosphere with some light entertainment recently with a juicy sex scandal , in the finest traditions of British politic...

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P. J. Harvey sings live... I'd been planning to write on the truly appalling line of questioning NSW Bar Association President and barrister for Tara Anglican School for Girls, Ian Harrison SC, launched during a recent court case where an 18 year old woman alleged that she had...

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An unfinished micro-story Gran says that putting sleeping pills in Santa's milk was wrong. But I still think it was a good plan. If mummy hadn't drunk the milk that I left beside the tree for Santa and if she hadn't fed the carrots and celery to the rabbits, then everything wo...

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This is only a quick word as I'm in Sydney at Literature Board meetings and other literary business, but thought some of you might like to read my profile at Norm Geras' wonderful blog, here It was very interesting answering the questions--and one I'd like to throw open for ge...

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Stephen posted recently on some laughably bad coverage of the Ukrainian elections aftermath by John Laughland . Writing in the Guardian , Timothy Garton Ash thinks European commentators have a problem with democracy in the Ukraine because of their distaste for Eastern European...

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So what exactly gets up employers' goat about union officials visiting workplaces ? When this issue is raised, stories are often told about intimidatory behaviour on building sites. But, no such justification has been offered this time. The only actual incident I can recall as...

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Brisvegas residents or visitors might like to note that the Straight Out of Brisbane Festival has an event on tonight which could appeal to anyone with a predilection to (occasional) ranting: 6-8pm :: The great ideas rant-off :: Venue :: Festival Club Speakers OUT, Ranters IN....

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The Finn brothers have been touring Australia . So I'm currently listening to Split Enz' excellent Moving Pictures (now playing - 'Poor Boy'...). Being a teenager of the 80s, (and one whose lp collection succumbed to a flood under a Queenslander), my first listen for yonks is...

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Brendan Nelson has announced the composition of his literacy enquiry. The establishment of this review was a response to the heated (and over-politicised) debate over the relative merits of whole language and phonics as methods of teaching children to read. A surprise inclusio...

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I recently posted on the imbroglio swirling around St. Mary's Catholic Community in South Brisbane. Today, Father Peter Kennedy of St. Mary's takes Archbishop Bathersby to task in the Courier-Mail . Fr Peter accuses the Church of being out of step with a democratic society. Th...

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According to the US publishers of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary , the most frequently searched word on their online site this year has been "blog" ... It's interesting to note that in an election year, five of the other nine words were political terms (eg "electoral", "sovere...

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Celebrity Capital: Rebecca Loos Writing in the online Fairfax publication Radar , Ben Cubby asks : Is Casey Donovan really Australia's most promising young singer? Possibly. But for every enraptured viewer loosing off votes for Australian Idol there was someone watching the pa...

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Published in both of Fairfax broadsheets this morning are Op-Ed articles by John Laughland , which attempt to provide the most generous spin possible for the Yanukovich government in Ukraine. Surprisingly this article was sourced from the Guardian , the same newspaper that pub...

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In my post on Redfern , I referred in passing to the the actions of Sydney Archbishop Cardinal Pell in appointing conservative Priests from the Neo-Catechumenate movement to St. Vincent's, once the parish of Fr Ted Kennedy and a hub for the Indigenous community - a subject of...

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Friday marks the 150th anniversary of the Eureka Rebellion. For all I know, this might be big news in Victoria, but I suspect the current debate over the cultural and political significance of this event is not being widely heeded. But it's worth taking a look at. Let's start...

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For anyone who might be idly curious about my continuing blogging absence, here's an update. Jen and I have moved successfully into our new home, and we're very comfortable. We're even getting a pool installed starting tomorrow, a week ahead of schedule. So we'll be swimming b...

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At the suggestion of commenter Alex on an earlier thread about the electoral and policy ways forward for the ALP , this is a thread thrown open for any readers who'd like to give the ALP an early Christmas present and suggest a philosophical/political strategy to re-invigorate...

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America's young conservatives have President Bush confused with Buffy the Vampire Slayer Take the National Review Online's Jonah Goldberg for example. Even conservatives have reason to "cheer the immense popularity of the Buffyverse," he wrote in June this year . Why? Because...

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Or, The End of Empire Part Two John Quiggin has an excellent take on the US Imperial overstretch I commented on in an earlier post .

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As Latho multiplies the apologies by adding one to all of us for the Labor Party's latest bout of navel gazing and back biting , finally someone in the ALP has something sensible to say. Wayne Swan's staffer, Denis Glover, calls on the party not to ditch the elites . Analysing...

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Photo by the Sydney Morning Herald's Dean Sewell. There could be trouble ahead in Redfern. I can remember when, in search of affordable hotel accommodation attending a conference at Sydney Uni in 1998, I stayed in nearby Chippendale. The hotel manager warned me not to walk the...

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It's been an amazing spring here in New England. There's been a lot of good rain followed by warm weather, so the countryside looks fantastic--green and lush, with flowers everywhere and lots of budding fruit (and sadly, lots of flies, too--the sheep farmers must be having a d...

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I don't often agree with observa, a frequent commenter on this and other blogs. However, I was struck with this comment on the Latho thread : one of the great attributes that Howard has, is a management style that allows the various personalities to make the running from time...

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Journalists everywhere are wringing their their hands about the consequences of Australia's ageing population . But why is it that they have left out the most important part of the demographic transition? In the future, old people will become drug-crazed cyborgs. Falling ferti...

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There is a good review in the Guardian by Simon Waldman of Dan Gillmor's new book on the impact of blogging on journalism , We The Media . And the Guardian is also raising the profile of the British blogosphere for its readership with a competition for the Best British Blog ....

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Well, it'll be an interesting day in Canberra tomorrow when the ALP Shadow Cabinet meets. Mark Latham, who increasingly finds himself subject to leadership destabilisation , has taken the bit between his teeth and vowed to discipline Senator Stephen Conroy, the Labor Senate De...

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Nightmares including SQL databases crashing, and the like. UPDATE- Everything seems to be back to normal. The SQL part of the server crashed, and I had to remember to repair the database. Once I did that, everything worked, except for Troppo, which required a rebuild. To see h...

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We seem to be returning to Ancient Greece for our film plots. The latest entry in this genre, Alexander , being an Oliver Stone film, has stirred up some controversy . And it's not just about Colin Farrell's silly wig, or Angelina Jolie's portraying his mum when she's only a y...

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Yesterday I bought, and am nearly finished(it's a real page-turner, you see!), a new and very enjoyable crime novel, The Walker, by a new Australian author, Jane R.Goodall. Set in London in 1971, with a prologue in 1967, it's a very spooky, well-written and unsettling read abo...

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Paul Keating's intervention during the 1996 election campaign when he claimed that Asian leaders wouldn't deal with John Howard is almost universally recognised as a big mistake. Of course, a lot of odd things are said on the hustings - well, that is to say, impromptu odd thin...

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Over at Kick & Scream , Rob Corr's commenters kick around the idea of another non RWDB-centric Australian Blog Award. Rob also has some interesting thoughts on bloggers and commenters meeting in "real life". I'd be interested in hearing Troppo readers' perspective on this. Do...

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Tim Dunlop is complaining about the prevalance of creationist ideas , and notes that it is not just a US problem: Speaking completely anecdotally, I have a cousin who is a geologist and who was doing surveys in NSW a few years back. He said he had to speak to a lot of property...

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Around the time of the US election, Don and I had quite a few posts about the cultural divide in the Land of the Free and its implications for politics. For new readers wanting some background, go here , here , here and here for a sense of the debate... Continuing this convers...

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Norm Geras had on his site today a link to a great article by the wonderful Philip Pullman, author of His Dark Materials and the Sally Lockhart Quartet, amongst others, about adaptation, from novel to stage as opposed to film. It is well worth reading--as always, with Philip,...

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Today is moving day, when Ken and Jen move into the new nest we've been preparing. The removalists are due at Jen's place at 7am, and at my joint some indeterminate time later to move the piano and the rest of my worldly goods for the third time in 12 months (aaagh). I'll prob...

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Or at least February? More reports are in today suggesting that Latho's shelf life may be very limited , with the leaks turning into a stream and the knives well and truly unsheathed. I commented in an earlier thread that any attempt on Latho's part to reach out to new constit...

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In his SMH column today, Ross Gittins reports on some interesting new research which shows that while Independent Schools do better in getting students into Uni, these same students are out-performed in first year by students from Government and Catholic schools. Gittins also...

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Do films based on printed fiction do justice to their source? Or do they trash the original spirit of the book? Can a film be better than the book it's based on? Or is it always, inevitably less satisfying? I don't think there are general answers to those vexed questions, but...

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Now is the time to submit your nomination for Best Australian Blog . Apparently, according to Jess at Ausculture , Tim Blair wins every year. Will this poll break the run of the 'coalition of the willing'? UPDATE: David Tiley advises us in comments below of another Best Austra...

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As the Sydney Morning Herald reports that a new BBC Channel 4 reality tv series will show footage of couples having sex (in a tasteful way and for educational purposes, of course), news.com.au brings us the tantalising tidbit that Gretel Killeen has dumped Saxon . The wonderfu...

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Have you ever thought that music, even instrumental music, shows definite national characteristics--that Russian music sounds, well, Russian, and French French, and German German, and English English, and so on? Well, it's not just an instinctive, slightly politically incorrec...

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Sadly, BackPage s is no more , but Gerard Henderson continues to provide fuel for bloggers' illogic spotting impulses . In today's Sydney Morning Herald , Henderson tackles Latho's triangulation dependency . Mark Latham is a long-time proponent of the Blairite 'Third Way', fro...

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One of the unpleasant things about being in the literary field is the snobbery that surrounds the definition of 'literature'. There are people who seem to think that if a novel is accessible, fun, and exciting with a gripping story and vivid characters, it's bound to be bad li...

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Knowing the academic bent of Troppo readers, I thought I would advise that Google has a new offering - Google Scholar . The aim is: Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts a...

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Yes, you read correctly. The great German sociologist Max Weber once answered the perennial question of whether religion was primarily conservative or progressive in nature through a discussion of theodicy. His answer was that it can be either. Theodicy is the philosophical pr...

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No, James Naughtie is not a Tory MP. Rather, he's a British journalist who's just published a rather interesting book called The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the Presidency . Naughtie's analysis of the close identification between Blair and Bush is fascinating - and rev...

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Or, Latho's Farewell to the Working Class Robert Reich, Harvard Economist and Clinton's Labor Secretary, made something of a splash in policy terms with his coinage of the term "symbolic analysts" in his 1992 book The Work of Nations . Reich argued that comparative advantage i...

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Sometimes I get an overwhelming feeling I'm living in a strange and totally alien world where almost everyone is quite mad. Or maybe I am? How could anyone not question reality itself when a fat ugly chick who shouts wins Australian Idol , and the world's worst batsman scores...

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The other reading problem According to the Australian's Janet Albrechtsen teachers have been inflicting 'whole language' teaching on kids for more than 30 years and the consequences have been disastrous. If this was the whole story you'd expect to find that Australians who sta...

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She's 18 , anti-nazi , and wants drugs decriminalized . Why is this news? Well... her name is Julia Bonk , she looks like this , and she's been elected to parliament in Saxony.

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I have just spent the last hour deleting and rebuilding over 400 spam comments that came in a wave just after midnight. I'm trying to watch the soccer, not hacking away with this blog all night. But it only took that long because the server was belching under the assault. Once...

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I know I'm supposed to be one of those over-educated lefties but one thing I love is a good hamburger. Hamburgers and beer. What could be better on a Friday night? The trouble is, most of the burgers you buy at the big chains are gross. The beef patties are small and thin, the...

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Last night, we watched 1940's The Philadelphia Story (starring Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart and Cary Grant), the latest in a long line of old romantic comedies that we've greatly enjoyed--mostly, much, much more than modern romantic comedies. And it set me thinking again a...

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The playboy, the lawyer, the Catholic college, and the big fat burger The Sydney Morning Herald is carrying a third-hand story about Hardee's new ' Monster Thickburger .' But do a little Googling and things get a lot more interesting. If you're going to do cut-and-paste journa...

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Sad day. Christopher Sheil has given up blogging , at least for six months or so while he finishes writing a book. The blogosphere will be a less interesting place without him. Chris and I didn't always see eye-to-eye (to put it fairly mildly), but he is an unfailingly thought...

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What with most southern capitals facing severe water shortages and scorching summer temperatures already beginning to occur (I gather it was 37 in Adelaide yesterday), it's an opportune time for passionate advocates of the Kyoto Climate Protocol to start ratcheting up the rhet...

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Well, the SMH is playing host again to a Masson family piece! This time, it's actually a Masson-Leach piece, our youngest son, 15 year old Bevis, writing an opinion piece about the joys of skateboarding , free of the controls of well-meaning programs like the government-funded...

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I think with Sophie on board we'll have to start a Troppo Literary Award! Stimulated by Sophie's post on Les Murray , I've been pondering the lack of popular or media recognition of some for our excellent emerging and young poets. This is no doubt partly explained by the econo...

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For fellow admirers of Les Murray, here's some fantastic just-breaking news: the latest international honour to be awarded to our greatest poet. I had it hot from the lips of my agent, Margaret Connolly, who is also Les' agent. Les will be awarded one of Italy's top literary h...

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I can remember sitting in an undergrad Political Sociology lecture in 1991 and hearing the acerbic Lecturer authoritatively state "Women in politics are only suited to nurturing roles, like Minister for Families or Social Welfare". I piped up, "What about Joan Kirner and Carme...

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Yesterday, when I was talking to one of my France-based sisters over the phone, she told me my 21 year old nephew Stanislas, who's been training as a helicopter combat pilot in the French Army, may well be sent off to the Ivory Coast soon as part of the 4,000 strong French tro...

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The months of October and November are sometimes referred to as suicide season in Darwin. Even when, like me, you're having too much fun to consider such a drastic solution for existential angst, the unremitting humidity still breeds rampant crutch rot while the screeching of...

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Chris Sheil has brought us a marvellous story - you read it first in the Australian blogosphere (unless you're a Guardian subscriber, of course). The Tory Shadow Minister for the Arts, Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, also editor of The Spectator , has had to resign after l...

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Politics looks complicated but it's actually very simple. As an aspiring leader you are looking for people to follow you, to be inspired by your penetrating insights, to hand out how-to-vote cards for you, and - most important of all - to love you. So here's how it works. Thin...

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Journalists, academics, and educators in the United States are constantly hounded by right-to-lifers, evangelicals, and creationists demanding that their opinions on scientific topics be given the same weight as those of mainstream researchers. The latest example of this is th...

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Fantasy fiction, like crime fiction, looks set to becoming one of the dominant cultural genres, in both books and films. In books, fantasy is making huge inroads; not only was Lord of the Rings voted top book of the 20th century by a majority of readers in the English-speaking...

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Observant and long-time readers will certainly have noticed "spam" comments popping up frequently in Troppo's "most recently commented posts" sidebar. I say "observant" readers because the spam never lasts very long. I delete it as soon as I see it, and that's always within an...

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(via Chris Sheil ) Here's a passionate if profane rant about those Bible Belt Republicans whose votes may or may not have been crucial to Bush's election victory. It echoes and amplifies this passage from a MSN Slate article by Daniel Gross that I quoted at the bottom of a rec...

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One of the remarkable aspects of the high profile achieved by conservative Christians as a result of the recent US and Australian elections has been the claim that they represent a reassertion of much-needed "values" in western society. The tacit assumption inherent in that cl...

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During the election, a number of groups including the AMA noted the inattention paid by both political parties to urgent issues about the living standards, economic outcomes and health of Indigenous Australians. After the abolition of ATSIC earlier in the year (supported by La...

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I'm not sure if there's actually going to be a definitive answer to this question in this post, but I'd like at least to advance some ideas as to why so many Aussie films flop with punters, and often with critics too. First of all, there is, with several honourable exceptions,...

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Tim Blair isn't a dumb guy but you'd hardly call him an education expert . Across the internet Ayn Rand loons , von Mises enthusiasts , and even the exceedingly grumpy Phyllis Schlafly have been denouncing a teaching method called 'whole language.' Obviously it's possible to d...

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From Nietzsche's Zarathustra : State is the name of the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it tells lies too: and this lie crawls out of its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people.' That is a lie! It was creators who created peoples and hung a faith and a love over them: thus t...

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I was a child who was often 'away with the fairies' --the very first book I remember reading was a Little Golden Book(in French) of three fairytales--Rapunzel, Beauty and the Beast and Toads and Diamonds. Stories about once upon a time in a kingdom far far away were guaranteed...

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As I mentioned in my earlier posting (Screen pleasures), I did not have TV when I was growing up, as my parents found it second-rate and a waste of time, compared to films. That didn't stop us children from being quite 'au fait' with a lot of TV programmes, mostly because we'd...

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In the course of wrestling with a half-written post about the influence of neoconservative thinkers (especially Leo Strauss and Alan Bloom) on current US politics (foreshadowed here ), I've found myself being diverted onto exploring the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, not least b...

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Loquacious commenter Nick has contributed a long but interesting soliloquy on the mentality and concerns of the average American voter. However, what most struck me about his analysis was that his list of "tsunamis on the horizon" didn't include any economic factors. Nor has t...

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Or, What We Really Know about the "Culture Wars" and American Elections Who'd have thought that Thomas Frank and class analysis would set the Australian political blogosphere on fire in our attempts to analyse the American election? Ken's sought to douse the theoretical flames...

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They get to be too busy to blog. I promised Ken a post as to my views on the US elections; my post got overtaken by events, and by the time I will have time to finish it, it will be very stale indeed. But I notice much angst about 'the state of the left' in electoral terms, bo...

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The lot of a political centrist is sometimes not a happy one. Lately I've been suffering pangs of angst and self-doubt. After joining the anti-Howard and anti-Bush camps for the recent elections and jinxing both of them, I couldn't help wondering whether I might be suffering a...

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Thomas Frank - critical theory, prairie style When John Quiggin reviewed Thomas Frank's One Market Under God (2000) he was surprised to find a reference to Osama bin Laden. The book gave Quiggin the "eerie impression that Frank, writing at the end of the twentieth century, had...

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Chris Sheil at Backpages , Don Arthur here at Troppo and myself in an earlier post have all been picking up on the work of Thomas Frank in an attempt to understand what happened in the US election. The more I reflect on this, the more I realise that what we've all done - in di...

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When a society becomes as rich as the United States status is no longer about quantity - how big your house is or how many cars you own - it's about quality. Today status is more about what your possessions say about you as a person. And the trouble with status in 21st century...

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It looks like the blue states and the red states split in the US presidential poll is almost identical to the results in 2000, and both Houses of Congress are still almost evenly poised - with some small movement to the GOP. Chris Sheil's post at Backpages and comments there b...

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Tim Dunlop sums up my thoughts about the US Presidential election and likely future prospects far better than I could have done myself. But read John Quiggin as well for more detail on the economic dimension.

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According to this story at News Online, citing this story at MSN Slate, exit polling shows Kerry leading Bush in a tight contest in the late afternoon in the US. Of course, exit polls are dubiously reliable . But pending meaningful real results, they at least give us something...

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If Bush is re-elected tomorrow, there is speculation that Colin Powell will step down and Paul Wolfowitz (currently Deputy Secretary of Defence and the most senior Neo-Conservative in the administration) will take his place as Secretary of State. If Bush loses (and I'm hoping...

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Troppo talks to Jon Kudelka about the Prime Minister, weapons of mass destruction, and Star Wars "I was hoping to get the phrase 'fully operational death star' on the front page of the national broadsheet" says cartoonist Jon Kudelka , "There was beer in it." Kudelka has been...

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I was brought up on films as well as books, and the silver screen loomed quite large in our family story. My paternal grandfather worked as a cameraman in the French film industry in the inter-war period, and indeed the story goes that he stood in for Douglas Fairbanks Jr, who...

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When politicians make ignorant statements in an election run-up period, there's a fair chance they're focus group-driven and designed to cater to the lowest common denominator of public taste. When they do it immediately afterwards, however, it's a good bet they're just displa...

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I remember reading somewhere that The Australian's columnist Janet Albrechtsen has a law degree. If that's right, she should know better than to make this silly statement in a recent article where she slagged High Court Justice Michael Kirby: Gleeson could have added that he,...

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John Gray provocatively begins his interesting article "The Curious Dogmatism of Atheists" ( reprinted in Friday's Fin ) with the assertion that - A revival of atheism is a curious byproduct of the September 11 attacks. We've read a lot recently about religion and politics, wh...

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I never believed the hopeful myth that Osama bin Laden was just a smear of DNA in a cave in Tora Bora. I mean, this was a guy who'd survived the war with the Soviets and then years of being tracked by Western and Arab intelligence services, long before 9/11, not to speak of su...

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Just a very quick post, to draw attention to Julia Baird's op-ed column in today's Sydney Morning Herald, which quotes yours truly a couple of times, one from my book In Hollow Lands, once from my controversial piece the other day. It's generally about Halloween; and she has i...

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Or so said Second Lieutenant Melissa Stockwell on her return to the States after a routine trip in a Humvee from the Green Zone in Baghdad to the morass of Mosul outside Iraq's sanitised Western occupied zone led to an attack on her armoured vehicle, which because of the disor...

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"Cute kittens grow up to be cute cats" writes Arthur Chenkoff . They sure do! Take Private Hammer for example. Hammer is a brave tabby cat who provided some much appreciated support to American soldiers in Iraq: "He was born at the site," said Staff Sgt. Rick Bousfield. "There...

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Troppo is gaining a decidedly genteel, cerebral flavour of late. Nothing wrong with that, but for this Scots-Irish member of the oz trailer-trash class there's a need for an occasional leavening of down-market physicality. And what better way to do it than muse about Brigid De...

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I've been reading two very different, but equally extraordinary books recently. One's a huge, sprawling novel--the amazing first novel of English author Susanna Clarke--'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell.' The other's a huge, sprawling combination of history and intelligence inv...

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Peter Hartcher hypothesises in this morning's SMH that Bush will win next week's US Presidential election despite his poor economic stewardship and a botched occupation of Iraq that may yet turn into a Vietnam-style quagmire. The reason? Scots-Irish "trailer trash" support the...

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It's the trinity of spring in our productive garden, in our cool highlands climate where the traditional seasons really mean something. By the time eagerly-awaited spring rolls in, we're all heartily tired of eating those hardy winter stalwarts, leeks, 'a toutes les sauces' ,...

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Nicholas Kristof says President Bush cares more about 'higher meta-truths' than facts. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof illustrates George W Bush's "casual relationship with truth" by quoting a short passage from Bush's autobiography: One night, Laura and I were out o...

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Or is Wicca a legitimate religion? Sophie's stirred Troppo commenters up into a debate questioning whether membership of the Church of Satan ought to be considered a legitimate religion. Among other things, I do some work in the sociology of religion, and having published some...

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The op-ed debate about the merits or otherwise of Indian author Arundhati Roy being awarded this year's Sydney Peace Prize is apparently being conducted in an alternative fantasy universe. I can't think of any other explanation for Sydney Peace Foundation Director Stuart Rees'...

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As readers will see from the post immediately below, Sophie Masson has joined the growing team of Troppo bloggers. She probably won't have time to blog very frequently, being a busy working author and occasional op-ed pundit in the daily press, Quadrant and elsewhere. I'll pos...

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Springtime greetings to all Troppo Armadillos from your newest blogger! And for my first post, I'd like to start with a piece which began life inspired by the reactions of some Troppo critics to my recent piece in the Sydney Morning Herald , about Satanism. I don't intend to d...

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Wendy provided me with some food for thought the other day when she serendipitously drew my attention via her post on a light switch puzzle to the fact that the English political philosopher Norman Geras has a blog . Geras is the author of an excellent book, The Contract of Mu...

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It's the quirky news story of the week. Leading Hand Cranmer, 24, a technician on board HMS Cumberland , has been given permission to perform Satanic rituals at sea. According to Warlock Helnock , editor of Rule Satannia magazine: Chris did a piece for issue 5 of Rule Satannia...

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Don Watson has a new book called Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words, Contemporary Clichés, Cant and Management Jargon . I don't know if it's any good but the image of a weasel sucking out the contents of an egg while leaving the shell intact has always appealed to me. Accordi...

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Writing in today's SMH, someone named Peter Bartlett reckons diversity is overrated when it comes to media ownership. "Synergies" are far more important: To ensure a high standard of media requires high quality people and players, providing resources to investigate and follow...

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Is there a 'counter-cultural conspiracy' to keep conservative Christian opinion out of the media? Political activism is more about mobilizing existing attitudes than it is about cultivating new ones. As a result, one of the best ways to influence public opinion is to keep view...

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Rocco Buttiglione believes that homosexuality is a sin, that the EU risks being swamped by asylum seekers, and that supporters of free markets should not form alliances with libertines. Activists like to portray Australia as a uniquely racist nation. They tell us that the civi...

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This comment a few minutes ago by the aptly nick-named "fool" is fairly typical of comments on very old Troppo posts. Comments on old posts are almost always either blog spam or moronic (and sometimes both). In fact, the entire Ubersportingpundit empire (including Troppo ) has...

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Former Whitlam Minister Barry Cohen postulates a provocative reason why, at least in his opinion, current federal ALP politicians lack breadth of policy vision and an ability to engage effectively with the interests and concerns of ordinary Australians. Their career paths and...

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(via Gary Sauer-Thompson ) Frequent Troppo readers will be aware that American jurisprudential scholar Ronald Dworkin is one of my intellectual heroes. Phillip Adams' favourite borrowing source the New York Review of Books has just published a multiple author article titled Th...

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(via Catallaxy ) The release of a study by the Communications Law Centre of the University of New South Wales on social attitudes to several behaviours including smoking marijuana, homosexuality and adultery throws the issue of defamation law reform into sharp relief. As CLC's...

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What odds Mark Latham will still be ALP leader in six months time, with all these frontbenchers voting with their feet? The cover story that he's just clearing away the deadwood from the Hawke and Keating years certainly doesn't apply to Lindsay Tanner or Annette Ellis (althou...

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As a bred (if not born) Queenslander with a long memory of the Joh years, I can never quite recapture the feeling of relaxation that used to wash over me driving over the NSW border into the land of Wran in 1985 and 1986. I was having a beer with a couple of friends on Saturda...

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As readers will notice from the post immediately below, Mark Bahnisch has joined the ever-growing team of Troppo bloggers. Mark is employed at QUT as a sociologist, has a first class honours degree in Industrial Relations from Griffith and a Graduate Diploma in Industrial Rela...

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Robert Manne is an interesting thinker. His personal trajectory from anti-communist intellectual and ideological conservative to social democrat has been well documented in his own writings and in reports on the controversy over the end of his editorship of Quadrant magazine....

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What do evangelical Christian journalists mean by 'objectivity'? The current issue of the Columbia Journalism review carries a story about the World Journalism Institute - an institution which "seeks to identify aspiring journalists who are Christians and help them become prof...

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Is opposition to fundamentalist Christianity a kind of prejudice? The Democrats in America are increasingly influenced by an educated urban elite who intensely dislike fundamentalist Christians, say two American academics. According to Louis Bolce and Gerald D Maio data from t...

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Religious people have some wacky beliefs. But do they have an obligation to justify them to the rest of us? Philosopher Jamie Whyte is cranky about the way religious people can get away with believing whatever they want. "An interesting change has happened" he said, "It used t...

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Don Arthur's post about Miranda Devine's latest ravings generated some comment box discussion about the extent to which the "yoof" vote might have been part of the reason for the Coalition's strong election showing. Don's post seems tacitly to assume that yoof still tend to vo...

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In the course of one of his repetitive self-pitying anti-babyboomer rants , Paul Watson raises a question that has interested me for some time. That is, the extent to which modern Australian society still involves some reasonably intact version of an extended family structure,...

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Loyal RWDB that he is, Professor Bunyip gleefully reproduces the American blogospherical right's latest attempt to smear Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry over his Vietnam war service, while simultaneously putting an ingeniously innocuous spin on the fact that Presi...

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The most enjoyable thing about a Miranda Devine column is the unintended irony. Devine's latest piece - 'Riding the Conservative Revolution' - starts off by making fun of Daily Telegraph letter writer, Petrina Frost . Silly old Petrina couldn't understand how John Howard could...

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The prospect that the Howard Government might have a Senate majority in its own right has some giddying ramifications, and it has caused some Liberals to become, err, rather ambitious about the sort of reforms that the government can and should make. Obviously, as a old fashio...

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I must have been around 12 years old when my liberal minded parents handed me over the fundamentalist Christians. Every Sunday, and sometimes during school holidays, the youth leaders taught us catchy songs and explained how we could avoid spending eternity in hell. My mum use...

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Tim Dunlop is very very rude about a bloke named Jim Wallace , who is executive chairman of the ominously-titled Australian Christian Lobby. We here at Troppo Armadillo are much more deeply civil, but I must agree Tim has a point. Wallace unsurprisingly claims that " Christian...

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Today is the second anniversary of the terrible tragedy in Bali, where 202 people were killed. I was watching Sky News this morning when I noticed an old familiar face- Damian Squire and his girlfriend have returned to Bali to commemorate those that died. Damian Squire is a st...

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American progressives have spent decades struggling with the moral politics of the right. But for the Australian left a morally motivated opponent is something new. Activists who developed their campaigning skills fighting neoliberalism in the 1980s and 90s risk being out mane...

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To help readers get a bit of perspective and rise above the depression or elation of the election outcome, I thought I'd draw attention to an interesting post by Andrew Leigh of Imagining Australia (the blog rather than the book), where he nominated the three best things Austr...

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A major factor in whether the present Coalition government surmounts the challenge posed by its remarkable electoral success and goes on to achieve Menzies-like longevity, will be whether Howard and the rest of his leadership team are capable of exercising wisdom and restraint...

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If I never hear another Labor "strategist" claim that the ALP lost because of Howard's "great interest rate lie" it will be too soon. As Paul Kelly pointed out on the ABC TV Insiders program this morning, the real reason Labor lost so badly was because most of the polls showed...

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We should have known, really. The election eve flagship polls are just as conflicted as the earlier ones. Morgan has Labor a shade in front at 51-49 2PP; ACNeilsen has the Coalition in front by a country mile at 54-46; and Newspoll has them 50-50. So anyone's guess is as good...

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I was talking on the phone to my brother the other day and, included amongst the trivia that expands our conversations; the state of Dad's health, child pornography, our travel plans (he's going to Europe via the Trans Siberian railway next year, I'm following the Silk Road to...

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Thus spoke the Chief Armadillo : I suspect the reality is that it remains impossible to predict with confidence who's going to win. He's quite right. To me it does seem impossible to have any confidence in an election prediction. But if pressed, I would predict a.... ...fairly...

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With so much commentary on the upcoming contest between "Ease the Squeeze" and "Be Inert and Embalmed" I thought I'd shift attention to Scandinavia where once again a decision will be shortly announced for the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. If I were not so time-p...

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As you can see from the post immediately below, Don Arthur has joined the Troppo blogging mob. Don is a longstanding stop-and-start blogger, due to the demands of employment and postgraduate study and research. His most recent blog is here , but Don found he was unable to upda...

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In a series of posts John Quiggin argues that the era of dry politics is over (see here , here , and here ). Andrew Norton almost agrees . He argues that market oriented reform is here to stay, but so is big government. In the US the Weekly Standard 's Fred Barnes writes that...

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The more I think about it, the more depressingly convinced I become that Howard is going to win on Saturday. It's not just the opinion polls or Howard's confident demeanour, or the fact that the betting markets have turned decisively against Labor. It's also that basic conserv...

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John Quiggin hypothesises that John Howard's new-found enthusiasm for tax-and-spend policies may be based on " a fundamental change of view about what the Australian public wants from governments, one in which more and better services rank ahead of tax cuts ", rather than just...

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It seems that my previous posts on values ( here and here ) were reflecting the zeitgeist to an even greater extent than I imagined. At the same time, High Court Chief Justice Murray Gleeson was also reflecting on the role of values (albeit from the perspective of a judge call...

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As has happened through most of the election campaign period, two of the major opinion polls are contradicting each other, and the latest Newspoll is yet to be released. ACNeilsen shows the Coalition comfortably in front (52% to 48% in two-party preferred terms) while Morgan's...

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Fortuitously given the ongoing skirmish between Chris Sheil and myself about the utility of the label "left", RWDB bete noire David Marr delivered a long lecture partly on that very subject a couple of days ago. It's reproduced at tiresome length on Margo's Web Diary. Incident...

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Christopher Sheil , the blogger about whom one dare not speak the name "left", posts an extract from a new book by animal lib Oz philosopher Peter Singer, which deconstructs/demolishes the libertarian justification of inalienable rights to private property. Of course, there ar...

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I mused the other day about the fact that the large increase in Australia's newly-discovered projected consolidated revenue surplus, along with Howard's cynical spending promises in its wake, created a real opportunity for Mark Latham to " promise some really meaningful major...

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The God-botherers have entered the federal election campaign in a big way, with Catholic and Anglican leaders expressing public concern about the ALP's schools funding policy. Why the Catholics should do so, given that their schools are clear beneficiaries of the policy, is be...

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A few days ago I noticed a comment from Mark Bahnisch that indicated he had some experience in the industrial relations field, and had been a consultant to the Queensland government. Given that I have no particular expertise in the area myself and that the Howard government is...

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When US television network CBS presented explosive political documents without enquiring too closely as to their actual credibility, they unleashed a firestorm from US bloggers who quickly identified the documents as fakes. Soon enough, the ferment from political bloggers spre...

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JOHN Howard yesterday doubled his campaign spending promises in one unprecedented wallop, with a $6 billion package aimed primarily at young families and small business. Both John Quiggin and The Australian editorial today describe it as profligate and spending money "like dru...

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Catallaxy's Heath Gibson has made a comeback to blogging with a heartfelt mea culpa for his support of the US-led Iraq war and occupation. I supported the war as well (albeit with reservations). However, I didn't retire from blogging when I discovered I'd been wrong. Moreover,...

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Just as the polls early this week showed Labor clearly ahead (supposedly to an extent exceeding margin of error), so the ones released at the end of the week show the Coalition ahead by similar decisive margins. Bryan Palmer covers the latest polls here . Does public voting se...

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The RWDBs seem to automatically dismiss The Age's Ken Davidson as a communard dolt. So posting an item agreeing with him isn't likely to endear me to the anti-luvvies. But we centrists call it as we see it without fear or favour. Davidson raises a critical issue in his column...

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Isn't it interesting how captive Tory mouthpieces like Tim Blair and Terry McCrann only become interested in emphasising (or even mentioning) opinion polling margins of error when the polls start showing a clear ALP lead?! Left and centre blogs (like Troppo , Chris Sheil and B...

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For masochists who found the Great Debate between Howard and Latham to be rivetting television, and who have an interest in matters legal, you may wish to view the webcast of the Great Legal Debate between Coalition cadaver and Attorney-General Philip Ruddock and his Labor cou...

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Apparently not all armadillos believe in deep civility. Nor are we all non-aligned centrists. Apparently some are even would-be active supporters of John Howard's vision of Australia's role in South-East Asia.

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(via a commenter on Chris Sheil's blog) This admirably detailed post on an American blog called Simply Appalling highlights and analyses the finding of the blond-haired body of an apparently executed man in the Tigris river just days after the "Horror Brigade of the Islamic Se...

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Alan from Southerly Buster has an excellent post on the Indonesian Presidential runoff that has resulted in Bambang Yudhoyono winning a smashing victory over Megawati Sukarnoputri, in a fairly unequivocal flowering of real, non-corrupt democracy. Who knows whether he'll be any...

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Two separate pundits in this morning's SMH remind Labor supporters not to get too carried away by the current positive poll figures. Ross Gittins , back from hols, says: We turn to the untried opposition only after we're thoroughly fed up with the government. (And, more often...

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I bet John Howard is hoping political scientist John Wanna is correct in his surmise that the undecided voters aren't listening yet . Because if they were paying attention to the incoherent gibberish Howard and Downer are spouting about pre-emptive anti-terrorist strikes on ne...

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I see some goober from the Weagles has won the AFL midfielders' award (once known as the "Brownlow"). When do they announce the award for best player out of all the other positions on the field? What a pathetic joke the Brownlow has become. Mind you, I would have given it to J...

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Tim Dunlop posts about Iraq interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's impending visit to the US, where he'll address the United Nations and (effectively) campaign for the re-election of President Bush. Tim suggests that this is utterly inappropriate given that Allawi is only a shor...

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There's an interesting contrast between the way personal smear negative campaign tactics work in the US and their relative lack of success in Australia. As Scott Wickstein pointed out in a comment to my previous post, the Bush memo fiasco and Swift Boat Veterans nonsense are n...

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I've been meaning to comment about John Quiggin's recent short post on the US elections. John said: The crucial issue is to determine which candidate has the better record on Vietnam, and will therefore make the better president. As I understand it: Kerry fought in Vietnam, bu...

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Sometimes I just can't resist rising to the bait when Paul Watson posts one of his very frequent mad, paranoid anti-babyboomer rants. That's because he actually raises some important issues, even though they're usually well hidden among all the self-pitying whimpering. Paul's...

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Bryan Palmer , who maintains the excellent political science site Palmer's Oz Politics , has a post noting the bookmakers' latest odds on the federal election race. Bryan also analyses the recently-published marginal seat polling, and concludes that Labor is likely to fall aro...

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This story in The Australian about the latest NATSEM study on income inequality trends provides a reminder about why Labor necessarily faces an uphill battle to persuade Australians to abandon the Howard government in the midst of an unparalleled era of general prosperity. The...

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I've been watching Fox News today as they have been covering the impact of Hurricane Ivan on the Gulf Coast near Alabama. It is a terrifying storm with winds around 200 kph and driving rain. You can read about the details here But what got me is that there are Fox News reporte...

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Quite a few election blogs have sprung into existence recently. Here's a list of the ones of which I'm currently aware: Peter Brent's Mumble election site (ongoing psephology focus, in operation for some considerable time) William Bowe's The Poll Bludger Matt Liddy's Poll Vaul...

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Mark Latham is quite right to complain about the Howard government's breach of the caretaker convention in failing to consult the Opposition about its decision to deploy a hostage negotiation team to Iraq following (probably false) reports of the kidnapping of two unidentified...

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Sometimes Troppo comment boxes attract very strange visitors .

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One aspect of Labor's education policy where I emphatically agree with Graham Young is in the area of values. Labor's policy document says (page 11): A Federal Labor Government will provide $150 million over five years to teach Australian values and improve discipline in schoo...

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Graham Young over on Ambit Gambit has a post about Labor's education policy release that trots out the usual kneejerk conservative slur against Labor: Latham's policy is based on "envy". But unlike most such defences of existing privilege , Graham actually argues his case. Upd...

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What impression might the average disengaged swinging voter receive (if any) of electoral issues in the news today? Will anything penetrate? Labor has just announced a $2.4 billion education policy package , which will " pump an extra $2.4 billion into the government and non-g...

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The Currency Lad is one of the more entertaining right wing bloggers around the place, mostly eschewing moronic RWDB thuggery in favour of piercing leftie pretensions by more gentle and effective methods. His take on Mark Latham's silly " ease the squeeze " line is a neat exam...

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It's a privilege to listen to someone with a really powerful and awesomely quick mind. Such was neuroscientist Professor Susan Greenfield, who was just on Andrew Denton's Enough Rope . Read the transcript when it becomes available if you didn't catch the program. One of the ma...

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Well, the bloggers' vote on the Great Debate is tiresomely predictable. The lefties at Chris Sheil's place scored it a smashing victory for Latham, while the RWDBs at Tim Blair's joint thought exactly the opposite (and reckoned the "worm" audience was rigged). This particular...

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My initial thought this morning was that there was no point in writing a federal election post in advance of tonight's Great Debate. But pondering a little further, I wonder whether the debate is likely to have a great effect anyway. In light of the Jakarta bombing, I suspect...

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I can't help musing about Paul Watson's tacky but amusing take on the Seven Network's newest "reality" TV show Playing it Straight , featuring Darwin barmaid Rebecca Olds trying to pick straight potential suitors from gay ones for a purse of $200,000. I won't be watching this...

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It still has quite an impact to suddenly notice that date "September 11" over in the left column, doesn't it? On this day three years ago I (along with just about everyone else in Australia and the world) was sitting in my loungeroom numb and transfixed, watching those planes...

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Some rather foolish people are suggesting that Australia should 'negotiate' with the rag-tag terrorist outfit Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). I would not normally comment on such a suggestion, but 29% of SMH readers seem to think it is a good idea. It should of course be dismissed out...

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Graham Young, who operates the group blog Ambit Gambit and prominent Australian e-journal Online Opinion , is a classical liberal in the finest sense. One of the manifestations of his studious liberalism is enlisting co-bloggers whose opinions differ markedly from his own. Jef...

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A wise man would leave well enough alone, and let the dust settle before venturing back into provocative blogging. But the combination of Bush, Blair, and sado-masochism is too tempting to resist. As this News Online story notes: For its 10th anniversary, upmarket London corse...

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In the wake of yesterday's tragedy in Jakarta, terrorism is back on the electoral agenda, whether we like it or not. It has not really gone away of course, but the political parties in Australia seem to have had a mutual non-aggression pact to not discuss the issue. That could...

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I can't help comparing the university where I work with St. Edward's hospital, the apocryphal institution in Yes Minister which won an award as Britain's most hygienic hospital because it had no patients to get the place dirty. I've just come back to my office with an armful o...

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It's probably an unworthy thought given that at least 5 people (presumably all Indonesian Muslims) have been killed, but I can't help wondering whether Abu Bakr Bashir is a closet member of the Liberal Party. National security and the War against Terror front and centre. Updat...

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Carolinkus is convinced that Satan is making her blog . It's taking up so much time that could be devoted to more worthwhile things, like spiritual contemplation. It's a familiar feeling for most bloggers, though most of us probably wouldn't put it in quite those terms. Bloggi...

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Online Opinion e-journal (run by Graham Young and Hugh Brown) has recently implemented a feature called The Domain , which provides a one-stop shop page displaying excerpts from and links to new posts on a range of prominent Australian political blogs including Troppo . It app...

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The Australian newspaper's evaluation of Labor's tax and family benefits package is surprisingly upbeat for a rag many lefties dismiss as blatantly pro-Coalition: Typically for Latham, the broad sweep of the policy vision is more attractive than some of the details buried with...

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Well, Labor's tax package has been released, and it looks very attractive, as Chris Sheil discusses here . Will it be enough to get Latham's campaign back on track? Certainly, Howard is doing his level best to keep derailing Latham's loco, with a pre-emptive medical care subsi...

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Insomnia strikes again. Surfing round the blogs, I finally noticed that Don Arthur has finally upgraded his computer from a dodgy Apple Mac (though I suspect he's only upgraded to another dodgy Apple Mac), and has been hard at work. But he keeps linking to Clive Hamilton . Cli...

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I haven't blogged about the appalling terrorist atrocity in Russia until now. The immensity, horror and pointlessness of the calculated slaughter of so many children is almost beyond comprehension let alone words. Several bloggers, including Darp Hau , John Quiggin and Rob Sch...

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Today's Sydney Morning Herald has an alarming article and a longer feature on the emerging practice of trial lawyers using expert witnesses (doctors, accountants, psychologists etc.) retained on a "no win no fee" contingent basis. It shows just how closeted one can get in the...

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Stan from South Pacific Federation Project has emailed me with a query about copyright and use of other people's material on blogs. Copyright isn't my specialist area (see Kim Weatherall's blog if you want someone who really knows about this area), but I have a basic working k...

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They're both simply engaging in the sort of expedient lying that is a working politician's everyday lot. Politics isn't a profession for saints. No, perhaps politics is not the career for the scrupulously honest, but that doesn't mean that we should be happy about our elected...

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The patent absurdity of Labor's " 27 Howard lies " document is underlined by a lie told by Mark Latham , reported in today's SMH, about the basis and effect of Thursday's High Court decision in Electrolux Home Products Pty Ltd v Australian Workers' Union (which I blogged about...

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Chris Sheil won't be happy about this Newspoll showing Labor doing badly in the Queensland marginals it must win to form government. And it looks like Latham has leaked significant aspects of his tax policy to George Megalogenis in the Weekend Oz. Two sandwiches and two milksh...

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As readers may have noticed, the "10 most recently-commented posts" sidebar feature is broken (blank). I don't know why. I suspect it's some sort of corruption of Scott's MT installation, because it won't allow me to rebuild the main index template to fix the problem. I've sen...

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In a second important decision handed down yesterday ( Coleman v Power ), the High Court by a 4/3 majority preferred freedom of speech over civility. It ruled that unflattering words about police used by a Townsville hippie protester in a pamphlet ("KISS MY ARSE YOU SLIMY LYIN...

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Yeserday's High Court decision in Electrolux Home Products Pty Ltd v Australian Workers' Union rejected the inclusion in an enterprise bargain of provisions imposing the fees of "bargaining agents" on non-unionists. The report in today's Australian newspaper summarises its eff...

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There is no doubt that the Prime Minister is in some political difficulty and is struggling to gain the initiative in the first week of the campaign. The essential Mumble website suggests that the ALP has a small but constant edge in the opinion polls, and entering the campaig...

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This story a couple of days ago caught my attention: AUSTRALIA is two years behind comparable developed countries in broadband services despite an accelerated uptake that doubled subscribers in the past year. The advent of less expensive entry-level products drove demand, says...

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Labor's "Howard is a lying rodent" campaign has hit a fairly major solid object. Just as many on the right of the blogosphere studiously averted their gaze from earlier stages of the Scrafton affair, so now the left is pretending that yesterday's resumed "children overboard" S...

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There might conceivably be room for debate about the extent to which John Howard is a "lying rodent", but in light of this post by Al Bundy there's no doubt at all that his most recent accuser Russell Galt well and truly deserves that label.

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Labor's promise to implement an independent Speaker of the House of Representatives is, as Christopher Sheil comments, a potentially major reform. It deserves a post of its own, because if implemented it would greatly improve the standard of Parliamentary conduct and debate, a...

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Ken Parish has most graciously allowed me room to opine on politics, without me having to go to the bother of re-establishing a blog of my own. Time pressures mean that posting from this quarter will be erratic at best, but I hope to pop by once in a while to give my own 0.02...

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Christopher Sheil claims today's Newspoll result means that things are "sweet as a nut" for the ALP at this stage of the campaign. He explains his spin this way: [Y]ou don't want to be way ahead at this stage. Given probabilities and margins of error, a big lead increases the...

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It's not likely that I'll ever emulate Gummo Trotsky and base my blogging on cooking recipes. Not that I'm all that bad a cook, mind you. But being in a solo domestic phase, I usually can't be bothered cooking unless my daughter Rebecca is coming around for dinner. Even then,...

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I still can't get motivated to write anything analytical about politics, despite the federal election campaign entering its fair dinkum phase. I tried to generate some political coverage on Troppo by emailing Scott Wickstein to see whether he intended making good on an earlier...

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Yes alright, the election is on 9 October. So?* The big news of the day is that Kerry Armstrong has slagged our Kylie and our Nicole: "I truly believe with acting and singing those two have done more damage than anyone I've ever seen," she said. "I really do believe there is a...

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Maybe I'm a bit strange but it occurs to me that casting a vote purely on the basis of your sexuality is a pretty dumb way to exercise your democratic franchise. I share this insight because there's a campaign underway within the gay community to punish the ALP for supporting...

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He's an evil bastard, that Latham. Now he's suborned a couple more generals to back up that porn-perving prick Scrafton. Lucky the Great Leader's still got some loyal staffers who can corroborate his story. He never told them about Scrafton mentioning anything apart from that...

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Don Arthur has finally solved his home computer problems by investing in a second hand iMac, and has made yet another comeback to blogging. During his previous blogging life, I had classified Don as "centrist" by inclination. I was mistaken. Don is undeniably of the left, and...

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Richard "Justinian" Ackland focuses on defamation law in his column in today's SMH, pointing out that Commonwealth A-G Phillip Ruddock's ambit claim for a uniform national defamation law includes a proposal that would allow the estates of dead people to sue for defamation with...

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One of the things you can do on a blog that you can't necessarily do in the mainstream media is run stories that can't be fully corroborated. This is one of them. Readers will recall that I ran a post the other day about NT Administrator Ted Egan's breach of the conventions go...

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This story won't please Professor Bunyip , whose third greatest pleasure in life (after castigating Phillip Adams for alleged serial plagiarism, and futilely fantasising about fornicating with firm young female flesh) is ridiculing the commercial acumen of Fairfax boss Fred Hi...

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John Quiggin has suggested that detained asylum seekers should be released on "bail" pending finalisation of their visa applications and appeals. It's a suggestion that I've also previously made, although in the context of implementation of a revived "Australia Card" secure na...

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One of the many great things about the blogosphere is that when you get bored with the political stuff (as I am at the moment - I can't even be bothered reading it let alone writing about it), there are usually more intimate posts to read and ponder. And some of them are very...

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Christopher Sheil has an excellent parsing and analysis of John Howard's "denial" statement in relation to the Scrafton allegations. As I mentioned in Chris's comment box, the critical weasel aspect is that Howard's statement in his initial paragraph " I had spoken to Mr Scraf...

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I wonder how many readers saw last night's ABC Four Corners program and, like me, were depressed if not horrified by the apparent degradation of the US criminal justice system by an extreme version of "plea bargaining", where not only do prosecutors and defence lawyers bargain...

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I attempted to kick-start a broad-based comment box discussion about vice-regal appointments in the Australian constitutional system. Unfortunately I failed completely. It occurs to me that it may be because I posted my comments under a post about Northern Territory Administra...

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I'm too depressed to talk about last night's Wallabies versus Springboks Tri-Nations decider. Fortunately Chris Sheil has fought off the after-loss lethargy and written a brief post-mortem update, and I managed to raise enough enthusiasm to insert some thoughts in his comment...

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it's my right to choose. I first heard about Phil Nitschke when he was working at Royal Darwin Hospital and he appeared in the local press waffling on about nuclear warships visiting Darwin and the lack of a disaster management plan in case an accident happened. The next time...

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The Northern Territory has its very own homegrown vice-regal constitutional crisis (well, controversy anyway). NT Administrator Ted Egan made some remarks about Aboriginal promised marriages on ABC TV Stateline last night, and is reported to have had a private conversation wit...

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Early Saturday morning ... crisp and cool ... managed to fight off insomnia and slept through the night ... looking forward to a delicious sleep-in ... BANG CRASH BANG BANG BANG ... LOUD VOICES. Christ what time is it? 6.30. Cunts. Blokes preparing for a fishing trip in the un...

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Given the slow and painful journey of middle-aged twice-bitten love, I was a bit disconcerted to read today's quotable quote in the NT News. It was by Bertrand Russell , and said: Of all forms of caution, caution in love is perhaps the most fatal to true happiness. I personall...

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I may have given readers the impression that I think Clive Hamilton is as big a goose as Alexander Downer. In fact I think many of Hamilton's insights are very valuable, especially in focusing Australians on the deficiencies of global capitalist consumer culture and the relent...

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It's fashionable both in the mainstream media and blogosphere to portray Alexander Downer as an effeminate goose. He may well be, but that doesn't mean his statement that Australia would not necessarily support the US in a war with China over Taiwan was wrong, either factually...

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Signposts is another new blog I've just found and will link. It's a group blog that looks at politics from a Christian perspective. And I see that Chris Fryer , whose blog I also mentioned below, suffers from muscular distrophy . Jen is always asking me to tell her stories, an...

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Darp Hau's blog is another one I've just stumbled across as a result of his posting a comment about rugby. He's another depressed, besieged fellow Manly fan. And yet another blogger who's been banned by the lovely Andrea Harris, the obergrupenfuhrer at Tim Blair's blog. Darp h...

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Yesterday I put my parents on the GHAN which will take them back to dark and wet Adelaide. After a couple of months in the Top End they'll suffer the cold seeping into their 80 year old bones. I don't communicate well with my father but I make sure that we bump along so that w...

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I've been idly following the discussion in rugby league circles about the possibility of adding two new teams to the NRL, probably one on the Gold Coast and one on the NSW Central Coast. Rupert Online reported yesterday that the Gold Coast consortium was totally opposed to shi...

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Clive Hamilton is his own worst enemy. His current ham-fisted attempts to promote proposed ALP policies to impose filtering software on Internet Service Providers to protect children from Internet porn are a case in point. By making the utterly stupid statement that "[n]o man...

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Queuing at the CDU cafeteria bain marie. Takeaway lasagne and apple juice for lunch. " Hello, Mr Parish ," says the woman at the counter, plump, middle-aged with a pleasant face. I look puzzled. " I really know your face from somewhere ," she explains. " Were you an Anglicare...

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This article by Paul Kelly in today's Oz provides the best short summary I've seen so far of the whole "children overboard" saga and the dilemma Howard faced on election eve: Howard is right to argue that the "children overboard" story did not win him the election. It was a su...

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Well, it looks like those dodgy polls (Omnipoll and that other one) were correct. Newspoll also shows Labor in front and going away (54 to 46 per cent on a two-party preferred basis). No wonder Howard looked and sounded like a confused old man in his multiple press conferences...

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Have you ever noticed how, when you get a new car, you suddenly see that model everywhere (hasn't happened to me for a while - you should see my car - but I still remember)? Well the same thing is happening to me since I decided to update and expand the Troppo blogroll. I just...

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I've just added to the specialist section of the Troppo blogroll a blog started by frequent commenter Stan which examines the possibility of political union between the South Pacific island states, Australia and New Zealand. It's called the South Pacific Federation Project . I...

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( both via Chris Sheil ) I'm not sure whether calculated blindness is any less morally reprehensible than outright lying, but the revelation in this morning's Oz that John Howard did lie outright about children overboard, rather than just being kept in "plausibly deniable" ign...

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Re-arranging my blogroll has been a mixed blessing. The good part of it has been that several new-ish bloggers have been induced to post comments, and I've discovered their existence as a result. All have been added to the Troppo blogroll, because that's my policy: - I want it...

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This SMH article by Australian physicist/philosopher Paul Davies was published about 3 weeks ago. I intended to blog about it then but didn't get around to it. It deals with the fascinating subject of the possibility of multiple parallel universes (or multiverses), which I ass...

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I thought he was dead, but apparently not. Rupert's mob reports : Neil Diamond has lashed out at big-name performers who "rip people off", vowing no one will pay more than $99 to see him live in Australia. They'd have to pay me $99 to go to a Neil Diamond concert, and even the...

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JOHN HOWARD CANBERRA PRESS CONFERENCE 13:02 AM 12/8/04 HOWARD: I'd to thank you for all coming . I would like to discuss the spirit of the FTA which the leader of the opposition has so heinously ridiculed showing his anti-American and anti-religious fervour. Now we had quite d...

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The Troppo blogroll was getting far too long and intimidating for comfortable use. Accordingly I've decided to revert to a previous organisational principle, namely listing blogs in rough ideological sub-divisions. Along with the individual description tags attached to each hy...

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Margo Kingston's Web Diary is a bizarre, eclectic and idiosyncratic publication, mostly with a tiresomely left-wing bias. And Margo herself is a strange creature to say the least. I often find her journalistic efforts shrill and irrational. But a long article by Margo in today...

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Different bloggers write for different readers. Ken enjoys the cut and thrust of debate in the comments box with threads often attracting scores of extraordinarily erudite contributions to the debate. The Bunyip on the other hand, simply flings his vitriol into cyberspace with...

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The question of whether and to what extent international law norms ought to influence the interpretation of Australia's Constitution is one that aroused fairly heated debate between Justices McHugh and Kirby in the High Court's decision in Al-Kateb v Godwin handed down last Fr...

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This story from today's NT News (not online so I've reproduced it myself) gives a flavour of the subtlety and sophistication of political campaigning in Australia's north. It may be of some interest given that the federal seat held by the CLP's David Tollner is Australia's mos...

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In the wake of the Richard Butler gubernatorial resignation farce, George Williams floats an idea that I've been pushing on and off on this blog for a couple of years: The first priority should be public discussion about the appointment process. It can be changed without a ref...

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Christopher Sheil has a fairly short guest post by peripatetic blog commenter Peter Ransen musing about how Labor advertising should be framed for the forthcoming campaign. There are some interesting comment box posts, including one by yours truly. Troppo landlord Scott Wickst...

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Christopher Sheil has an interesting post in which he proposes abolishing the National Competition Council and using the $0.75 billion paid annually to the states and territories (as incentives to continue implementing Competition Guidelines) to fund national infrastructure. R...

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As others have no doubt noticed too, the Gravett Right Wing Death Beast Blog Empire has been off the air most of the time for the last fortnight or so. For this lover of blog bile, that leaves a yawning gap in my daily blog browsing. What with Tim Blair being away somewhere in...

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Al Bundy waxing lyrical from current bitter experience on the qualities necessary for public service promotion in Canberra (or, I would add, anywhere else): These people know 'superior performers' when they hear of one over their prawn toasts at a cocktail party. They're not a...

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The strategic release of a statement by 40 43 very senior retired military, diplomatic and public service heads calling for enhanced standards of truthfulness and accountability in government should by rights be a significant political development. These blokes aren't in the m...

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Chris Sheil's match preview ended up being pretty well spot on. The All Blacks tried to play the grinding, possession-based rugby they've reverted to this season with such success. However, except for the first 20 minutes, the Wallabies matched and then outpointed them 23-15....

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Quantum Meruit gives a young practitioner's perspective on the likelihood of truthfulness of certain evidence being given by a lawyer from Allens Arthur Robinson (acting for James Hardie) before the Jackson commission of inquiry. The general topic is one on which I also blogge...

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It's a wonderful day for a constitutional law academic. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! The High Court hands down two parallel decisions dealing with a plethora of subtle and interesting constitutional questions: the nature of judicial power and Chapter III of the Constitutio...

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Sometimes the generally sensible SMH legal affairs pundit Richard "Justinian" Ackland has a brain spasm. Today's column is an example. He argues that it's unfair for the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions to use relatively new statutory powers to seize or freeze "chequebook j...

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Yesterday I mentioned Tim Dunlop's post on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme aspects of the Free Trade Agreement as telling us everything we need to know on the subject. But Chris Sheil's post is even better. What's more, most of the meaty detail and analysis of the pros and...

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Still procrastinating before the 5pm e-tutorial rush, so I'll whip around the newspapers as well: How long will it take Tim Blair to start slagging Bruce "The Boss" Springsteen following the announcement of a series of anti-Bush concerts with other noteworthies like Pearl Jam,...

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Needing a break from endless administrative and student support tasks generated by CDU's embarrassingly successful external law degree program, but lacking the energy to write anything original. Here's a mini-race-around of the blogs: Tim Dunlop has a long post setting out jus...

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Since I'm making insomniac posts that technically breach my resolution to have a holiday from blogging while finding and re-inserting my dummy, I thought it might be a good idea to explain the origin of the blog title "Troppo Armadillo" to readers. The "Troppo" bit is easy eno...

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A change is as good as a holiday, they say. But a change and a holiday as well is even better. Non-abusive feedback on the new style is welcome.

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The ALP has played an interesting card in the FTA debate. Yesterday the Labor caucus voted overwhelmingly to support the FTA. The FTA is of course a deal or no deal affair. Either it's accepted or it's not. Having done that, Labor then introduced two amendments to the enabling...

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My mum always used to say: " If you can't say anything nice about someone, don't say anything at all ." Mind you, that was usually after she'd made a decent hole in the cooking sherry, verbally knifed just about every neighbour and relative she had, and was looking for a way t...

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A brief update on my previous brief post about Christopher Hitchens' demolition of the increasingly self-parodying Phillip Adams. Professor Bunyip has skillfully dispatched Adams' ridiculous reply to the Hitchens article over the square leg boundary. A welcome return to top form.

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When I read in the Oz over the weekend that the Full Federal Court had allowed an appeal by the wife of disgraced bankrupt former Sydney QC John Cummins, I thought it must surely be a badly flawed, hometown decision. The case concerned whether assets Cummins had transferred to...

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Yes, I know the "triple bypass" label refers to the number of times Howard rose as Liberal leader, rather than his number of election victories. But it's still a good headline for a post about the latest Newspoll . Chris Sheil won't be happy, but he'll probably bear up under t...

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Given the extensive debate generated by my previous post about the ABC , it's worth highlighting an opinion piece in this morning's Oz by the egregious former Communications Minister Richard Alston's former adviser Andre Stein. Stein advocates a standard neoliberal, total dere...

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Paul Watson has noted , stylishly, that a feature story in yesterday's Oz looks, on the surface of it, to be a strange fit with the brief of the nation's daily newspaper. That thought had also occurred to me. The gist of the story is pretty unremarkable on the face of it, thou...

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This review of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 by Darlene on Ambit Gambit is well worth reading. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I suspect my reaction is likely to be similar.

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The Peter Principle holds that employees in any organisation are promoted up to their level of incompetence, and then cling relentlessly to a job they're incapable of performing. It's a phenomenon especially evident in the Northern Territory. Much of the population is so mobil...

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'Fisking' (defined here and here ) was an often irritating aspect of the blogging genre, that seems to have fallen out of favour over the last year or so. Probably that was for a very good reason: too often bloggers resorted to 'fisking' mostly because they were too lazy or in...

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This morning's SMH carries a special investigation into alleged large-scale multi-million dollar fraud and mismanagement in various NSW Aboriginal land councils. The scams mostly seem to involve deals and kickbacks with dodgy developers over valuable coastal development sites...

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Now this is how you forensically carve up wankers like Phillip Adams .

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Richard Ackland's column in this morning's SMH provides a succinct summary of the state of play in the Jackson commission of enquiry into James Hardie Industries' manoeuvrings to effectively avoid legal liability for the mountain of asbestos exposure-related claims, to which i...

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Thirty years ago, when I managed the local credit union I received regular requests ( if memory serves it was called a S263 query) from the Australian Taxation Office to search through financial records in an attempt to find those taxpayers who had not declared significant int...

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I can't resist covering this story from the NT News : Territorians don't mind an orgy and are not embarrassed to use sex toys, survey of sexual habits shows. Sixty four per cent of Territory women and 48 per cent of men admitted to having been in a threesome. Fifty per cent of...

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Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. Apparently the ABC has finally been cowed and beaten by the Right Wing Death Beasts. And I have to confess I've been a (small) part of the problem by occasionally joining the chorus of criticism of Auntie's evident left-wing bias. Of course, if the...

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(via Al Bundy) Currency Lad , a frequent, well read and provocative poster at this and other blogs, has launched out in his own right and started a solo blog. And not before time. He's a welcome addition to the blogosphere, and can be expected to vex the left of the 'sphere on...

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Some readers may have momentarily felt sorry for Prince Charles after reading this story : PRINCE Charles handed over his entire personal fortune to his late ex-wife, Princess Diana, as part of their divorce settlement, his former financial adviser told a British newspaper. Ge...

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Al Bundy has posted an amusing and lengthy shot in the History Wars at his blog. The latest skirmish started with Al posting in my comment box (to this post ) a link to an account in the Oz of events at a meeting of the Australian Historical Association, which discussed variou...

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Here I was, just cruising the blogs when I came upon Al Bundy's latest and, while thinking "he can write a good piece" especially the link to this post by Patrick when who should walk through the door but my beloved with her purse bulging with the well gotten gains of a public...

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As regular readers would know, a young couple that come from the next suburb are currently travelling the world. Every now and then they send me a travelogue which I post to my web site. The latest can be read here . For those who might like to see a wider view of Africa Tarun...

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I can't tell you how disappointed I am that our political leaders have been so badly let down by the intelligence community, not only in the US and UK but in Australia as well . The really tragic thing is that John Howard would clearly have done something completely different...

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Sam "Yobbo" Ward doesn't think much of Qantas. But he probably should thank his lucky stars that Aeroflot isn't our national airline: Two crew members on a domestic Aeroflot flight beat up a passenger who had complained that the flight attendants were drunk, airline spokeswoma...

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I have a confession to make. I've started watching ABC TV Media Watch again, after swearing blind a year or so ago that I'd boycott it because of David Marr's blatant, hypocritical bias. He's no less biased or hypocritical now, but Marr is an amusing, eccentric character in hi...

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Troppo Armadillo is clearly in tune with the zeitgeist. I posted a long article about values and civility several weeks ago. Now I see Don Arthur has also posted a shorter piece on the subject, musing that "deep civility" might be regarded as a core value of classical liberali...

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The second of theTerritory issues I thought worth mentioning (see post immediately below for the first one) is a minor controversy about whether the NT (presumably somewhere in central Australia) will be the site for a Commonwealth low-medium level nuclear waste dump, in the w...

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A couple of current political controversies in the NT might be of some interest to a wider audience. The first is John Howard's announcement yesterday that park entry fees into Kakadu will be scrapped completely from 1 January 2005. At the moment they're $16.25 per head, as Je...

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Christopher Sheil blogs a fascinating viewpoint that seeks to characterise current Australian political progressions in a sweeping ideological overview sense: This era [ neoliberalism of the 1980s ] has in turn given way to an aggressive neoconservative reaction. The reaction...

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This story claims that the Nine Network is about to make drastic personnel changes, especially to its current affairs lineup: Ray Martin and Jana Wendt are among those stars whose positions are under threat, with gardening guru Don Burke also set to be replaced by Jamie Durie....

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What's all this hoo-haa about the Iraqi PM dropping a few insurgents ? They said the 58-year-old prime minister "wanted to send a message to his policemen and soldiers not to be scared if they kill anyone especially, they are not to worry about tribal revenge". What better way...

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I'll leave o thers to report on the match but wanted to say that the game and the result, while not unexpected, could have been made more interesting had the Australian coach been more constructive. I say not unexpected because the world's best attacking team vs the best defen...

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It's granny season in the Top End. Visit any shopping centre and you'll see the oldies shuffling around wasting time, looking after the grandchildren, until their working children finish supporting the unemployed and the military and they can go home to get their fix of the da...

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I've just deleted the "Indiscreet Personal Revelation" post from the database. It was making me feel bad every time I saw it. And it was having an even worse effect on Jen. Not much point in being made unhappy by your own blog. Probably wasn't a good idea to turn my life into...

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One of the oddest stories to emerge from the 15th International AIDS Conference in Bangkok is that James Glassman of the American Enterprise Institute found - to his considerable shock - that the American delegation booth didn't have a photo of George W. Bush displayed. It see...

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I've decided to take on board Terry Sedgwick's wise words and follow the advice of Kingsley Amis: "If you can't annoy somebody, there's little point in writing." ALP barrackers Tim Dunlop and Christopher Sheil have both gone into bravura foot-stamping mode in the wake of the p...

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My attention was taken by this piece from The Weekend Australian (not available online as far as I can see): The world may be about to watch one of its last Olympic Games without genetically enhanced athletes. With the first genetic treatments to regenerate muscle, enhance its...

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Don Arthur's recent blogging comeback has stimulated a flowering of creativity, at least on the left of the blogosphere. As Tim Dunlop's Blogjam roundup seems to be on holiday while Margo promotes her new anti-Howard book (which I haven't been tempted to buy or read), I though...

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I always feel unaccountably nervous when I find myself agreeing (as I often do) with Paul Watson . Maybe I'm subconsciously fearful of becoming infected by the conviction that all the woes of the world are caused by my parents' generation, and that it's too late to get any sat...

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Kept out of bed by rampant insomnia, I've finally finished my long-delayed project of adding description tags to all the blogroll links in the right column. I was more or less shamed into it by John Quiggin's generous mention of TA on last night's Sandy McCutcheon Australia Ta...

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My recent post , about the resumed History Wars and the status of the doctrine of terra nullius , continues to attract comment box debate. Two of the more interesting comments ( here and here ) have been from historian Brian Spittles. The bottom line is that Brian has undertak...

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(Via John Quiggin) Oh for joy! Don Arthur has finally made a comeback to blogging, presumably having finally finished his doctoral thesis. I wonder if ruminating on Don's admirable self-discipline might help this armadillo to do likewise and get back to the PhD slog after the...

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Back from a few days in Kakadu. I see that my sincere flattery of Geoff and Wendy failed to flush either of them out of the blogging woodwork. Maybe it might do the trick if more of you mob were to say really really nice things about them in the comment box. I had intended to...

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Jen and I are going away for a few days into the tourist-infested wilds of Kakadu. Not all that wild, actually; we're staying in four star comfort at the Gagudju Crocodile Hotel at Jabiru. It seems that our roughing it in a swag days are over. We'll be back Thursday night, but...

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Tarun and Dan have emailed more details of their African Odyssey: read it here.

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Future developments in this story from ABC Online will bear watching. I've heard such stories from several separate sources over the years, so I can't say I'm utterly astounded. Nevertheless, it's quite a weird feeling, watching a story of this sort unfold about someone you've...

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This post at The Spin Starts Here would be a worthy recipient of a Blog Bile Award next time it's up for adjudication. It's also a fairly convincing demonstration of the decline of civility (a phenomenon never evident here at Troppo , where the worst social sin we ever commit...

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I've been relying on historian blogger Christopher Sheil to keep us all informed about any new shots in The History Wars . But he's let me down, possibly too busy perfecting his own unique brand of black is the new white sophistry . Instead I stumbled on the fact that a new "H...

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I have an investment in a little cashbox that raises finance to invest in biotechnology companies. It's had a couple of successes (e.g. C3 and Starpharma) and I'm hopeful that some of it's current investments will pay off in the future. I received an email alerting me to a new...

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Yesterday I said I'd post about national politics if anything happened to change my tentative intention to vote Labor at the forthcoming federal election. But I didn't expect that to happen within 24 hours. Last Sunday I watched Laurie Oakes interview Health Minister Tony Abbo...

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I've added a couple more blogs to the Troppo blogroll: Ambit Gambit , a blog associated with Graham Young's Online Opinion ezine (sorry Gianna), and Andjam . I'll be keeping a very regular eye on Ambit Gambit , because I have a high regard for Graham Young's qualities as a pol...

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This article by Peter Hartcher in the SMH and this one by Michael Costello in the Oz both seem to me to offer incisive analyses of the state of play for the forthcoming federal election. Both suggest Howard may have the inside running (though offering slightly differing ration...

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I don't know whether others have noticed it, but there seems to be a developing meme on the conservative side of politics lamenting the "decline of manners", musing about its causes and what might be done about it. Of course, it might in part be a deliberate Tory response to M...

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Shock! Horror! Mary-Kate has anorexia . But have a look for yourself . I reckon Ashley's even skinnier. I blame that prick Morgan Spurlock . These girls need to get biggest mobs of Maccas into them without delay.

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It's taken me a while to identify a sufficiently worthy winner of the Blog Bile Award . But Paul from Paul and Carl's Daily Diatribe has come up with this little beauty about a German-made doco on "the horrors of America's brutal treatment of prisoners and heartless war crimes...

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Strolling along the foreshore near Rapid Creek with "B" last evening. A mob of mildly agitated Aboriginal women approaches. One of them comes up to Jenny. " Dat thing dangerous, you know ," she says, gesturing towards the gleaming new high-tech aluminium automated ablution fac...

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While idly traversing the blogs just now in a successful attempt to find an excuse (almost any excuse) to escape from exam marking for a while, I came across a post by Steve Edwards fulminating against the depravity of producers of a UK 'reality' TV show called There's Somethi...

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In The Atlantic Monthly : July/August 2004 Christopher Hitchens writes, Leon Trotsky survives as part kitsch and part caricature. But the reissue of a majestic biography reveals him as he always was - a prophetic moralist; The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921: The Prophet Unar...

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Newspaper reports this morning suggest rugby league's greatest current player Andrew "Joey" Johns is about to switch rugby codes and sign a two season contract to play rugby union for the NSW Waratahs for a reported fee of $2 million. Ah the benefits of an ARU awash with cash...

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Glenn Milne has an article in this morning's Oz about the (alleged) political watershed/revolution that voting for a Latham-led ALP would involve. Milne's article includes a long-ish quote by Labor fellow-traveller and ANOP pollster Rod Cameron: "For the first time in my 30 ye...

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Darwin in the dry season has the best climate on earth in my unbiased opinion. This morning when I popped into Casuarina Shopping Square (to pick up my spectacles from being repaired) it was actually warmer inside the air-conditioned centre than the open air outside. Sixteen d...

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I probably should know better than to keep rising to the bait of Paul Watson's repetitive "baby boomers are bastards" theme, but I can't help myself. Anyway, one of his more recent rants gives me a pretext for making some points I've had on my mind for some time. Paul cites a...

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Well, Troppo readers like Homer Paxton might think I'm full of bovine excreta, but at least Kim Beazley's former chief-of-staff Michael Costello is on the same wavelength as this armadillo. Costello should certainly know all about "small target" strategies if anyone does, havi...

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Northern Territory readers may have noted brief mentions in today's local media of the fact that the High Court yesterday dismissed an appeal by North Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service (NAALAS) in the matter of North Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service Inc v Bradley...

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This article (about the latest Dick Morris-inspired ALP policy - banning food ads during children's TV programs) makes me wonder whether Loopy Latham might be about to change his name by deed poll to Tarquin Fin-tim-lim-bim-lim-bin- bim-bin-bim bus stop F'tang F'tang Ol© Biscu...

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John Quiggin put his mouth where our money is a couple of days ago, and blogged a list of potential spending areas/waste that Mark Latham could attack to raise the money for substantial Labor spending initiatives and tax cuts. JQ's list looks eminently sensible to me. Unfortun...

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I don't have a problem per se with John Howard's announcement yesterday of a $500 million program to subsidise the development of currently non-commercial "low carbon emission" technologies. It's fairly clearly aimed mostly at development of so-called "carbon sequestration" te...

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Christopher Pearson speculated in the Weekend Oz that a Latham government might have secret plans to try to "stack" the High Court with reformist Labor appointees, by increasing the size of the current Bench from 7 to 9 (a step not constitutionally barred) as well as replacing...

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(Via Gareth Parker ) An IT expert writes (in Crikey's subscriber email): There is a good chance that Labor will give the Howard Government a hard time over its failure to make e-commerce safe through adequate regulation of ISPs. The Minister for Telecommunications Darryl Willi...

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I haven't until now entered the general blogosphere discussion about the imminent federal ALP preselection of Peter Garrett, which seems already to have degenerated into a predictable left versus right slagging contest. Garrett's political views are quite a long way to the lef...

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ATSIC NT North Zone Commissioner Hill is astounded Mr Bob Beadman, a former senior public servant, has displayed such ignorance. Commissioner Hill made the comments following the release of Mr Beadman's report; Do Indigenous Youth Have A Dream? published by the Menzies Researc...

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I suspect the Professor has been caught speeding past the billabong again. I continue to be amazed at his eloquent loquacity even if not agreeing with his point of view. I think he would agree with this. You may have noticed me at an academic conference or meeting sometime in...

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It looks like Ken doesn't have to resort to blog bile posts, porno photos et al. to start a lively debate in the comments section, he simply throws together a piece about his old favourite global warming and the commentaries flock in, (not that I would for one moment suggest a...

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Tim Dunlop is running an 'open-mike' post on how readers are intending to vote at the forthcoming federal election and why. My own most recently-announced voting intention was to vote informal, because I couldn't bring myself to vote for a Howard-led Coalition and was so unimp...

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I received an email today entitled; DO YOU REMEMBER WHEN...? All the girls had ugly gym uniforms? It took five minutes for the TV warm up? Nearly everyone's Mum was at home when the kids got home from school? Nobody owned a purebred dog? When a a shilling was good pocketmoney?...

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Paul Watson sometimes irritates me intensely (mostly in his repetitive and silly GenX whinges), but he's also frequently an incisive observer. Paul's take on the current furore over whether/when the Howard government knew about allegations of prisoner mistreatment at Abu Ghrai...

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For any readers who've been following the legal issues surrounding the suppression of reporting of identification evidence in the Falconio/Bradley Murdoch murder committal hearing, and the Nine Network's unsuccessful challenge to the magistrate's suppression order (about which...

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A couple of commenters have asked what is going on with the beastiality links in various comment boxes. Presumably they haven't been paying attention to the fact that (apparently) most blogs running on a Moveable Type or similar platform are now subject to periodic attack by b...

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Another Falconio/intrusive media rant that I understand is to be submitted for publication under my name. Actual authorship is another question, but it certainly reflects my views very closely: There is nothing more dangerous than the wrath of the media scorned. So now it's re...

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As you may have deduced from earlier blogs about global warming I don't believe we'll have time to worry about the gradual increase in temperatures leading to asphyxiation from carbon dioxide, world's end will be due to a well-overdue Dansgaard Oescher event. Reading the weeke...

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I got some more emails from Tarun and Dan today, if you want to read about their adventures click here.

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Any masochistic readers interested in hearing this armadillo raving on at leangth about the Falconio murder committal (and related legal and policy issues) can listen to the Real Audio recording of today's ABC Radio National Media Report by clicking here . There are also extra...

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Not only is global warming scepticism dangerous, but so too is blogging. News Online reports on yet another blogger dismissed from her employment for exposing her personal life in the blogosphere. However, in this case it's very personal indeed. Jessica Cutler, whose nom de bl...

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Don't you hate the way advertisers treat you like a moron. UP TO 99% OFF screams the ad. What a waste of money !! Does the advertising guru really believe that the average consumer watches/listens to/notices garbage like that; or has (s)he used so much nose cleaner that connec...

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The life of a global warming sceptic is a dangerous one, it seems. Well-known sceptic John Daly died suddenly of a heart attack earlier this year, and now one of his frequently-published colleagues (on the Daly website at least) Theodor Landscheidt has also shuffled off a few...

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The Basement website (live Internet radio, jazz/blues concerts etc), beamed out of Sydney's longstanding Basement venue at Reiby Place, Circular Quay, is about to close, according to this story on News Online. It was one of the few Internet music sites that I actually used to...

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Sam "Yobbo" Ward has put in a blatantly self-serving bid to win this week's Blog Bile Award by republishing substantial extracts from his previous anti-West Coast Eagles rant under the guise of a new rant against just retired Weagles player Glen Jakovich . Despite the arguably...

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The Falconio murder committal hearing remains "on hold" this afternoon, as barristers for the Nine Network, Murdoch Group, DPP and defendant Bradley John Murdoch (no relation to Rupert as far as I know) continue to argue before a Full Bench of the Supreme Court about whether M...

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The review of Fallen Order: A History (Karen Liebreich) by Miranda France in The Guardian Unlimited tells us that Catholic priests have been sexually abusing children for 400 years and still nothing has been done to punish the perpetrators. The web is full of reasons, excuses...

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"Good evening Fele". I nodded politely to 'Lady' Fele Mann, President of the Darwin Philippine community association, as we arrived at their annual beauty pageant and charity fund-raiser along with a squirming army of local politicians. "Good evening, Mr Mann", I said, acknowl...

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The Troppo Armadillo, posing as a legal academic, was overshadowed by Roger Maynard, correspondent for the London Times in a discussion of the Falconio case in Territory stateline on Friday night. TA blogreaders would have been amazed at how quietly Ken sat while the Times goo...

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A recently-retired friend of my wife applied to a local volunteer organisation to assist immigrants in learning English. She was informed that she would have to acquire an accreditation involving three hour sessions, two nights a week for eight weeks, two assignments and a thr...

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I'm thinking about instituting a "Blog Bile of the Week" award for the most impassioned, hate-filled blog rant, where the author makes no attempt whatever at balance or objectivity. After all, blogging isn't academic writing, so why even try to maintain a semblance of detachme...

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Watching Red Kerry on the box the other night I got a bit prickly over a report that the World Health Organisation was concentrating on obesity at the Health 2004 conference, "attended by representatives of the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, health ministers fr...

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Robert Corr has a couple of interesting posts about the current furore over federal Liberal MP Trish Draper's apparently dodgy claim for travel allowance for an overseas trip with her "spouse", and an injunction she obtained to preent screening of a TV story about the controve...

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The Charles Darwin Symposium Series is one of several initiatives suggested by highly-paid consultants to resuscitate the somewhat tattered reputation of the Northern Territory's only university, which Paddy McGuinness famously dismissed as " a so-called university which has n...

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A couple of weeks ago I received an email from a friend in NSW publicising the effort to find Daniel Morcombe. As a rule I don't do anything about pleas such as this because I have been hoaxed in the past, but in this case I made an exception and forwarded the email to my addr...

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