This is my second column in a row on superannuation as super choice looms. Super has been an area that Australia's politicians have not excelled themselves. The ALP deserves considerable credit for moving on super and extending it to the hoi polloi. Focusing on the long term i...
Continue reading →
NT Chief Minister Clare Martin has just announced a Territory election for 18 June, a pleasingly brief campaign of just under 3 weeks. Even this jaded political observer should manage to avoid terminal boredom for that period. Bryan Palmer of Ozpolitics has started posting on...
Continue reading →
It looks like French bloggers are really blazing a trail as far as the latest blogging craze is concerned--pictologs, or BD blogs as they're also called, which are like a kind of blend of webcomics and traditional (!!) blogging. France is of course right up there in the graphi...
Continue reading →
There's been an awful lot of discussion about the Howard government's proposed IR reforms from various , left - leaning bloggers and at Catallaxy from a more right of centre viewpoint. I deplore the stripping away of basic employment terms and conditions too, and as a passiona...
Continue reading →
We've been celebrating the 60th anniversary of various events towards the end of the Second World War in the last few months, like V(E) day and the liberation of Auschwitz-Burkenau. We can also celebrate the 65th anniversary of the landmarks of the first years of the war. I've...
Continue reading →
That's what a rather good piece in this week's TIME magazine, on the French campaign re the EU constitutional vote this Sunday, called that aspect of French psychology which projects a self-image of a small, proud, gallant, quarrelsome and , besieged people fighting with their...
Continue reading →
I've just been reading Crooked Timber posts on (and by!) Steve Levitt . I heartily recommend it. I read Kieren Healy's and John Quiggin's reviews but haven't read the others yet. How these guys toss off such well written, informed and thought through stuff at the rate they do...
Continue reading →
Which of these is the odd one out? (a) Cargo pants (b) Mudhoney (c) John Howard If you believe the conservative columnists it's 'c'. Only John Howard is still cool in 2005. Cargo pants and grunge bands like Mudhoney are hopelessly '90s. Only decrepit Gen-Xers think it's hip to...
Continue reading →
This week's effort is about super choice - as will be next week's. It's amazed me how much effort has been put into choice of fund and yet, particularly in the light of how little people know, how little effort has been put into trying to make those choices reasonably informed...
Continue reading →
What is federal Transport Minister John Anderson up to with his planned federal takeover of Australia's ports? And what does the ACCC know about regulating ports, let alone operating them? It's the national competition and consumer protection watchdog, for God's sake. I starte...
Continue reading →
Having an 11 year old daughter, I watch a lot more reality TV talent shows than I otherwise would. (My seven year old son prefers to use the TV to study the footy a figure of quiet pathos as he clutches a black and white striped 'Beanie Baby'). Herewith a review of one of the...
Continue reading →
I was very pleased to read Michael Duffy's latest column in which he laments the tribalism of the Australian right and the extent to which it is driven by the desire to score points off the left rather than build its own contribution to our life. As he says Howard's tenure is...
Continue reading →
A while back Mark Bahnisch commented in response to a 'centrist' post by me that centrism was all very well, but hard to get passionate about . I didn't really follow that then - saying that if one wanted to get passionate one would surely be passionate about specific principl...
Continue reading →
..to cheer us all up--or not, as the case may be! There's this game doing the rounds in the blogosphere, which goes under the unofficial moniker of 'Ten things I've never done.' The whole point is they're supposed to be reasonably ordinary things--no point writing you've never...
Continue reading →
For quite some time now I've been feeling radically uninspired about blogging. It's getting harder and harder to get enthusiastic about topics, or to find ones I haven't already posted about, sometimes multiple times. I've always been opinionated about political and broader pu...
Continue reading →
Nicholas Gruen reckons the Darwin-Alice Springs railway is a "white elephant". That's certainly long been the prevailing view of a high proportion of southern politicians and bureaucrats. In part it depends on how you define white elephant, I suppose. There would be a multitud...
Continue reading →
Here's this week's effort . Another lamentation on our national loss of vigor in economic reform. I argue that recently its been displaced by the much abhorred 'wedge politics'. I try to downplay the idea that 'wedge politics' is anything special or limited to the Howard Gover...
Continue reading →
Something relevant to today's announcement of a rapprochement betwen the Catholic and Anglican Churches on the subject of Mary, and the impression, in much of Britain, that the Anglican Church is all but dead.. An interesting Times Online article by journalist Ruth Gledhill, c...
Continue reading →
(via Tim Dunlop ) Australian law academics Mirko Bagaric and Julie Clarke are apparently about to publish an article in the University of San Francisco Law Review arguing that the use of torture, even if it leads to "annihilation" of the tortured suspect, should be lawful and...
Continue reading →
This post is a rant dug up and brushed up out of an email. It was prompted by reading the Monthly, but I didn't want to hijack Sophie's more serious review of it and it is not really in response to it. One point of disagreement with her is that while I like to read Helen Garne...
Continue reading →
Just drawing readers' attention to the fact there's a longish piece, by Richard Johnstone, on the blogging phenomenon, in the May issue of Australian Book Review. You can find it here
Continue reading →
There's a real feeling in Australian media/literary/intellectual circles that we are somehow lacking in something because we don't have a magazine of the venerable calibre of the New Yorker or the Atlantic Monthly. That's why every so often there's an attempt to remedy the sit...
Continue reading →
T1 and T3 ( here and here ) are squabbling again, this time over the number of war-related deaths in Iraq. Tim Lambert has long argued in favour of the credibility of the Lancet study which purported to show that some 98,000 Iraqis had died as a direct and indirect consequence...
Continue reading →
I have just been to see the German film 'Downfall'. If you're concerned about it 'humanising' Hitler, it does. It presents him as a three dimensional character with charisma, and gravitas. He's even courteous a lot of the time at least when he's not apoplectic with rage partic...
Continue reading →
Larvatus Prodeo » Butget Orthodoxies and the Politics of Greed How much for one of those PhD's again?
Continue reading →
Tim Dunlop muses about the need for an Australian Bill of Rights, in light of some comments by the head of the federal Attorney-General's Department, Robert Cornall, to the effect that perhaps some individual rights might need to take second place to the collective/community r...
Continue reading →
At last a Labor leader who understands what is needed and can articulate it - powerfully, coherently and convincingly. It's what Australia needs, in contrast to the cynical patrician populism of Costello's budget. This is the position statement Beazley should have given 7 or 8...
Continue reading →
I posted on the theme of bullshit under the heading " Why is John Clarke so funny? And why now? " a while back. Just to let Troppodilians know, the author of "On Bullshit", Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, Harry G. Frankfurt, is being interviewed tonig...
Continue reading →
I wasn't going to post this Courier Mail column as I agreed with Andrew Leigh's criticism of it that it didn't say much about the budget! But prompted by Peter Browne's request to post it on APO , I re-read it and thought it was quite good! (I don't always think that when I re...
Continue reading →
UK Troppo reader Alex Deane has just published a book, and writes to tell me he quoted extensively from some of my blog posts about values. The book is called The Great Abdication: Why Britain's Decline Is the Fault of the Middle Class , and the Amazon blurb describes it this...
Continue reading →
What I don't know about economics would fill a library. Moreover, the mainstream media is full of budget analysis and comment, as are some other blogs. So I think I'll give it a miss, except for these shoot-from-the-lip glib oversimplifications. The tax cuts (despite the skew...
Continue reading →
A recent post over at Catallaxy put me in mind of an old cartoon of mine. Apologies to more high minded Troppodillians, but it amused me.
Continue reading →
I can't decide whether American economist Richard Florida , who is currently doing the rounds promoting his latest book The Flight of the Creative Class , is one of those public intellectuals that Tim Dunlop loves, or just a populist poseur. Florida is responsible for the vogu...
Continue reading →
No doubt I'm the last to discover it, but I thought this essay 'An imaginary "scandal"' by Theodore Dalrymple was a great piece, marred only by the occasional ideological sloganeering.
Continue reading →
"There can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian social order. They will have to be physically separated and removed from society. Likewise, in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those ha...
Continue reading →
The Atlantic and Australia's new magazine The Monthly discuss the art of the interview In the Atlantic Stephen Budiansky unearths a World War II document on how to interrogate Japanese POWs while in The Monthly Kerryn Goldsworthy looks at how the ABC's Andrew Denton "lures his...
Continue reading →
I guess it's still too early to make confident predictions about precise numbers of seats, but the Sydney Morning Herald is suggesting that the Blair New Labour government has been returned with a greatly reduced majority of around 68 seats (down from 160 in 2001), while the T...
Continue reading →
That's the title of my newest book, which is a collection of my shorter pieces--essays, short stories and a few papers I gave at conferences--which has just been released by the small Australian publisher, Altair Australia Books. Nearly all of the pieces have been published be...
Continue reading →
The National Library of Australia wants to preserve Troppo Armadillo in its Pandora online archive . It's a welcome compliment to the consistent quality of writing by Troppo contributors over quite a long period (by blogging standards anyway). However, because there are so man...
Continue reading →
I ducked over to The Spin Starts Here just now to see if Caz and the crew had blogged a satisfyingly vicious coverage of the Logie awards. But disappointingly, they've fallen down on the job and spared the TV Week extravaganza, Rove's "F" word and all. Nevertheless, apparently...
Continue reading →
Below is this week's column. It raises the issue of regulation to combat wrongdoing - and the paradoxical results it often brings about. Regulation generates lots of debate between the right and left. The left often argue for regulation at least where it is putatively directed...
Continue reading →
I'm in mourning. James Russell ( Hot Buttered Death ) has chucked it in and moved on to the Old Bloggers Eventide Home . James was one of the relatively early entrants to the ozplogosphere, although his blog soon developed into an eclectic mix of posts about the bizarre and un...
Continue reading →
Graham Ring has an article in today's Age where he bemoans the lack of success of Victorian Aboriginal claimants in either prosecuting native title claims or negotiating successful outcomes with governments. It's entirely understandable that an activist associated with the lob...
Continue reading →
The Weekend Australian's editorial described the non-custodial sentence handed out to hit-and-run-killer Adelaide criminal lawyer and former police prosecutor Eugene McGee as a "travesty of justice". Certainly a $3,100.00 fine and licence disqualification appears grossly inade...
Continue reading →
I've just finished a biography of Lenin by Robert Service. It wasn't a great biography, but, if you'll pardon the expression, it serviceably addressed my own ignorance. * No doubt some Troppodillians are full bottle on revisionist history since the fall of the wall but not, al...
Continue reading →
For those who are interested..an actual scene from 'Melo', the film mentioned in my last entry.
Continue reading →
Alexander Downer's recent comparison of the Timor Sea to Texas is a little disturbing... but only if you've studied American history . Australia has been negotiating with East Timor over rights to revenues from yet to be developed gas fields in the Timor Sea . According to an...
Continue reading →
