Well, here you are at the capacious new premises of Club Troppo (formerly Troppo Armadillo ). Just about all the grunt, grind and skill involved in creating this shiny revamped WordPress blog has been contributed by the amazing (and amazingly patient) Stephen Bounds. We are de...

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This week's column - with the answer to the question about the picture below. And I hope Troppodillians had an enjoyable Christmas. Some Christmas reflections ________________________________________________________________ I'm afraid (but not ashamed) to say that I'm an abste...

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All will be revealed on Tuesday night.

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I thought this was a teriffic op ed on the Cronulla riots. It's got a 'down the middle' format that many Troppodillians will know that I'm attracted to. But I think the points it makes about the standard left and right views of the issue are spot on. I would have liked to have...

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This is a quote from a sympathetic review of a book I am reading called "Children of the Lucky Country". I hope to write more on it soon. Paul Kelly - (not the journalist but the board member of the Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth) writes this: Australian p...

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I've previously written up the idea of charitable giving at Christmas. It's a bit late now I guess, but, in doing some reading around for next week's column I came upon an Australia Institute paper (pdf) that I'd missed on Christmas giving. It gives a bunch of links to Christm...

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In 1959 Michael Harrington shocked America with the claim that 50 million of its citizens were living in poverty. His magazine article turned into a book and by 1964 President Johnson was standing outside a shack in Kentucky announcing that the nation was at war with poverty....

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At the end of each year, like migratory birds, the world's international greenhouse diplomats over ten thousand of them hear a mysterious call. And each year the tell-tale trails of greenhouse gas seem to stretch yet further across the sky as planes descend on another exotic l...

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I've found from long experience that if you don't promote yourself no-one else is likely to do it for you. So it is with great pleasure that I note Troppo has been awarded the gong by Crikey as it's Best Blog of the Year . I'm usually not a great believer in awards, especially...

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I've just been to see the above film and recommend it. It seems to have a fair bit of verisimilitude. For those that don't know, it's about the role of CBS news and what we now call 'current affairs' in the downfall of Joe McCarthy. At a time when people are being deported fro...

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George Monbiot agrees with the Australia Institute, though he calls a spade a spade and comes out and says it. Whereas the Australia Institute hates four wheel drivers but dresses it up in all sorts of apparently reasonable and scientific talk, George just gets things off his...

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I regret to say that the standard bearers of open source on your desktop, Firefox browser and OpenOffice.org both have important flaws. Firefox has dreadful memory hunger. Have a look at how it's chewing up resources on my own system (above) though I guess I can forgive it it'...

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Robert Carter is the President of the Australian Society of Marine Artists. He has some paintings on show at the Mosman Art Gallery, alongside a truly spectacular selection of important works collected by Howard Hinton and donated to the Armidale Teachers College. Anyone who t...

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Let me count the ways. 1. Platinum Capital doesn't pay investment 'advisors' to recommend its product. 2. It doesn't 'index hug' but rather tries to make money as well as it can using a range of strategies that are broadly contrarian. Thus rather than hedge currencies in a mec...

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(1) It's all down to the cunning evil racist manipulator HoWARd, who used his mincing minion Jonesy to inflame the ignorant, white bogan surfie meathead masses into a jingoistic frenzy against some basically harmless colourful ethnic oppressed yoofs. (2) It's all the fault of...

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One of my relatives, just retired, has a serious and longstanding weight problem, complicated by a bad leg as a result of a car accident many years ago. One leg is shorter than the other (which could have been corrected by a built-up shoe) and that has upset her gait and damag...

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Albert Jacka was possibly the outstanding footsoldier and front-line leader of men in the Great War. It is possible to imagine equally impressive achievements but hard to imagine better. That is a big claim, but check out the record . It is worth reading to the end because Jac...

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Jen often wants me to tell her a story. But it isn't that easy. I'm not one of those blokes who can spin a yarn at the drop of a hat or even talk the legs off an iron pot (how's that for a mixed metaphor?). The mood has to be right and the muse suitably inspired. The Harbord D...

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"Isolated and angry" an apt descriptor of Far South Sydney's [pen]insular white trash? Err, no it actually refers to residents of geographical middle Sydney. Of course, The Australian 's headline is meant to refer to cultural, rather than geographical isolation. But other tha...

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This week's column. My father sometimes responded to my cheekier moments with an old Jewish saying that greatly amused him "If you're so smart, how come you're not rich?" Dad dedicated his own smarts to academia, and was happy with the tradeoff he made in favour of interestin...

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Families surround us with symmetry. Echoes. Half-understood parallels. You realise it more and more as you get older. Like when you rebuke your child for some appalling piece of behaviour, and suddenly realise you're using the same words and tone your own parents employed when...

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Meet Didius Julianus I've been listening to some introductory lectures on the Byzantine Empire . A nice fact I didn't know is that those Romans were way ahead of us economists in the use of economic instruments. Didius Julianus was a little too short term in his thinking. Afte...

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My last trip to bed with a nasty wog brought forth a feast for those Troppodillians who were interested. Some gems from hours of listening to Radio National were unearthed. Well, I've got the dreaded virus again, and expect to recover in the not too distant. In the meantime th...

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I've got a bunch of correspondence from charities I give to. I'm not a close observer of these things but I guess their main times of the year are Christmas time and end of tax year time. Anyway, they've been busy with their direct marketing techniques (and I suspect receiving...

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My editor asked me to write about the Robert Gerard scandal, so I did reflecting on some broader governance issues. Readers with an eye for some of the economic debates will detect in the background of the second half of the column the debate on Reserve Bank independence. As t...

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Brian Penton's book The Landtakers is now on line as a part of the Australian Gutenberg ebook project. It came up when I did a google on Jacques Kahane who worked with Penton to translate Mises "Against Socialism". Penton's novel is dedicated to Kahane. Similarly, Olga Penton'...

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From today's Financial Review You can tell when governments get long in the tooth: ministers keep recounting the good old days, when they first came to power. So it was last week when the leader of the government in the Senate, Senator Robert Hill, gave one of the reasons for...

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Congratulations from all right thinking people to Steve Bracks' Government in Victoria. We'll be accompanying our daughter Anna to the Children's Hospital for her to participate in a ballet concert for the entertainment of the kids in the hospital as they battle various ailmen...

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Some Troppodillians might have heard the essay I posted on Troppo a few months back on Oscar Wilde and Ned Kelly boiled down into a five minute talk. 1 For those who are interested, the transcript is below the fold and you can even download an MP3 of the broadcast [4.8 Megs]....

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Sixty percent of a rabbit's meat is in its hind legs. That's why it's so difficult to make one rabbit into a meal for four people. If you need some ideas on how to do it, then Anthony Georgeff's Spiceblog is the place for you. Georgeff's blog has the most amazing food pictures...

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If beer isn't good for you why are they selling it in chemist shops Germans are drinking less beer . Part of the reason is that beer isn't cool anymore but perhaps the major cause is the country's ageing population. Older consumers are becoming more health conscious and are tu...

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'Economic reform' gets blamed for many things. I heard someone complaining about growth at all costs, they then segued into its costs on the environment. Then we had the greenhouse effect and the poor person couldn't help themselves and went on to wonder about the tsunami. Dea...

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That old boy scout joke about the person looking for his shilling where the light was best, rather than where he'd lost it, is so funny (partly) because it's such a good take on human psychology. And any good joke about a the psychological foibles of someone acting alone is li...

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Francis Wheen Francis Wheen was fun to listen to on LNL, though his targets are pretty easy ones. Targets are more fun when shared. I posted on Demos a while back and here is Wheen on one of its most prominent alumni on whose book I also commented. Thin air is solid Charles Le...

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I love my beer. I don't think this is inherently funny. And it doesn't mean I like getting drunk (just the early stages). Though I'm in no great danger of becoming an alco, I would not find it easy to go without my one (and occasionally two) stubbies of Coopers or sometimes mo...

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Brian Penton (1904-1951) would surely have achieved the status of the most memorable journalist and commentator in postwar Australia but he died in his prime and left too many enemies to achieve the reputation that he deserved. This article by his biographher Patrick Buckridge...

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I wonder if I'm just being naive in imagining that there was once a time when newspaper editors, at least on the quality broadsheets, maintained a clear distinction between news and opinion, and attempted as far as possible to report the news in a reasonably straight, unbiased...

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I was swimming around the website of Queensland Education and came across a report with an interesting title "Promoting Positive Gender Relationships: A report of a study into the feasibility of developing and delivering curriculum through Queensland state schools to promote p...

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It is an odd fact that practitioners of the dismal science - or some of us - really are a humorous lot. Robert Solow is probably the funniest - but then he's got a Nobel Prize so he's a clever fellow. I was reminded of this receiving Chris Caton's report on the US economy toda...

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One of the posts that I've had in the back of my mind since I started at Troppo is a ranking of the PMs of my (adult) lifetime. Readers of this column will not be surprised to learn that I think that Hawkie was the only really good PM in my lifetime. In any event as I say in t...

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Some recent converts to blog reading might not yet have stumbled across the delights of Gummo Trotsky's blog "Tugboat Potemkin". Gummo took a long break from blogging not so long ago (a dark blogging night of the soul not unlike my own), but is well and truly back and blogging...

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I pointed to the dilemma Microsoft faced in considering whether or not to open up the specifications of its .DOC, .XLS and .PPT standards here . Well, (courtesy of Slashdot) according to the London Financial Times , Microsoft will be announcing the opening up of these standard...

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Today's AFR column. Losing is sometimes better than winning. That might be the case for the Australian business community which supports the Commonwealth's new wages setting policy. Of course, the Government could eventually lose. Although no government Senator will want to in...

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I told Alexander pictured above (he's the good looking one), that I'd write a post on Troppo when he got his first cricket wicket. Well he got his first cricket wicket, so here is the post! Alexander is besotted with cricket and he's a good bowler. You have been Warned!

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Verily I say unto you, who knows if this will amount to much but it is nevertheless a heavy scene. Via Slashdot . You heard it first on Troppo - well second actually (maybe third). Google's Secret Plans For All That Dark Fiber? Robert X. Cringely details the plan for all the d...

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Most Americans leave high school knowing little about their nation's history . The latest Zorro film isn't going to help. According to Eric Cox in The American Enterprise , the latest Zorro sequel -- The Legend of Zorro attempts "to reconcile Latino identity politics with Amer...

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Taking up the theme of limited government that I dropped in a comment the other day, Gerard Radnitzky wrote a fascinating paper on the "European miracle" of scientific progress, freedom and prosperity that marched together over the last few centuries. The bottom line of this l...

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I've not bumped into John Armstrong before, which presumably says more about me than him. He's been a busy bee in the new burgeoning field of popularising philosophy having published The Secret Power of Beauty (2004) and Conditions of Love (2002) and is about to publish Love,...

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When Coca Cola distributors in Mexico City tried to persuade Raquel Ch¡vez to stop selling a rival brand of cola the shopkeeper complained to Mexico's Federal Competition Commission. The result was $15 million fine for the distributors, a moral victory for Ch¡vez , and an unex...

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Hugh Pavletich e-mailed me this article arguing that " Bicultural Europe is doomed ". Very dramatic. Also I must admit that the hostility in some quarters mainly on the right - to multi-culturalism surprised me when it surfaced and even now surprises me. I'm afraid I'm with P...

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Ross Gittins' column in today's SMH takes up a topic sure to get RWDBs foaming with apoplectic rage: FORGIVE me if I'm not shaking in my shoes over the risk of terrorism on our shores. There is a risk, of course, but it's being greatly exaggerated. My scepticism comes after 30...

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On Late Night Live tonight. Should be fascinating and great fun. Paul K sat at Lang's feet when young drawing the big fella out. I'm not a big fan of Paul Keating as PM. But he was a great Treasurer, and he's great to listen to. He'll discuss Lang with Phillip Adams and histor...

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I had a go at this topic here but wanted to just make the note here that, rather late in the day, going through old Slashdot newsletters, I found this link to the BBC Open Source project. A Good Thing methinks. There should be more of it. I particularly liked this para. For th...

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Here is the 'op ed' of a presentation I made to the National Policy Conference of the Australian Fabians. Naturally the Fabians were extremely keen to have troppodillian representation and so invited me and Tony Harris to give papers. Tony's session - on accountability - was m...

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Readers of this blog will know that I am an admirer of the way in which New Zealand seems to be innovating in economic policy . I've drawn attention to the way in which they've been the first country in the world to build the ideas about 'potent defaults' into savings policy,...

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Courtesy of Slashdot, this report does come from a biased source, but with that warning and the declaration of my own antipathy to the extent to which intellectual property has been extended (though I'll be happy if someone can show me that it is all for the best), this simila...

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Sometime Troppodillian commenter and source of large quantities of high quality analysis, Andrew Leigh has a section on his website called "Frivolous Stuff" . Alas, all it says is "Watch this space....". I thought this was disappointing. But immediately donning my trusty and p...

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A great steer from Matt McIntosh (in a comment) to a long interview with Jeremy Shearmur . He is now living in the vicinity of Canberra. Britain's loss.... This is some stuff about Adam Smith that should appeal to Nicholas Gruen. Interviewer You've spoken about Adam Smith. How...

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Suppose you're at a rollicking pub. An obviously very-drunk man is staggering about, brandishing his car-keys. From what you can understand from his slurred speech, his intention is to shortly drive home. Do you: (a) try to gently talk him out of it? (even at the risk of fruit...

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Former Queensland rugby coach John Connolly comprehensively demonstrated yesterday why it's lucky he was never made Wallabies coach. Connolly reckons the Australian rugby team and/or its coach shouldn't be criticised for the current record run of test losses: But Connolly, now...

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This week's column is about the politics of IR. I think it will be OK for the Government if the economy stays healthy. But if it doesn't I think there'll be hell to pay. Tim Colebatch has published on this issue before and had another go in the paper today . I took the opportu...

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Well Troppodilians, you heard it first - well read it first - on Troppo. A week or so ago having received the link from a friend, Mike Waller, I referred Troppo readers to the story of David Mery , who was held as a terror suspect in Britain under their new laws. It was a fair...

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From the Australian Financial Review, 8th November, 2005 Thank goodness for the counter terrorism guards on Sydney's Harbour Bridge: they can stop pedestrians who use the bicycle path to cross the harbour. However, some people ignore instructions and continue their stroll. If...

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I was looking through the second book of Leunig cartoons in which this image appears. In preparing my column for Wednesday, I was looking for his cartoon on how Vasco Pajama meets the scapegoat who teaches him the art of 'copping it sweet' - the opposite of self defence. When...

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Magnificent n'est pas? (Though I have to admit that circle in the foreground is a bit of a worry. I wonder what it is?)

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The Dunera News is a photocopied magazine of news and reminiscences of the Dunera boys who were shipped to Australia in World War Two (and who included my father). The latest edition contains a reproduction of an Age story that I missed at the time about Captain Broughton his...

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The Howard Anti-Terrorism Bill (No. 2) 2005 (no. 1 being the one rushed through both Houses yesterday with bipartisan support) is a considerable improvement on the original draft leaked by ACT Chief Minister John Stanhope. But it still has major problems in my view. Sedition p...

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Regulatory Impact Statements are supposed to function as a 'gatekeeping' mechanism for regulation. They are supposed to be rigorous assessments of the economic costs and benefits of various options. The Government is so concerned about regulation that it has just announced a r...

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I've just done a biography of my dear old Dad for Wikipedia. He may or may not be resting in peace, but he's now reposing in Wikipedia. For those readers of this blog knew him they might like to refine the entry and others may find it of some interest. He had a more exciting l...

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Catallaxy is running a bit of November 11 nostalgia , so I thought I'd join in. Here's a reedit of my comment on the thread, and an invitation to others to tell us where they were. I go back as far as JFK. I was about 6 and my dad was trying to listen to a crackling radio and...

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Inflation dodging bullets There's an old story about former Federal Industry Minister John Button. It refers to his (diminutive) size, to his political dexterity and maybe his luck. Several Labor ministers were caught and drenched in a downpour. Having scrambled to cover they...

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In a way this story is reassuring. I don't have any objection to some extra attention being given to someone who fits a profile of a terrorist. But of course the potential helplessness in the face of bureaucracy is thoroughly spooky. In this case nothing too terrible happened....

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I've just got back from a trip to Canberra which allowed me to pick up the family copy of Pride and Prejudice - my Dad's favourite book by his favourite author. I wanted to bring it back for my 11 year old daughter to read as she'd loved the movie. There was quite a few books...

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I sent two unsolicited essays to Black Inc a couple of months ago a longer and a shorter essay on open source software. Neither was successful which was fair enough. Fortunately I hadn't written them for that forum, but was hoping that they might publish them. When I inquired...

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Richard Ackland has a powerful and angry article in this morning's SMH about the Howard government's anti-terrorism bill (a topic about which I've blogged here and here ): The design of the legislation is to conscript the federal judiciary into sprinkling holy water over asses...

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As David Williamson's latest foray demonstrates this idea that we're stealing from our kids is back in fashion. Cruise Ship Australia is in fact living off resources that took billions of years to accumulate. We're eating up our past at a prodigious rate. Our grandchildren won...

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I must be going through a particularly grumpy phase of middle age at the moment. It's not often these days that I find myself so peeved by a TV current affairs story that I can't resist resorting to a cathartic blog post. But that was certainly the effect of an item about the...

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Thanks to Ian for providing the link to this 1994 piece by Noel Pearson , deploring the Labor failure to allocate more money to health care or any other stragegies to address the devastation wrought by alcohol in the outback communities. I just wish that the honorable members...

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The aptly named Chas Savage contributed an opinion piece in The Age the other day about the sedition provisions of the Howard government's proposed new anti-terrorism laws . Savage's article is well written and makes some good points: I openly urge disaffection with the consti...

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Noel Pearson gave a talk this evening, actually yesterday, sponsored by the dreaded rightwing think tank The Centre for Independent Studies. The venue was a rather unlikely location, a bunker under the Sydney Stock Exchange, an interesting place to talk about relieving the con...

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I've been mystefied that so little attention has been given to the idea of imposing an access regime on Microsoft - surgically targeted to 'natural monopoly' bottlenecks in their software. The strongest case for doing something is in the area of the standards that their file p...

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Optimism seems to be a quality in short supply in this current period of Islamo-fascist terrorism and authoritarian responses to it. That's why I was taken by a SMH article a few days ago by Peter Hartcher . The world, he pointed out, was pretty damned good and getting better,...

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Inveterate Troppodillians (that's not invertebrate Troppodillians) will know that I'm pretty interested in how 'open source' things are working out on the internet. Open source software like Linux particularly that under the GPL licence has demonstrated itself as a new and pow...

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Hugh Pavletch has sent me this exchange on 'corporate social responsibility'. The two parties arguing the standard Friedman case against CSR (one of them is Friedman) are much less interesting than the party arguing the case for - John Mackey. That's not because Friedman et al...

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I thought of a post on this film, and then thought it wasn't worth the effort. Suffice it to say, it is very pleasurable to look at, and everything clicked into place when I saw on a bus stop poster that it was by the producer of Bridget Jones Diary and Love Actually and Notti...

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Saturn, it's rings and one of its many moons, Dionne.

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Courtesy of Ric Simes and Yahoo: October 20, 2005 OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- A man got a prison term longer than prosecutors and defense attorneys had agreed to -- all because of Larry Bird. The lawyers reached a plea agreement Tuesday for a 30-year term for a man accused of shooti...

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Great news from Mattel Toys , and not before time. But why does the most recent Ken doll look like a Madame Tussauds effigy of Princess Diana? And the 1990s version like Boy George after a fright but before he lost his hair? I'm certainly available if they're looking for a mor...

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On October 19, in 1899, a 17 year-old Robert Goddard climbed a cherry tree on a beautiful autumn afternoon in Worcester, Massachusetts. Inspired by H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds and gazing out across a meadow, young Goddard imagined it would be wonderful to make a device that...

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Have a look at this article on Trolltech . In short it explains a nice little bit of price (and product) discrimination by which software is developed simultaneously as a proprietory commercial product and as a GPL licenced open source product. This is not particularly new, bu...

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Abraham Lincoln is one of the great politicians of all time. A man who confessed he was at sea in the chaos of politics and war, that events controlled him more than he events. And yet Lincoln did that thing that a great politician does like the alchemist. To fashion something...

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Here's this week's column in the Courier Mail . And here's the devastating graph which shows how poorly correlated with poverty low wages and minimum wages are. There is almost no relation between these jobs and household income. So, at considerable cost and while it generates...

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I was reading Tim Colebatch's column on IR reform thinking it was a bit overblown. He argues that IR reform could be a lingering threat to the Coalition's electoral prospects. My own thinking was that it would be more like the GST - something for an Opposition to conjour with...

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Peter Kemp has an interesting post at Mark Bahnisch's place , in which he argues that the "preventative detention orders" to be created under the Howard government's proposed new Anti-Terrorism Bill 2005 may be unconstitutional, in that the provisions repose non-judicial funct...

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Our institutions are constantly evolving and so we are faced with a challenge, a promise and a responsibility. The challenge is to join the eternal task of critical appraisal and piecemeal reform, the promise is the hope of unending progress and the responsibility is to mainta...

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I've been trying to get Tony Harris, friend, some time colleague, Auditor General and Fin Review columnists to post on Troppo for some time. He sent me the fantastic piece you see below the fold - which he published in the Fin on Saturday. So I've created a profile for him her...

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. . . instead make them listen to the latest novelty ring-tone, on endless loop I'm not sure if such an idea has yet crossed the minds of this Indonesian/American odd couple , but once you start using music in the services of ideology which is what Abdurrahman Wahid and C Holl...

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How come this article by David Marr and Nick O'Malley is in the national news section of the Sydney Morning Herald , and not the opinion section? Compare the nakedly partisan polemic of Marr and O'Malley with the balanced, careful analysis of Nicholas Gruen here at Troppo, or...

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I've been meaning for ages to give a plug to Colin Wicking's blog . Wicking is the long-time chief cartoonist for the Northern Territory News and Sunday Territorian (the local Murdoch rags here in Darwin). People tend to either love Wicking's cartoons or hate them. I'm unasham...

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The figure above is a curve which was all the rage after it was published by two European economists in 1988 the Calmfors and Driffill curve. Calmfors and Driffill's idea was that you could get caught between two stools. The curve models unemployment against the kind collectiv...

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Topalov, known affectionately on tihs site as Troppolov is World Champion . In a personal message to Troppodillians, Veselin said "Comrades, I couldn't have done it without you". Apparently in his darkest hours Troppolov took great comfort from Rafe Champion's notes on the tri...

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On Tuesday, IBM Research celebrated it's 60th Birthday. IBM inventions and discoveries include the programming language Fortran (1957), magnetic storage (1955), the relational database (1970), DRAM (dynamic random access memory) cells (1962), the RISC (reduced instruction set...

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Among a few others were Babbage, and Lyell, both of whom liked to talk. Carlyle, however, silenced everyone by haranguing during the whole dinner on the advantages of silence. After dinner, Babbage, in his grimmest manner, thanked Carlyle for his very interesting Lecture on Si...

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Readers of Troppo will be familiar with my concerns about the Australia Institute's recent foray (pdf) into name-calling and finger-pointing at city drivers of 4WDs. A creepy development if you ask me. (And here on what my old friend and occasional lurker Kathy call's "Pontifi...

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I think David McKnight has to move a lot further to locate himself in a viable position vis a vis left, right and neoliberalism. In addition to the links provided by the indefatigable and mercurial Nicholas Gruen in the post below, there is an appraisal of the concluding chapt...

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There's been a bit of interest in the blogosphere regarding David McKnight's book 'Beyond Left and Right: New Politics and the Culture Wars'. Rafe has some links here . I'm going to try to go along, because from what I've seen and heard on LNL, McKnight's effort is a worthwhil...

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Last Christmas I was doing some writing on intellectual property and got interested in how James Watt was a bit of a forerunner of Bill Gates. Microsoft bought MS-DOS and built an empire out of it. James Watt did better, and introduced an important innovation, but his was an i...

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Concentrations of people with university qualifications in Melbourne in 2001 (from the ABS's social atlas of Melbourne) From a talk to be delivered tonight . The pattern is striking n'est pas?

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My Adam Smith posts haven't exactly laid them in the isles - at least judging by the number of comments they've generated. But perhaps some people have enjoyed them. I enjoyed writing them. In any event part of their purpose was to collect my thoughts in preparation for an int...

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From the Social Change project , at the Mercatus Centre, George Mason University, a link to a report on the recent three-day World Islamic Economic Forum held under the auspices of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The forum hosted more than 500 delegates from...

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Another triumph - another brilliant piece of work .

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I doubt this will be of much excitement to many Troppodillians, but, emboldened by Troppo's webmaseter Scott Wickstein , I am posting my second chess post. The first was a game by Albert Einstein. Every now and again something amazing happens and right now someone whose been i...

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Those interested in the development of our economy may be interested that insurance against one's house prices falling has just been introduced to the Australian Housing Market not a bad time to get a policy if you ask me! Of course the beloved Peach Discount Mortgage Broking...

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In this week's column, I took a certain amount of pleasure in being 'right wing' (ie pro-market) about petrol and 'left wing' (ie pro-collectivism) on greenhouse. It surprises me how many people get caught up in the greenhouse denialist agenda. It's not that scientific consens...

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Adam Smith sketched what I've called a 'dialectical' picture of humanity in which people grow from infantile 'self-love' to become socialised and psychologically much more complex individuals. Self love remains powerful throughout their lives, but so too are the internal restr...

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This is a picture of Enoch Mankayi Sontonga who, though he only lived 32 years, somehow managed to bottle over a century of suffering into South Africa's magnificent national anthem. I've always been moved by the song and did a little reading on the net from here an edited ver...

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I don't know why regulation and its failures annoy me so much. It's not healthy - because there's a lot of bad regulation about and only so much nervous energy to go round. Anyway, I got my GST installment advice today. The story of the GST has been a sad farce from the beginn...

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Hyperion, the strange tumbling moon of Saturn has been photographed by Cassini. Remarkable non? I read about Hyperion when I was doing some reading on Chaos. Hyperion gets its own chapter in Ivar's Peterson's Newton's Clock: Chaos in the Solar System alas not available to be p...

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Having bagged Australia's latest efforts with film - or more specifically said that the New Zealanders were leaving us in the shade, I'm pleased to say that I thought "Little Fish" was a very good flick and good enough for you to try to go and see it - even if I wouldn't put i...

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The Age carried stories on the weekend of the collapse of a company called "Money for living". It preyed on elderly people who were asset rich(ish) and cash poor by buying their home (often worth around a third of a million dollars in return for a paltry lump sum of around $50...

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While the Australia Institute was pouring over the numbers which show that the drivers of four wheel drive vehicles are solitary, nasty, brutish and short (well fat anyway), the Canadian Recording Industry Association was commissioning similar research about what a bunch of na...

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Old time Troppo readers who actually liked my stuff can get their fill at my new blog here . (Blogger is a really sound platform these days.)

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Nicholas Gruen is coming to town next weekend, Sunday Oct 9. It is a long way from home so he might appreciate some convivial company. What if we make this an opportunity for a bloggers night out? How about the Clock Hotel in Crown Street, Surry Hills? Any takers, any other su...

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I can't quite put my finger on it, but I find the Australia Institute's latest effort (pdf) particularly irksome. It uses data from Roy Morgan to describe the drivers of four wheel drives as unusually aggressive, lacking in community mindedness and various other things. Someti...

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The story in the two posts so far in which some foreshadowing of what's to come is snuck in. Smith's great work in sociology and psychology The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) shares a deep logical symmetry with his (now) more famous work The Wealth of Nations (WN). That symm...

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Here's a favourite economic journalist - Samuel Brittain - dispatching the idea that economics shouldn't make interpersonal comparisons of welfare. He's spent most of the column - engagingly titled "Truth, bullshit and economics" hopping into the more extreme relativist claims...

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As readers of an earlier post will know, I've become interested in the arguments that suggest that greater deregulation of land usage could improve land usage and in the process lower house prices to the great benefit of those trying to buy their way into the market. Here's th...

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Crikey outlines how much more engagement there is in political campaigning over there. And Tim Colebatch says some things that are similar to my own thoughts about the upshot of the NZ elections - namely that the power of incumbency combined with the power of being seen to wor...

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In 2000, out of the blue, the OECD rang me and asked me to present a paper I'd written to their senior treasury officials meeting (That's Treasury and/or Finance Secretaries). The paper advocated refashioning fiscal policy in the image of monetary policy. I decided to do what...

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If you are disgusted and dismayed by bile and propaganda thinly disguised as news, if like, Adam Smith you abhor views presented "with all the passionate confidence of interested falsehood", if you wonder how you could possibly get your case heard through the distortion and bi...

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Courtesy of Ian Rogers of 'The Sheet ' newsletter on the financial industry: Few CFOs pay down their credit cards In keeping with the findings of this East and JP Morgan survey in the past, the research found that less than 20 per cent of respondents at the top 500 companies m...

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David McKnight has set up a blog to promote discussion of his book. It is a very interesting exercise and I am making an effort to help him in his endeavours, especially to improve the revised edition of his opus. Commentary on some of the chapters can be found on Catallaxy. C...

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I have little doubt that when people look back on the Howard era they will see - apart from other things a similar set of wasted economic opportunities to those we saw under Fraser. The main difference is that Fraser inherited a difficult hand - and played it in a mediocre but...

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Check out this post on Catallaxy for a good interview with a friend and colleague of the late Paul F, philosopher of science, dadaist, man about town, opera buff and prodigious correspondent.

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On July 4, 1054 A.D., Chinese astronomers noted a "guest star" in the constellation Taurus; This star became about 4 times brighter than Venus in its brightest light, or about mag -6 (whatever that means), and was visible in daylight for 23 days. Over the fold you can see what...

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It will be interesting to watch the evolution of open source software (OSS) in the next few years. On the one hand it's a fabulous, powerful new way of working. But will it displace slightly less fabulous ways of working - like Microsoft's. I've always been sceptical that MS w...

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Here's Michael Bassett - former Lange Govt minister on the NZ election in today's Australian . National's caucus gets 24 fresh faces, several of them with substantial track records - diplomats, a top lawyer, a prominent secondary school principal and a medico. Hard to imagine...

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Belay there, me hearties, today Monday Sept 19 be International Talk Like a Pirate Day . Among a wide range of attractions and distractions on the site is the pirate personality test .

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From the SMH on the NZ campaign . Then there was an . . . unforgettable moment when a semi-naked, anti-Labour protester (later dubbed Undies Man) jumped in front of the PM, who promptly asked for a magnifying glass and branded him a "disappointment". Us boys couldn't get away...

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Andrew Norton had an interesting post on the different perspectives of 'classical liberalism' and 'social democracy' a week or so back on Catallaxy. He quoted this passage from Tim Colebatch's article on cutting the top marginal rate. There are good reasons to cut taxes, and b...

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The story so far. . . Smith's 1759 The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) builds a picture of people as inherently dialectical beings. As Montes (2004: 55) puts it "The TMS presupposes sympathy as a principle in human nature that fosters a continuous relationship between spectat...

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Below the fold a column for the Fin which appears tomorrow. It outlines the argument for an increase in the 'default' rate of super. I posted early drafts of the essay on which it is based on Troppo - here, and here . The essay is being launched as one of four Progressive Essa...

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This week's column tackles the thorny question of economic reform in NZ and Australia. Actually it doesn't really tackle it - it ducks the main bit of trench warfare according to which one side says that NZ performed badly because of reform and the other says it performed badl...

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In a recent ABC Radio National Program a psychologist said this: Looking Out for No.1, that they keep an idea sort of for the invisible hand of the market place that will somehow take your own self interest and turn it into good. That is you know from Adam Smith's famous theor...

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I put WW into my browser tabs as he's a pretty sophisticated commenter on a range of philosophical issues. I liked the way he gnawed on that bone of Layard on Happiness till he'd got something he wanted to say said. It was interesting, stimulating and rigorous stuff even if I...

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Look around any old, inner city suburb and see how little we care about kids. Compare the grounds of most private girls schools to most private boys schools and see how little we care about girls. (Though perhaps their style of socialising actually requires less space). In the...

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The latest end of Policy Magazine has an article discussing one of the latest crazes in economics happiness studies. The field usually involves working with data that has been generated by asking people how happy they are with their lives, their job, their personal circumstanc...

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For those who don't know anything about me, I used to be a regular solo blogger here . I'm now pleased to join the illustrious Troppo crew as an occasional (monthly) guest blogger. As a special treat for my first guest post, I've sworn to avoid all of my previously-known hobby...

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I think it was Barista that first pointed me towards this marvellous site . It opens up with all the other daily sites I load on my Mozilla Firefox browser - which has tabs unlike Internet Explorer unless they've done some updating and not told me about it. Jeez these guys are...

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I like sport, but I don't think you'll get many sport posts out of me. But in my opinion we're being uniquely ourselves in the way we're losing the ashes. Good on the Poms for playing so well, particularly their bowlers. And it's been amazing to watch Warnie. Warnie's never lo...

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Helen Pringle tells us that Voltaire didn't really say : 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it' which is a bit sad. I hope she doesn't debunk one of my favourite 'famous last words'. Please tell me it's true. I've always believed th...

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Below is this week's column on Hurricane Katrina. It seemed to me to be a good illustration of the importance of public goods that we take for granted. I also wanted to tell the story of my days in the Canberra bush fires. As I got into it, it seemed that the example of domest...

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Read all about it here : Back in New Orleans, many of those who survived the storm were heading through the stinking flood waters towards the Superdome, now home to almost 30,000 people. Police armed with assault rifles attempted to keep order, but they were overwhelmed by she...

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An excerpt [Brendan] Nelson has said intelligent design should be available in schools because "it's about choice". That is postmodern rubbish. Schools are not about choice, they're about discrimination, about using limited time and resources to teach children what our society...

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I've commented before on my view that three or four of the best films I've seen in the last 10 years have been from New Zealand. Once were Warriors and In my Father's Den were amongst the best films I've ever seen. Then there was Whale rider . I can take or leave the Lord of t...

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Nicholas kindly suggested to me that we might like to cross post our three favourite posts from August at each other's blogs to see if commenters' reaction is different. So here's the first of mine, originally published at LP . -------------------------------------------------...

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I've been reading a fair bit of Adam Smith and stuff on him lately and will probably do some more posts on the great man. But here I just thought I'd note that my reading has enabled me to further uncover the provenance of the phrase that (I think) Alan Blinder used as the tit...

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I thought readers - well some readers - might like to see one company's - Peach Discount Mortgage Broking's - take on operating system market shares. Here it is. Linux has a long way to go! Operating System % of Total 1. Windows XP 75.30% 2. Windows 2000 11.95% 3. Windows 98 5...

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The Australian Red Cross will be accepting online donations to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina as as soon as they have clearance to issue tax deductible receipts. If getting a tax deduction isn't your first concern you can make a donation to the American Red Cross . Othe...

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I have always felt that a cold hard universe cannot explain the yumminess of a really good spaghetti marinara. And so I was pleased to see spaghetti coming centre stage in that tussle for openness of mind being waged on behalf of the theory of intelligent design. Indeed, looki...

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Looking at this story of Enceladus , the moon of Saturn of which I have never heard before, it struck me how different all the planets and particularly all the moons of the planets are - at least those big enough to have become spheres rather than large rocks. The laws governi...

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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...

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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...

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(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...

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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...

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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...

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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

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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...

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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...

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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...

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" 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...

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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...

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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.

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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As a follow-up to the epic post on the graveyard of ideologies, here is a story about the graveyards of ideologists .

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Limpopo farmers sell fresh produce by cellphone . Off the Blogafrica site . Off Jonathan Calder's Liberal England site.

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Does the Centre for Independent Studies' Peter Saunders want you to believe something he thinks isn't true? Peter Saunders says that " we should endeavour to make the meritocratic principle work ". At the same time, however, he argues that we should roll back government involv...

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I'm back jetlagged from Japan, about which I may have the strength to post a little in the future. For now a thought - a big generalisation with only the sketchiest of evidence. Please don't take it too seriously - or think that I have. It just occured to me as the hours and t...

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Taking up a passing comment by Gummo Trotsky on the apparent failure of liberal education, it is tempting to compose a small essay or meditation to explore some points of entry to this rather large issue. Talk of failure (or of deferred success) raises the question, when do we...

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Jacques Barzun is one of the great pioneering figures in cultural studies and he is also a most illuminating commentator on the problems of education at all levels. In 1973 he delivered some lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D. C. and they were published in...

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Toby Fattore, of the New South Wales Commission for Children and Young People has written an insightful and nuanced review of a book of international readings on child labour . Some of the more strident commentators on this topic are unfortunately still in the grip of the mora...

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Following a debunking post on Che Guevara , John Quiggin made an interesting comment. "The orthodox history I was taught at school consisted largely of glorification of people who were pretty much identical to Che in all essentials (Alexander the Great, Richard the Lionheart,...

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In an article for Policy , Peter Saunders of the Centre for Independent Studies compares life to a game of Monopoly. But over at Tug Boat Potemkin , Gummo Trotsky is unconvinced. The aim of Monopoly is to drive your opponents into bankruptcy. For decades arrogant older brother...

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You can't help wondering about legal academics. What with Deakin University's Mirko Bagaric waxing lyrical about the inherent morality of torture, and his colleague James McConvill arguing a variety of increasingly bizarre propositions (most recently today's article claiming t...

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On the eve of the first test in the Ashes series, with Brett Lee selected to play and some green in the wicket, Catallaxy appropriately has a thread "In defence of bouncers" . Not to be outdone, here is a piece from the Rathouse on the role of gambling and other commercial inc...

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Jon Hawkes was one of my class mates at Launceston Grammar. He was the brightest kid in the class and also the youngest by a fair margin. Mr Hawkes was an anglican cleric with an interesting series of posts - Jamaica, King Island, the Huon Valley in Southern Tasmania, Monash U...

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This week's column. It's pretty self explanatory. For anyone who has arrived here via Counterpoint on ABC Radio National or the Courier Mail where this site is mentioned, welcome. I hope you like our site and you'll come back for more. Simples Surpreendente I'm excited! Seriou...

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This is reminiscent of the time a Melbourne company offered stoves in VFL club colours. The marketing ploy did not suceed, presumably due to the regretable prevalence of mixed marriages and other forms of social mixing between the tribes. "Fans of soccer club Reading can now t...

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Interesting problem halts games in the Nigerian football league. "Away teams rarely win games in the Nigerian league while many teams usually rely on securing points through protests to the league's disciplinary committee."

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A disturbing report from the Old Dart. The Anglican Consultative Council has recommended that its member churches divest their investments with firms that support the Israeli occupation of Arab territories. A strangely misplaced example of moral equivalence.

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Andrew Ford - the lead ABC Radio National broadcaster on the world of music - seems like a remarkably nice guy. He just radiates good mental health. Talented, hard working, nice, modest. Daggy but just a tad - enough for it to be engaging rather than painful. In addition to be...

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Lingua Franca is usually a teriffic little program, yet another hidden gem on our great national broadcaster. Being in bed with a nasty wog (so to speak) I taped and then listened to this week's episode at some time in the wee small hours. It really has to be heard so if you w...

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This article indicates that the US provides nearly 0.7% of GDP to third world nations, compared with the usually quoted figure of 0.15%. It also notes the importance of other forms of aid such as private capital to establish so-called sweatshops that provide a ladder of opport...

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Peter Saunders wants unemployed people to pay their own dole. In a recent paper for the Centre for Independent Studies, he suggests that unemployment allowances could be replaced with Unemployment Savings Accounts (USAs). Under this system workers would be expected to save eno...

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I just found this on the net on David Walker's interesting site Shorewalker . It's Paul Graham explaining why one might write an essay. To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history ... to Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he ca...

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The Age ran an interesting and quite critical piece on Live 8 yesterday. One of its themes is a line that irritates me a little. The romanticisation of the idea of music 'changing the world'. But the article does make the point that this time around, for all his scruffiness, S...

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Troppo has been quite blokey lately, what with Wen and Sophie AWOL and Jen in Melbourne. So I thought I'd post over the fold something to indulge the prejudices of female readers just for a change. There is of course no resemblance to my own domestic behaviour in any of these...

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You may nor may not think this is a good colum, but it took me bloody ages to write. It helps to have a single line to stick to in a column given the need for simplicity, clarity and brevity. But it seemed to me that there were important parallels between what William Easterly...

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In case anyone finds this observation reassuring, less people have died in the London bombing than the US authorities incinerated at Waco . I support joint activities with our ally when it is proper or expedient to do so (and especially when it is both proper and expedient). S...

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As some readers may have noticed, the Troppo commenting system has been malfunctioning badly for the last week or so. When you try to post a comment, it invariably returns an error message saying that the " server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unabl...

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I have just discovered that this post has been linked to by Tim Blair . Please take your pick. a) do a quick word association on some words chosen at random (but inflenced by Blair's misleading heading "VILE MURDERING SCUM HAVE FEELINGS TOO" and put whatever abuse you like in...

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I regret to announce that the wars between humans and computers have pretty much been won - by computers. Michael Adams, a very talented young Englishman and number 7 in the world played a nasty contraption called Hydra in a six game chess match. Result. Five wins - all to the...

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Don Arthur has posted on the London bombings immediately below (although there's something very strange going on with his post at the moment). For me, it's too early to say anything wise or even sensible about these dreadful events. We don't even know how many have been killed...

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Today I found the message that Ken posted when Mark Bahnisch joined the team, with a profile and all that stuff, and I realised that Ken has been too busy to post the my cv. This is no big deal, but in case anyone is interested... There is also a photo that is only few years o...

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The post immediately below argues that we could achieve something worthwhile by changing the 'default setting' of our superannuation contributions. Namely we could require that the level of super contribution required from someone who doesn't make any active election is not 9%...

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This week's column is the third in about five weeks on super to co-incide with the introduction of super-choice. The other two are here and here . So as someone who commented on a draft said, I might be getting near the stage when I can call it a Gruen Plan. I wrote it in thre...

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Lots of you will have already been there, but for those who haven't seen it, John Falkner's speech in launching Latham's bio is terrific. And what did Falkner go an do? Resign :( *PS - thanks to Liam Hogan for correction on the simple task of spelling Faulkner's name. I left o...

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This looks like a recreational event that could take off in the Territory, perhaps with the requirement that in addition to having fun the participants should consume a slab of beer or so before taking the field.

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Gavin Kennedy, Adam Smith enthusiast after my own heart e-mailed me recently to tell me of a weblog post he'd done after reading a column of mine on on-line opinion (the longer version of which was posted at troppo ) arguing that economic and social success comes not from a pr...

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Armadillo afficionados might be interested to know that Cambodia has issued a postage stamp to celebrate a prehistoric armadillo .

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It's lucky I'm feeling positive about life generally, or this would be an unbearably depressing Friday night. Not only does Jen insist on watching some mind-numbingly dreadful Walt Disney telemovie starring Julie Andrews, but it's "Territory Night". The NT is the only part of...

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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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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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..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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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(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...

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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...

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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

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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...

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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...

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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...

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Larvatus Prodeo » Butget Orthodoxies and the Politics of Greed How much for one of those PhD's again?

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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.

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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...

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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.

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"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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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For those who are interested..an actual scene from 'Melo', the film mentioned in my last entry.

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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...

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Recently, I've been doing a lot of research on early French 'Talkie' films, not only as background for my 1930's crime series, which has a great deal to do with the film world, but also because my paternal grandfather, Robert-Rene Masson, known as 'Bob' , worked from 1929-1933...

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In this month's Atlantic Monthly David Foster Wallace has a long article on Los Angeles talk radio host John Ziegler . DFW (as fans like to call him ) spent a month hanging around KFI 's studios. What he finally came up with is... stimulating. Like most talk radio hosts, Ziegl...

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This post is inspired by a suggestion from reader Steve on my previous post about serious playfulness as a way of promoting constructive blog debate. Imagine that it's 2006. The new Australian Prime Minister Dr Brendan Nelson has been convinced by reading this post at Troppo A...

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I initially posted the following as a comment to my recent post on global warming . But I think it's worth creating a separate discussion thread: I think blogs offer a potentially very useful way to explore and understand complex issues, at least for the minority of amateur re...

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Writing my column I try to follow a fairly standard formula editors seem to really want this of commenting on topical events. Sometimes I find this preoccupation with what's happening now really frustrating. It means that things at least in journalism are not assessed on their...

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The art of the obit is a tricky one and potential exponents have had a field day recently what with Joh - a unique amalgam of the mayor of Porpoise Spit in Muriel's Wedding and a dyslexic John Calvin - and Al Grassby. Al was a colourful - shall we say larger-than-life? - dude...

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Cognitive dissonance and its subset confirmation bias are behaviours of which all of us are guilty, probably more often that we like to admit even to ourselves. We're not perfectly detached, perfectly rational beings. All of us have variable tendencies to frame issues in ways...

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The Imagining Australia quartet look Anzac legend through the eyes of young Australians and see a new cosmopolitanism: It is the tragedy of the event that moves young Australians. We weep for the memory of wasted young lives because in the Anzac spirit young Australians see th...

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Tim Lambert and John Quiggin have both been banging on about global warming rather a lot lately. Tim's Global Warming Sceptic Bingo post is an especially useful corrective source for the spurious and fraudulent material typically trotted out by global warming sceptics. But Tim...

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Watching a doco about Gallipoli yesterday - was there anything else on? - several exerps from the famous diaries of CEW Bean were read extolling the virtues of the ANZACS. The producers failed to mention Bean "admitted that while the Australians at Gallipoli were a tough and b...

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My accreditation as an Austswim instructor is up for renewal. In order that I may have the privilege of paying an exorbitant sum to register, I am required complete at least 20 (unpaid) hours of teaching and renew my cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) certificate. The former...

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So anyway, thanks to the generosity of Caz, the post Ken mentioned can be seen below. As it was posted in the middle of the night under the influence, I think it is crap and I deleted it first thing but Ken and Geoff have asked for it back, so..anyway it is 'below the fold'. W...

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Scott has just deleted an Anzac Day post he'd written. I don't know why, perhaps it was written when tired and emotional early in the morning. But his judgment that it was unworthy of publication is just plain wrong. It was one of the most evocative pieces I'd read in a long t...

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The thing that has puzzled me about the seemingly endless Schapelle Corby drug case is why anyone would bother to smuggle gunja from Australia to Bali, given that I assumed prices are much higher in the former than the latter. But Miranda Devine , of all people, may have provi...

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I could do with a 24 hour moratorium on Gallipoli roadworks responsibility wrangling. There's been a road there for decades. I used it in 1990 when I went to Anzac Cove. From what I can make out, that road has been widened and the current brouhaha is about whether the widening...

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You'd think that we'd have learnt something about land speculation over the last 200 years but in Rum Corps to white- shoe brigade by Jim Forbes and Peter Spearritt - thanks to Currency Lad for the link - the authors show that practices started by Macarthur and the officers of...

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One of the lesser known marital pressures on Australian couples is the North-South football divide. Hailing from Sydney as I do, I occasionally have an urge to watch rugby union or league (and sometimes even to play the former). But it's almost impossible to watch a rugby game...

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The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself. Daniel Patrick Moynihan In one of my favourite quotes for me a kind of credo R...

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I had every good intention of picking up on a reader's suggestion that I create a Frequently Asked Questions section of Troppo, to which new-ish commenters could be referred whenever they raised topics that had already been debated ad nauseum , either here or in the blogospher...

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As Andrew Leigh is reminding us on his blog, The Monthly , a new magazine of ideas, is being started up by Morry Schwartz, the man who brought us the Quarterly Essay. Better yet, you can sign up for a free issue by going to their website before April 27. Its probably old news...

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Otto de Voogd is a Netherlander who has considered the ethical dilemma of traveling in Myanmar. It is impossible to travel to Myanmar without being confronted by the current travel boycott against the country. Specifically the Campaign for Human Rights and Democracy in Burma w...

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I'm enjoying writing my column for the Courier Mail . One of the things I am trying to do is sketch out ways in which very ordinary things and things that people don't associate with economics have economic dimensions - or rather have dimensions which economic thinking can hel...

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The only good thing about the election of Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI is that it will put an end to the interminable prattling on current affairs programs , where a motley collection of logacious loquacious priests and self-appointed Vatican experts discuss a Papal e...

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High academic salaries and low teaching loads are pricing working class kids out of university says David Horowitz . In a talk at Ohio's Bowling Green State University Horowitz told academics that if they really as concerned about the working class as they pretended to be they...

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So I have spent the last three hours trying to get WordPress to work on my server. It works okay, but when I did a dummy run install, it didn't remember who had posted what, and there is a bug in it that means that I can not get comments to work. This is due to something that...

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I've penned - well actually I've pecked - an article on open source software. Its not yet been accepted, so I thought I'd see if anyone wanted to read my draft and offer comments before its too late. I should have thought of this before - but there you are - I didn't. When I f...

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Not long ago I blogged about a CIS paper by Helen Hughes and Jenness Warin which canvassed a range of options in relation to Aboriginal affairs. Most notably, they advocated amendments to native title and legislated aboriginal freehold to enhance individual ownership and alien...

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Never get caught between Rex and a tram seat .

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An interesting speech by Rupert Murdoch discussing the mainstream media's shortcomings (as he sees it) in embracing the Internet age in an effective manner: What is happening is, in short, a revolution in the way young people are accessing news. They don't want to rely on the...

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AustLII (the Australasian Legal Information Institute) has just released a new facility called the Point-in-time Legislation Project . It allows users instantly to view legislation at any given historical date. You simply select the desired date in relation to any law and it i...

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Endurance athletes are risking death by drinking excessive amounts of a substance that causes brain cells to swell. According to the Mayo Clinic , drinking excessive amounts of the substance dilutes the sodium content of the athlete's blood. This can lead to rapid and dangerou...

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George Williams has emailed me and advised that his detailed opinion on the constitutionality of a Tasmanian Greens Bill aimed at allowing same-sex marriage is available on the Tasmanian Greens website . Melbourne University public law academic Simon Evans (whose blog I've jus...

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The States look like caving in to Federal Treasurer Peter Costello's demands that they abolish seven taxes that they agreed to "review" in 2005 as part of the GST agreement with the Commonwealth. This development is certainly part of the crisis in federalism about which I've b...

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A Tasmanian Greens bill to legalise gay marriage is attracting significant attention in the national media. UNSW constitutional lawyer George Williams is being touted by supporters of the bill as advising that it may well survive constitutional challenge (somewhat ironically)...

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Sometimes events happen in our lives that are so horrible that they scar us permanently. Educationalist Kevin Donnelly , a sometime guest blogger here at Troppo, and his family have had just such an experience. Kevin's son James was killed in a hit-and-run road accident some 3...

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With the British election campaign underway, the Labour Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Rights (LCLGR) worries that gay men might vote Liberal Democrat instead of Labour. So to help Tony out, the LCLGR has distributed beer mats ( pdf ) to gay venues across the country -- the mats...

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If you think YOUR job is bad, check this site , stop whining, and get back to work.

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I've heard of factional heavies, but this is ridiculous ...

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The current relatively conservative makeup of the High Court has a range of manifestations, not just in more newsworthy decisions like indefinite detention of asylum seekers or preservation of barristers' unconscionable immunity from suit . One may also argue with some force t...

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Japanese beer companies are making beer out of peas and soy beans. They don't taste as good as beer made with malted barley so why do they do it? According to BeverageDaily.com it's about tax. When the Japanese government decided to tax beer it defined it in terms of its malt...

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Phil Gomes kindly suggested on another thread that I should stop blogging for the evening and go fishing or go to the pub. At least I think he was being kind. But I had to decline his suggestion. I detest fishing with a passion. Yes, I know it's utterly un-Territorian to confe...

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I think I must reluctantly agree with Christopher Sheil (and I conceded in my previous post anyway) that any scheme to levy a state-based income tax would in all probability be a political suicide note for any state government introducing it. However, as Chris also observed, t...

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In a post a week or so ago I lamented the seemingly imminent terminal dismemberment of Australian federalism at the hands of an arrogant fourth term Howard government with apparently little or no understanding or respect for the fundamental principles of liberal democratic con...

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Tim Dunlop has a very nice post up at Road to Surfdom, about his Catholic education Reading it, and the comments people made on it, made me reflect once again on just what it is that my own Catholic education gave me, and the tensions and gifts it bequeathed to me. My experien...

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Sound familiar? A DECISION will be taken within weeks on whether to switch off the "futile" life support for the woman left for dead in the boot of her car in Melbourne earlier this year. Melbourne Magistrates Court heard today that Maria Korp would die in two weeks if medical...

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Meika the Dolebludger has been writing a novel , and it's nearly finished. An intensely thoughtful (if perversely prickly) individual, Meika poses the following question? Now, a[n] ethical problem. As a longterm dolebludger, should I:- A) sell it to a mainstream print publishe...

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Amazing news this morning--Jalal Talabani, the respected and doughty Kurdish leader of the 'peshmergas' (literally 'those who walk with death') and the founder of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, has been elected President of Iraq. He is the first Kurd ever to be in the top p...

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Another sad thing to report on the Australian film front, as yet another 'great white hope' looks set to segue into 'big flat flop.' Apparently, the film version of Robin Klein's well-loved, funny, tender and whimsical novel of school and family life, Hating Alison Ashley, is...

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As various other bloggers have already noted, the UK election campaign is off and running towards a 5 May election date. I was particularly interested in Antony Loewenstein's claim that the Liberal Democrats are poised to overtake the Tories as the second most popular politica...

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Australian Democrats deputy leader (and serious blogger) Andrew Bartlett has a post about the role and importance of blogs (or rather their lack of importance) from the viewpoint of working politicians: Occasionally I read something usually on a blog - about the power of the b...

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For the last couple of days Jen has been attending a teachers' conference at CDU. Yesterday I attended a session with her to listen to Dale Spender, aging 'digital diva' and former guru of the non-radical feminist movement, spruik about her new hobby horse: information technol...

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I'm really not good at putting sorrow into words but there was something really depressing about the Sea King crash that killed nine Australian servicemen and women on the weekend. They brought the bodies back home . I'm glad the Governor General put a sprig of wattle on the c...

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On North Terrace here in Adelaide there is a fine building known as Parliament House. This ornate structure is home to the most laughable legislature known to man. There are plenty worse around- Zimbabwe's springs to mind just at the moment, but for comic ineptitude, it is har...

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I was asked recently by the editors of Online Opinion to write a short op-ed piece on what I saw as the future of new media, such as blogs. I thought Troppo readers might be interested in the piece, which has just been published on the Online Opinion site My own piece, if you...

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Nicholas Gruen must be psychic. He's been spruiking in these pages for creative ideas for state government co-operative policy action. And lo and behold! The States themselves, led by longtime Kyoto advocate NSW Premier Bob Carr, come out with a proposal to introduce a State-b...

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Just popping in to my old home quickly to alert Troppo readers to a post on the Politics of Civility over at my new digs at LP . It's not a comment on recent controversies on these pages , but rather some reflection on how civility works politically in blogosphere debates, and...

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I never cease to be amazed at how, with only a few questions, the quizilla people seem to get it so right. Or perhaps they simply feed back what we want to hear. From Timbuktu to Tijuana, you know all about world culture and politics. You've seen it all, and what you haven't s...

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"Tough, fearsomely intelligent, loyal, fast on her feet... a woman possessed of a withering wit" Fenella Souter's feature in the Good Weekend shows that Julia Gillard can be both entertaining and ferocious. Would she like a senior ministry? "I'd cheerfully kill several hundred...

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The death of Pope John Paul II was hardly unexpected, yet it is momentous. This was, I think, a Pope who was perhaps the most exceptionally talented and extraordinary man to fill St Peter's shoes in a long time; one of the great men of the twentieth century, and like all great...

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Sophie's Masson's compares the terrorism of 19th anarchists with that of Al-Qaeda today. Many of those sympathetic to anarchism object to this kind of comparison and I can understand why. But if you read her post carefully you'll see that Sophie is also making a more interesti...

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With election results expected to be released shortly I am not at all optimistic about the chances of free and fair elections in Zimbabwe. But hopefully I will be proven wrong and The Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) will succeed in overthrowing the ruling ZANU-PF governme...

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Moderating a group blog like Troppo, where both contributors and commenters possess a more diverse range of views than seems to be the norm in the blogosphere, is a challenging task. Sometimes (like now) it gets so tiresome I feel like walking away and leaving the zealots to t...

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My original post on anarchism and the cataclysms of the 20th century has certainly engendered some lively debate, and here's something to add to it. It's actually to draw the attention of Troppo Armadillians to the work of a man I've only just become aware of(in fact since yes...

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Mark Bahnisch publishes a letter from neo-communist Italian intellectual Antonio Negri, which seems fairly convincingly to debunk most if not all of Keith Windschuttle's attacks on him. The failure of basic research/fact-checking in Windschuttle's Negri letter appears consider...

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The future of Australian federalism has been a much discussed topic recently among the commentariat of both mainstream and blogosphere. It's hardly surprising given John Howard's extraordinarily hubristic statement that Australia would be better off without state governments....

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Tim Dunlop blogs about the influence of Howard government "black arts" gurus Lynton Crosby and Mark Textor on British Tory election campaigning: Sorry, but it's a crock. I mean, far be it from me to defend Lynton Crosby, and I'm sure he is organising such a campaign, but in so...

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Indonesia can't take a trick at the moment. The Prime Minister is sending medical teams back to Sumatra; hell, they only got home this month from the last earthquake. I mean, its just terrible. Two in three months...

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Today's ruling by the trial judge in the Michael Jackson child sexual abuse case, allowing the prosecution to lead evidence of other alleged incidents of abuse of young boys by Jackson, makes a conviction significantly more likely: Legal analysts say the admission of such expl...

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Funny the directions in which research for books can take you. As part of my research for my planned detective fiction series, I've been reading a lot of 'true-crime' books from the 1910's, 20's and 30's, and one of the authors I've been reading is a once-famous writer and cri...

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Tasmanian tiger spotted begging for food outside the Subway outlet in City Walk Canberra (it seems to like meatballs).

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I tried to post this on the most appropriate blog - our host at ubersportingpundit central - but couldn't log in - so you'll have to put up with me venting spleen here. Probably the best thing that's happened to Australian soccer took place during the third quarter of the AFL...

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Biodiesel is one of the most promising sources of renewable energy . Made from crops like soy beans, American supporters claim it can enhance national security , protect the environment, and reduce the trade deficit. Farmers , environmentalists , and opponents of the war in Ir...

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Biodiesel is safer for the environment because it produces lower emissions and is made from renewable sources, say supporters . But the snag for morally motivated vegetarians is that those renewable sources can include cows, pigs, and chickens. Biodiesel is an alternative to p...

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Having apparently defeated the Trackback spammers with the (unsought but still welcome) assistance of Scott's domain host, we now seem to be under concerted attack by a renewed and virulent form of comment spam. At the moment it appears that MT blacklist doesn't delete thes sp...

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A light and tasty post to leave you for Easter..and a happy Easter to all! Chez nous, it's ducks, ducks, ducks at the moment, as the 14-strong regiment of Muscovy ducklings we've reared have become big enough to well, become dinner. We've had duck 'a toutes les sauces', you mi...

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One of the reasons I thought I'd like to do some writing on Troppo is that I have recently become a columnist for the Courier Mail. I thought I would like to try out 'open sourcing' a column. So I proposed to Ken that I post forthcoming columns on Troppo a few days before they...

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One of Professor Bunyip's blogging obsessions is excessively intrusive traffic policing in his home State of Victoria. It's understandable if Bracks' henchmen are anything like NSW, with whose practices I'm much more familiar through annual holiday visits. Speed cameras prolif...

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I got an email from the hosting company this morning alerting me to the amount of trackback spam and they have disabled the trackback script. I'm content to leave it off. Trackbacks are nice, but they are not worth the effort to keep afloat. It is a considerable pity that this...

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The Good Professor weighs in on the Schiavo case : Well pardon a Bunyip being frank, but this business isn't about compassion. It's about control -- control of both the individual and society's direction. As so many advocates of slow starvation are now demonstrating, they beli...

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A case of the Dreaded Lurgi hasn't prevented me from reading the papers, as per usual. As I was wiping snot off the monitor, I came across this article , describing the controversy about these 'do it yourself' DNA kits. It is not quite at the 'do it yourself' stage, but it is...

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The other day, in Sydney, I went to see Bride and Prejudice with my daughter. In case you don't know, this is a Bollywoodised version of Jane Austen's great work(which is always put at no 2 on world 'top hundred' reading lists these days, behind Lord of the Rings!). I'd heard...

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The East Timor-Australia maritime boundary issue is in the news again, with the Financial Times running an article quoting Timor Leste Prime Minister Mari Alkatiri as hoping that an agreement might be able to be reached by July. Apparently Australia has increased its offer for...

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Ken's jumped the gun on me , so I may as well officially launch my new blog and declare it open! Troppo readers are of course very welcome visitors. And thanks everyone for all your kind words on my farewell post here .

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I must confess I hadn't taken much notice of the Terri Schiavo case until now. Schiavo is a severely brain-damaged (vegetative?) American woman currently being effectively starved to death through cutting off her intravenous feeding tubes. Perhaps partly because of instinctive...

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Here is a discussion board post I've prepared for my first year Introduction to Public Law students here at CDU, to focus their minds on fundamental constitutional concepts in a topical, real world context. I thought some Troppo readers might also be interested. Richard Acklan...

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One of the more disturbing items in this morning's news is a report that not only are police pushing for special inquisitorial courts with reduced standards of proof for the trial of terrorism suspects, but that apparently the only objection our highly principled Amnesty Inter...

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Is anyone surprised that Mark Bahnisch resisted his blogging addiction for approximately 1.5 seconds at his new digs ?

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Now that Mark Bahnisch has gone solo and presumably taken his sociology/philosphy minded readers with him, we can get back to politics. It's good timing on Mark's account because after a six month slumber after the election, some interesting things are happening, not least to...

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Last night my kids were watching the swimming championships on the tele and the National Bank ad came on. "You said you wanted us to listen. So we listened. You said you wanted better service: We've given you better service". Or whatever it says. Then we switched to John Clark...

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In the post immediately below , I argue that it's an error to label John Howard as a "neocon" comparable to George W Bush. However, that isn't to say that there aren't some interesting and instructive parallels to be drawn, especially in terms of the rhetoric and mindset of co...

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This story from Indonesia rather suggests that early optimism about its progress towards liberal democracy was seriously premature: Indonesians will be barred from kissing in public under new laws criticised by human rights groups as draconian. Justice Minister Hamid Awaluddin...

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(via Jacques Chester) Apparently the Howard government has now introduced into the House of Representatives a Bill that effectively abolishes compulsory student unionism in Australia. The principal operative provision reads: (1) A higher education provider must not: (a) requir...

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Apparently left-leaning fact-checker extraordinaire and UNSW IT academic Tim Lambert is celebrating April Fool's day early, and has set up a mirror site of Tim Blair's blog . But there's a very real question of just who's the fool here. Naturally it's got all TB's RWDBs huffin...

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Bunyip's unlikely nemesis? Bloggers and spammers could be forced to put their names to political commentary in a bid to close a loophole in the nation's electoral laws. Roused by last year's furore over anonymous political websites such as www.johnhowardlies.com , the Howard G...

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Australian citizenship is a valuable thing - too valuable to be wasted on people who don't understand our fundamental values, beliefs, and traditions. In Britain they've been working on a new ' Britishness test ' for would-be citizens. Their Labour party says that it wants to...

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"Jane", the lesbian student teacher at the centre of several recent Troppo posts that mostly generated more heat than light, has posted an extensive response here . I strongly urge everyone who read any of the original posts to read Jane's response. It certainly sets to rest m...

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A wise innkeeper never lets a bed get cold before renting the room to a new guest. So it is here at Troppo . Scarcely has Mark Bahnisch rubbed the sleep from his eyes and ventured out into the big bad world of blogging, than Nicholas Gruen leaps in between the armadillian shee...

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Recently John Quiggin's blog hosted a guest post from me and I wanted to put a follow up post here largely because it may attract the attention of some readers of this blog who didn't see my post or contribute to it when it was on John's blog. In the next iteration I might see...

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Or, Lapsing, then Lapsing into Solo-dom I think this will be my last post on Troppo . For some time, I've been thinking seriously about a number of conflicting impulses relating to my blogging life. For a start, I really need at this time to focus all my writing energies on my...

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We haven't had a good mindless partisan political stoush on Troppo for ages now. A couple of days at least. So I thought I'd draw readers' attention to this NT News story and see if it elicits the expected polarised Pavlovian reaction: A lesbian is pregnant with twins after ha...

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Old fashioned jingoism and new fashioned marketing collide on the British campaign trail The candidate's grandfather was an illegal immigrant , his campaign strategist is Australian , and his party's voter database software was developed in India . But as Party Co-Chairman Dr...

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A little while back, on one of my literary posts, on nominations for the 'dullest authors', a couple of people commented on how they found Australian writers , in the main, boring and/or unreadable. I thought I'd actually give you a chance here and now to nominate those Austra...

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Norm Geras has collated the results of the 'five favourite composers' poll he ran, and it won't surprise you to know that number one, at 345 votes, is Beethoven, closely followed by Mozart at 340 votes and JS Bach at 335 votes. In fourth place is Schubert, at 119 votes, and Ch...

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"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible." - George Orwell. In his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language , George Orwell wrote: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things l...

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One of my favourite bloggers, Phil Gomes over at Citystate has a very interesting reflection on the eclipse of op/ed columnists by bloggers - well worth reading . One of the constant bugbears of the blogosphere is the degree to which it's parasitic on mainstream media. Lately,...

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I'm indebted to "Santamaria socialist" The Currency Lad for his recommendation of John Edwards' new book Curtin's Gift: Reinterpreting Australia's Greatest Prime Minister . I read a lot of Australian political history at Uni, but not much in the way of political biography - th...

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In the comments thread Al Bundy has some kindly advice for parents who want to ban junk food from schools . Nic White says that kids should be able to eat what they like, while Andrew Norton and Michael Warby think that the real problem is that governments are running the scho...

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Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to ban the sale of junk food in California's schools. Naturally, the Center for Consumer Freedom is outraged. When former governor Gray Davis tried to do the same thing Consumer Freedom accused him of confusing the roles of government and f...

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You tend to get a bit complacent about cyclones after a while. We get one or two cyclone watches most years, but they seldom come close enough to do any damage. Fortunately, large ones have a very tight centre, so that really destructive winds don't extend over all that large...

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Sadly, Irish comedian Dave Allen has passed away unexpectedly . His show was one of the highlights of my week's viewing as a kid. May his God go with him .

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If you read nothing else this weekend in the papers, make sure you read The Australian's Middle East correspondent, Nicolas Rothwell, on the colossal blunder Osama Bin Laden made when he attacked America on September 11 2001, and the massive quakes it set off in the Middle Eas...

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Richard Ackland discusses yet another appalling High Court decision in his SMH column this morning. It isn't quite as breathtakingly repugnant as last year's Al-Khateb decision where a strong numerical majority held that it was perfectly lawful for the federal government to ho...

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I love crime fiction; have loved it ever since I discovered it at the age of 12 or 13. Crime fiction, well-written, is one of the most satisfying reading experiences there is: technically, the crime story provides a superb structure; characters are usually at crisis points in...

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A week or so ago I posted and asked about the available options for buying music legally across the Internet. I discovered that the alternatives seem to be quite limited in Australia; there are some pretty good sources, but the biggies like iTunes and Napster don't offer their...

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One of the nice things about blogging and teaching law is that the two often complement each other. Yesterday while searching for additional readings for my first year public law class I stumbled across the fact that legendary US federal judge and incredibly prolific " law and...

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In a classically neo-conservative review for the Public Interest , Kay Hymowitz argues that advertising is corrupting children: The truth is that hundreds of times each day, between television, the Internet, billboards, school vending machines, and curriculums, kids are prodde...

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There's an interesting discussion going on the Howardian power grab vis-a-vis the states over at Catallaxy sparked off by the resident representative of the Carlton-living, latte right Federalist faction of the Liberal Party , that is to say, Andrew Norton. Atypically for rece...

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In light of recent debates at Troppo , readers might be interested in an excellent op/ed piece by Gary Younge in The Guardian .

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A quick update on the IR wars. Kenneth Davidson has a cogent op/ed piece in The Age today demonstrating how lowering the minimum wage would not necessarily contribute to employment, would harm the low-paid, and do nothing for the skills shortage. The government's latest gambit...

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As the intensity and pace of the Troppo culture wars over sexuality and schools diminish rapidly (though increasingly people are commenting elsewhere - see Tim Dunlop's contention that there is no centrist position on the issue recently posted at Road to Surfdom ), it's probab...

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Just eight days after she announced her retirement from blogging , to general and justified lamentations from her devoted readers, Gianna came back ! Yay! Welcome back, G! Why wasn't I told earlier???!!!!

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I'm not inclined to participate further on the debate on non-heterosexualities and school education, partly because I think it's rapidly running its course , and partly because at the moment I can better focus my writing energies on my thesis. So after this post, I'll disappea...

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Rob Corr has put up a very measured post summarising the debate which started with the incident of the student teacher having her prac terminated because she answered children's questions about her same-sex partner over at Kick & Scream . Rob's post is tellingly titled 'Discre...

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Feeling generally overtired, a bit ill, and reeling from all sorts of things that are stressing me, I was delighted to be asked out by a good friend of mine for a Corona or two tonight (a very good rule of thumb is that any drink that can reasonably have a lime in it is a good...

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In light of events at Troppo over the last couple of days, now might be an opportune moment to post an extract from a post by the wise but currently absent Don Arthur at his now-moribund blog: A deeper form of civility asks us to make an effort to treat other people with respe...

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For American talk radio host Bruce DuMont ideas are just another product traded in the marketplace. And unlike some right wing whiners, he thinks the marketplace is working just fine: Yes, my Classically trained friends, "Praise be to Adam Smith!" It is my position that maybe,...

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Unfortunately, I'm feeling unwell today so unable to go into work. Happily, though, this gives me the chance to post on International Women's Day. There are a number of entries around the 'sphere - Rob Corr's birthday is also today, and he has some interesting reflections on c...

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You'd get the impression from parts of the recent comments threads around this joint lately that Western civilisation is about to collapse if the shaky heteronormativity in schools isn't immediately reinforced. As a number of us have pointed out, though, there are real people...

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Mark's posting on what he sees as a 'rightwing PC' intolerance of sexuality in schools has led me to present these few thoughts to Troppo Armadillians, based on my own observations and experiences in schools. I'm not interested in debating the rights and wrongs of the toleranc...

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Much of the talk about IR Reform is based on assertion - and misinformation, or perhaps creating an impression which proves to be untrue on closer inspection, if that's a different thing. The current contention that a panel of experts is needed to assess the economic impact of...

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From the age of 10 we Parish kids were expected to do squad swimming training. Every morning from September to April we'd be driven down to the local pool at South Curl Curl beach before 6am to churn up and down for an hour and a half before school. During the early part of th...

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I previously argued that talk of values - usually found associated with education debates - can be code for imposing conservative social values on everyone , and that one value that rarely gets mentioned is the fundamental liberal value of toleration. As the right wing culture...

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At the very welcome recommendation of a friend, I reread the second "Lightness and Weight" chapter in Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being on Saturday. Kundera reminded me of the truth of a metaphor Maurice Merleau-Ponty used for how our lives are shaped by remembered...

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Fresh from a coup in snatching the free to air coverage of The Ashes series against England which Channel Nine declined and the ABC dithered over, public broadcaster SBS will tonight show highlights of the Danish Royal Wedding . I'll be watching - I still have Princess Diana's...

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