In view of the topical nature of Third World issues, this online journal from Africa may be of interest. A summary has been turning up in my mail for some time, courtesy of one of the many email groups that flood my in-box with more stuff than I can read. Clearly it has free m...
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This week's column comes out of the conjunction of my reading Jeffrey Sachs book on how we can cure extreme poverty in a couple of decades and the mounting hype about Live 8. Sachs' book is exciting in a way, though one also becomes aware fairly quickly that one is dealing wit...
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Having posted on Collingwood and racism last night, I came across this in the Sunday Age. The idea of sporting bodies getting involved in making our world a better place is a bit scary at one level. A bit like religious leaders lecturing us on politics (With the AFL getting po...
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Following the example of Nicholas Gruen who posted on some people who helped to save the world, I will put up some little-known people who were less involved in affairs of state but instead made their contribution in the world of ideas. Let me introduce Ian D Suttie, Bill Hutt...
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My team Collingwood has had an interesting involvement the modern social history of racism. At around the time of Pauline Hanson I used to argue that, though all the focus was on Pauline's contribution to making Australia more racist, we were in fact becoming dramatically less...
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I'm chaperoning my 11 year old daughter to the 2005 Children's World Summit for the Environment in Toyohashi City and Toyota City in Aichi Prefecture in Japan. I could go on here about how irritating the indoctrination of the young with all sorts of ridiculous ideas about the...
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I'm excited. I'm chuffed. I've published plenty of articles in journals and, though I thought some of them were good, and a number had important implications for various things, I've rarely had more than the slightest sign of life in articles once they've been published, unles...
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An amazing story was reported today, about another kidnapping crisis ending happily, and a captive rescued from cruel kidnappers: you can find it at At first I thought there'd maybe been a bit of a linguistic or cultural misunderstanding, and that maybe 'lions' was really a me...
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Do yourself a favour and read this superb post by guest contributor Kate at Mark Bahnisch's Larva tus Rodeo (can't help calling it that - I blame Nabakov). My sister Lynne has an intellectually handicapped daughter in her mid-twenties. She and her husband Ray have been through...
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Latest counting after Saturday's NT election suggests the CLP will most likely end up with just 4 seats, Labor 19 and Independents 2. It's a stunning Labor whitewash, equal to the largest victory the CLP achieved in its long years of dominance, back in 1983. Despite my modest...
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This week's column is on the shenanigans over the inquiry into Jayant Patel, the rogue doctor of Bundaberg. Since Troppo is kind of becoming a site of record for my column and I appreciate people's comments, I'm postiing it. Anyone who likes reading my columns might like it. B...
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" Ya know what the time is, mate ?" asks an Aboriginal "long grasser" sitting under the trees as we walk along the beach towards Rapid Creek footbridge on our evening constitutional. " Five past six ," I reply, ploughing onward to forestall any possibility of the usual follow-...
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When I went to law school, my criminology lecturer Gordon Hawkins taught us that research clearly showed that the death penalty had no measurable deterrent effect on murder/crime rates. But I recall thinking at the time that the evidence he cited didn't sound all that compelli...
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I wonder why the blogosphere zeitgeist is throwing up musings about the desirability of some latter day form of Athenian participatory democracy? Nicholas Gruen's post earlier today, in which he advocated a randomly selected "people's chamber" of Parliament, is a proximate exa...
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Just returned from an evening at the central tallyroom in Darwin. I confess that I failed to disguise a quietly malicious joy at the crestfallen pain of all the old CLP apparatchiks who used to gloat without restraint during Labor's many dark nights of the soul through the 198...
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I was reading a Financial Times article by Robert Skidelsky the great biographer of the great Keynes (Lord Skidelsky's bio of Lord Keynes!). It offered the following observation about the increase of party solidarity, and the resulting threat of tyranny of the executive and/or...
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John Quiggin and Andrew Leigh have posted a couple of reviews of a big one day conference in Canberra held on Thursday in honour of Bob Gregory's turning 65. It was a very enjoyable event, with a remarkable number of recognised faces in attendance. Bruce Chapman was the main o...
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Over the fold you'll find my latest (and possibly last before Saturday's election) obervations on the NT election. I've been lazy (because I'm swamped with exam marking), and have just copied my notes provided to CDU's media people as part of my job as one of the University's...
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We'll be hearing a lot more about this topic in the next month or so. I'm pretty excited about it I must say. Tim Colebatch's column captures my own feelings pretty much. There may be bugs on what's flying around at present, but there are real achievements occuring. And if any...
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Bestsellers are often disappointments. They promise a great deal fascination, revolutions in our thinking, entertainment. But they almost invariably under-deliver. When skimming through the pages of Thomas Friedman's tome the Lexus and the Olive Tree he's got a new one out whi...
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Ted Barlow has a great post over at Crooked Timber . One of the things about ideological warfare is its relentlessness. Tactics and attitudes that emerge to respond to bad situations build up a kind of second nature in their adherents which continues to roll on even where many...
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John Quiggin has undertaken a more detailed analysis of NT CLP Opposition Leader Denis Burke's bizarre election campaign promise/proposal to build a power line from southern Queensland to Darwin. I discussed the proposal here . JQ's analysis was published in today's Australian...
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Troppodillians have seen some of this week's Courier Mail column coming in an earlier post . This week's column is about the strange way in which Great Britain snapped out of the 'low dishonest decade' of appeasement. It seems to me that there is something remarkable about the...
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This blog isn't called Troppo Armadillo for nothing. There's something about living in Australia's Deep North that generates frequent bouts of bizarre behaviour, not least in our politicians. The phenomenon was strongly underlined in the first days of the current NT election c...
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It seems that members of the Schapelle cheersquad aren't quite as numerous as one would have imagined from reading the hysterical outpourings in our mainstream media. Fifty one percent of Australians think she's innocent, but almost as many think she's guilty or don't know (th...
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Here's a short essay I've written. The magazine of the Aurora tower in Sydney (would you believe?) approached me to write something for them. They're even paying me! Readers of my piece on open source software (pdf) that I discussed on Troppo a month or so back (now published...
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The New Zealand film "In my father's den" has been available on DVD for a few months now. I first saw this film in the cinema and saw it without any expectations other than some good reviews. I thought it was a magnificent movie, one of the best I've ever seen and raved about...
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Nicholas Gruen posted an excellent piece about asylum seekers the other day, and Andrew Bartlett has another one today that's also well worth reading. Andrew's post exposes the mealy-mouthed hypocrisy of John Howard's utterances on the issue, especially in relation to the dete...
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A number of readers have emailed urging me to say something about the bloody Schapelle Corby case. God knows why they'd want to read yet another pundit whittering on about it; surely Schapelle has already consumed enough column centimetres for even the most hardened legal soap...
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Jason Soon has an interesting post drawing attention to research suggesting a link between psychopathic and sociopathic personalities and abnormal brain development. The research suggests that 'unsuccessful' criminal psychopaths (i.e. those who get caught) tend to exhibit spec...
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