Pressing on with the Les Darcy research and the things that you find out whether you wanted to know or not. I should have mentioned that the Park/Champion book is available in paperback from quality booksellers etc.
The foundation for the book was was laid by Darcy Niland (named after the boxer) who conducted many interviews during the 1950s while numerous people who knew Les were still alive and sound in mind.
Darcy Niland died before he started to organise his research notes and these were kept by Ruth Park until she was about to donate them to the Mitchell Library when she decided that we could keep the work in the family (Ruth is the mother of the Rathouse webmistress).
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As Mark Bahnisch said to me having read a draft of this week’s Courier Mail column, “Getting pissed off is often good for one’s writing”. Well, I’m not sure, but it certainly works for this genre. I’m thoroughly pissed off with the latest turn of events and so am grateful that I get the chance to put my case in the paper.

Most of the efficiency arguments for cutting top marginal tax rates are not too hot, and downright poor when one considers that almost all taxes distort – so if you want to argue against some tax, you have to show how its unusually bad. Anyway I’ve argued these things in various columns before. For instance here and here.

As I argue in the column this issue is a critical one for the ALP because so many of those policies for which the labour movement had high hopes either make life worse for most working people (eg. tariffs) or are ambiguous in their effects helping ‘insiders’ and hurting ‘outsiders’ (as I argue below is the case with most IR regulation including the basic wage).

As I suggest at the end of the piece, it’s also (yet another) loss of contact with the recent sucesses of the ALP, which was – uniquely amongst English speaking countries in the 1980s and 90s, economic liberalisation with a strongly redistributive flavour. The bargain between Paul Keating and Brian Howe.

Helen Clarke was able to sell this message in NZ, and indeed argued for higher taxes at the top end and got into government with that message. Whether one wants to embrace that (and top rates were much lower when she argued that) going the other way seems to me to be politically silly. A kind of rerun of the budget debacle when the ALP found a way of letting the Government off the hook for cutting taxes (for the second time) exclusively for those on higher incomes.

Anyway, the column is over the fold.
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"What was John Brogden thinking"? asked Miranda Devine, "Bob Carr’s resignation had just handed the NSW Opposition Leader the greatest gift of his career. But instead of capitalising on this stroke of luck, J-Bro let his hair down in rather exuberant style in front of a room full of journalists at a party at the new Hilton hotel."

Devine’s story appeared three weeks ago on 7 August. It seems that she had the story but didn’t spell it out. She did, however, let readers know that Brogden was treading close to the edge:

The Australian Hotels Association’s legendary annual knees-up is better attended by the fourth estate than just about any function on the Sydney media calendar.

The sushi and chocolate fondue fountain were temptations but the party and its aftermath downstairs in the Marble Bar were surely not the wisest place for an aspiring premier to let down his guard over a lemon-studded Corona or three.

Right now, discipline and focus are what 36-year-old Brogden needs if he is to have any hope of impressing NSW and achieving the big swing he needs in 2007.

After all, as his mentor John Howard is fond of saying about elections: "You can’t fatten a pig on market day."

Brogden was one piggy not destined to make it to market.

Meanwhile, on the ABC’s 7:30 Report site, there’s a reference to the shadowy figure "Alex Walker". Did they mean this bloke?

One saying that I’ve never really understood is this one. “To err is human. To forgive is divine”.

What I don’t understand about it is that I imagine that the forgiveness spoken about is forgiveness that is called for – and that is most typically where one understands the genuine contrition of the other person. I don’t know about you people, but, at least within the compass of my comfortable middle class life, I’ve always found that forgiveness comes as a flood in such circumstances.

This was in my mind recently when I posted on Colin Allan McAlister’s apology for his racist remarks.

I’m naive about such things, and the quick read I gave to Andrew Landeryou that alerted me to the story suggests that maybe lots more was going on.

But I was moved by the apparent genuineness of Brogden’s resignation. Would that a few more of our pollies who’s reaction to such an expos© would be to do a bit more talking under wet cement might act with such decisiveness and honour.

A post on Crooked Timber links to an article about ‘reality TV’ catching on in Iraq. The mind boggles. After boggling, my mind remembered Vietnamese comedian Hung Le’s line about the Vietnam war.

It really brought war into our living rooms.
And we didn’t even have a TV

The internet is where you go for armchair theorising about the internet and Google. Here’s a tip and some armchair theorising about Google.

Firstly I run two businesses – a discount mortgage broker and an economic policy consultancy. Neither couldn’t have existed in the form they do within the internet.

In fact when I set them up I did occasionally allow myself the ridiculous boast that I was “setting up an internet business” but only if I thought the person I was talking to was silly enough to believe me. I certainly didn’t believe it. I figured that for the businesses I was launching a mortgage broker and an economic policy consultancy that the ‘internet’ stuff was just an add on. A very handy bit of technology.

Then I got my first e-mail from Pakistan offering to redesign my site for peanuts. And I realised that there really was something new going on. Typical me I caught up with all the wave of hype after it had washed over me and crashed.
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