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 (nam...
Continue reading →
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...
Continue reading →
(Note: for reasons unknown to me, Wordpress has filed this as a contribution of Tony Harris. It is in fact by Rafe Champion. NG) One of my most interesting writing projects was to work with Ruth Park on a historical biography of the boxer and sporting icon Les Darcy. This invo...
Continue reading →
"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...
Continue reading →
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 genu...
Continue reading →
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
Continue reading →
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...
Continue reading →
Lawrence Lessig says this . the strong bias of public policy should be to spread public goods at their marginal cost. Compromises are no doubt necessary if private actors are to contribute voluntarily to the production of public goods; but public entities, such as govern-ments...
Continue reading →
What's driving house prices? Well we know that there's some artificial scarcity driven by the rationing of land for housing is an important contributor. For instance Canberra has lots of land, but very high house prices (and pretty cruddy little blocks on the outer edges) and...
Continue reading →
" A long time ago in a far away land reigned the establishment Kingo's Club Chaos, sometimes now referred to as Ye Olde Webdiary ." Back in 2001 Sydney Morning Herald journalist Margo Kingston set up an online diary at the Herald's web site. Margo's Webdiary soon turned into a...
Continue reading →
I went to David Hare's play Stuff Happens last night. Thinking a lot of the playwright, I've been disappointed by the most recent productions I've seen Via Dolorosa and The Judas Kiss , both of which were OK but basically dull. The play is really a documentary about the invasi...
Continue reading →
This is not an easy read for philosophical amateurs like myself, but its a good one. "G¶del and the nature of mathematical truth". Ends with a bit of a bang too.
Continue reading →
This week's column talks about that old chestnut of the limitations of income per capita as a measure of welfare and then talks about the UN Human Development Index. I would have liked to go on about the Australia Institute's Genuine Progress Indicator . Attempting to produce...
Continue reading →
A couple of entries down I posted a draft Progressive Essay I'm working on. I said the next post would contain another large slab of text with two sections - one on investment advice, the other on a role for the Opposition. Well the first of those offerings is being held over...
Continue reading →
I lived in Canberra in the mid-1980s and it was a magical time for amateur - or perhaps I should call it non-professional - theatre and music. Each year the Arts Faculty at ANU put on a Shakespeare play. I don't know what they were like as lecturers but there were actors there...
Continue reading →
Below is an appendix to the first essay I'm working on mentioned in the previous post . It was a note to myself to work something out a few years ago. I was irritated with the automatic assumption that price discrimination (where a seller like Qantas or Telstra sells the same...
Continue reading →
I am working on a Progressive Essay . I am basing it around some ideas on superannuation that I have elaborated in my Courier Mail Columns here , here and here . As the essay burgeoned to over 8,000 words, I decided to break it into two. The first essay is oriented around the...
Continue reading →
Barista has just done a great post on an iconic World War II picture revisited and reinacted . It reminded me that a few days ago I got an invitation to the Australian Maritime Museum for a celebration of what must be the 65th anniversary of the landing of the Dunera - the boa...
Continue reading →
My editor wanted a piece on the Beattie Govt's economic strategy in the context of two by-elections being held this weekend. So here it is - with an additional graph that couldn't go into the Courier Mail. __________________________________________________________________ Pete...
Continue reading →
At the end of question time in Parliament any member can speak to a claim that he has been misrepresented. I claim to have been misrepresented. I was interested in the responses to my earlier post on Peter Singer's Animal Liberation. Perhaps it's understandable given that it's...
Continue reading →
Critical comments from a Kenyan economist James Shikwati on the perverse results of western aid to African states. SPIEGEL: Even in a country like Kenya, people are starving to death each year. Someone has got to help them. Shikwati: But it has to be the Kenyans themselves who...
Continue reading →
Spiked Online has run quite a lot of articles about animal welfare lately. I remember how disappointed I was thirty odd years ago when I bought Peter Singer's book Animal Liberation . The case for considering animal suffering and for doing what we could to alleviate it seemed...
Continue reading →
Here is the next exciting installment for those people who read my post of a few days ago on insider trading. I agonised over whether or not it was worth making the proposal that there be a civil remedy against companies where it can be shown - according to civil standards of...
Continue reading →
As a follow-up to the epic post on the graveyard of ideologies, here is a story about the graveyards of ideologists .
Continue reading →
The contrasts between Oscar Wilde and Ned Kelly are obvious. But reading Neil McKenna's (relatively) new biography of Oscar the parallels hit me forcefully. What follows is a subjective reflection on those similarities. I won't try too hard to justify what I'm saying, but rath...
Continue reading →
Editors place a high store in columns being topical. So, even when I've got some issue I'd like to run with in a column, if I can't think of a way of shoehorning it into topicality I often put it aside for a few weeks, until something comes up that gives me a 'hook' with which...
Continue reading →
News Online reports that the Howard government has today announced that it is seizing control of approvals for new uranium mines from the Martin Labor NT government: THE Federal Government has taken control over the future of the Northern Territory's rich uranium deposits, dec...
Continue reading →
I don't know about you but I'm a big fan of David Hare. I thought 'Plenty' was marvellous, and so was a David Hare play produced in Melbourne some years ago called "Skyliight". Here's a terrific little essay of his extolling the virtues of the lecture. I agree with pretty much...
Continue reading →
Here is the column I asked for assistance a couple of posts ago. The earlier post started a discussion that was a bit unsatisfying for me as it seemed to me to misunderstand what I was getting at. Essentially the point of what I'm arguing is that if the Opposition had handled...
Continue reading →
Limpopo farmers sell fresh produce by cellphone . Off the Blogafrica site . Off Jonathan Calder's Liberal England site.
Continue reading →
Here's last week's column . Its fairly self explanatory. I might say that I'm pretty disappointed in the debate on IR so far. On the one side we have John Howard arguing that it will promote productivity, when its pretty clear it will do the reverse - but that's because if it...
Continue reading →
I'm trying to write a column which argues that the 'Tampa' was John Howard's 'conviction politics' reduced (very successfully) to street theatre. His handling of the Tampa incident enabled him to embody his values in a way that the Australian populace found compelling (however...
Continue reading →
I wrote this a while back as a companion piece to my piece on Australian Idol. With Oz Idol coming round again, and Big Brother drawing to a close (these shows are best towards the end), here is the piece. If the format of the Australian Idol franchise is slickness itself, 'Th...
Continue reading →
