I've known Tony Morris QC for a number of years as webmaster of a very useful legal site called Lex Scripta . More recently he attained national fame and then notoriety as the Royal Commissioner investigating events at Bundaberg Hospital involving the so-called "Dr Death" Jaya...
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I've been regularly monitoring opposition and minor party media releases over the last fortnight or so. That's the sort of boring person I am, sadly. But it's brought me to a few conclusions I think are important, and I'm going to share them with you. One specific issue and a...
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Only last week I was speculating about why Terrence Cole QC hadn't sought an extension of his terms of reference to enable him to make substantive findings and recommendations about the conduct of Ministers and public servants in the AWB affair: I would have expected that Comm...
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[photopress:jevons1.jpg,full,alignleft] As a practiced poster, I now find myself spinning inane puns for my headlines, like any good subbie. Be that as it may, I happened upon an interesting post by our Troppodillian friend and sometime colleague Rafe Champion over at Catallax...
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Sometime Troppo commenter Gaby sent me this amazing article from New Scientist. DARK energy and dark matter, two of the greatest mysteries confronting physicists, may be two sides of the same coin. A new and as yet undiscovered kind of star could explain both phenomena and, in...
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Tim Dunlop posts on the situation in Iraq, and it doesn't make happy reading. No doubt RWDB readers will dismiss it as just another piece of lefty defeatism, but others might care to consider the facts on their merit in a more sober, analytical spirit: [W]ith militias from bot...
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What is the collective noun for volunteers? Well I'm just starting to recover from swarms, of them, whole irritations of volunteers. There were fifteen thousand of them! I first encountered games volunteers in Sydney. Not having encountered them before it was a magic experienc...
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I liked Andrew Sullivan's article today on the current barney between some celebrity scientologists and South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker. As others have commented, there are echoes of the issue of freedom of speech versus respect for the beliefs of others raised...
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Thank God the Commonwealth Games are almost over. I can easily avoid Nine's tedious TV coverage, because I rarely watch that channel's offerings anyway. But having the local ABC radio station dominated by frenetic commentary about third rate sporting events is extremely irrita...
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This nut cutlet reckons a meat industry commercial claiming that humans have evolved to thrive on red meat is misleading. But we humans are omnivorous creatures, and our metabolisms have indeed evolved over millions of years so that a daily menu including meat is the simplest...
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In view of Tim Blair's exhaustively exemplary coverage of recent ALP in-fighting, I'm waiting with bated breath for TB's equally thorough run-down on the current wave of Liberal Party feuding in 3 separate states. I'm sure he'll be posting the first instalment any moment now....
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Sports blogging has been a tad deficient in the Australian blogosphere since Scott Wickstein's Ubersportingpundit site went belly up a few months ago. So I'm pleased to see our very own Rafe Champion is trying to revive the genre with his AFL blog The Real Game . Moreover, and...
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I've been remiss in my non-coverage of the developing AWB scandal. Fortunately, GetUp! has a succinct and very funny spoof AWB commercial that gets you right up to date with everything you need to know. For much more detail, however, you can't go past Tim Dunlop , who has too...
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The federal Grants Commission system for sharing Commonwealth revenue between larger and smaller states and territories seldom attracts good press in southern states, and appears to be little understood even by quite knowledgeable observers. When I raised the issue obliquely i...
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I've suggested that policy makers think about trying to engineer a situation where 'defaults' - what happens when we do nothing - are considered and set to optimise outcomes rather than just be allowed to happen. Thus without infringing anyone's freedom of choice we could spec...
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Clare Martin's NT government appears to be about to sign its very own slow-moving but certain political death warrant. Well, that might be slightly hyperbolic given that the CLP opposition here has been reduced to a rump of 4. But there are 4 or 5 Labor MLAs who unexpectedly w...
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Ken's excellent post below on Sydney water contains this statement. Bad governments exist in part because of even worse oppositions, and New South Wales is currently very poorly served by both major parties. I think we're seeing a new age of incumbency. Its produced to a large...
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Darwin doesn't have a water shortage. Quite the opposite in some ways. I think I'm just about ready for the wet season to end. Travelling to Sydney at Christmas was quite a strange experience in that context. There people can't even hose down their cars and can only water thei...
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Tony Harris's column from Tuesday's Fin Review. Don't you feel sorry for chief executives board members in the private sector? The community and the regulators still expect that their signatures mean something. They can even be jailed for misleading the market. By comparison,...
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[photopress:triviaman.jpg,full,pp_empty] A weekly wrap of what's been happening across the Top End news-wise, which might be handy for former residents who really miss reading about this sort of thing. May contain cane toads and/or crocodiles. Brokeback Territory Territorians...
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Sometimes when under pressure Kim Beazley succumbs to a bout of unintentional candour: I'll tell you something else, too, because sometimes our opponents kid themselves on this. I did spend last week in Queensland trying to sell the policy we put forward on climate change, whi...
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From Paul Barratt's recent piece for New Matilda - reproduced in Crikey. In late 1998 I was directed by the then Defence Minister to give him a comprehensive report on the history of the Collins Class submarine and the matters that remained to be dealt with in order to bring t...
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I've long been a close observer of the developing contest between IT titans Microsoft and Google. That's why I was especially interested by this announcement a couple of days ago: Internet search leader Google has acquired Upstartle, a small startup that runs a collaborative w...
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Having read Morag Fraser's review of John Hirst's collection of essays I went hunting for the essays mentioned in the review. I found only " The Distinctiveness of Australian Democracy " which I'd put on my 'must read' list. A really interesting and in various respects contrar...
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The recent revival of popular books on philosophy is a Good Thing in my opinion. Two friends, Alain de Botton and John Armstrong are hard at it publishing a book or two every few years. I've just finished reading The Secret Power of Beauty which I enjoyed. If you're well read...
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[photopress:full.jpg,full,pp_empty] A weekly wrap of what's been happening across the Top End news-wise, which might be handy for former residents who really miss reading about this sort of thing. May contain cane toads and/or crocodiles. SCAREDY CROCS The Top End's crocodiles...
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Paul Krugman had a powerful column on income inequality in America recently. Here are some extracts. What we're seeing isn't the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we're seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly...
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The author of this article at Online Opinion seems to think so. And it's a vaguely intriguing idea too; after all, lots of creative people live and experience reality rather closer to the edge than most of the rest of us. But there's an almost complete absence of evidence for...
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[photopress:GST.gif,full,centered] I've written previously about how lifting marginal rate thresholds is a preferable alternative to lowering tax rates (essentially because of the inequity and the inefficiency of lowering tax at the very top). This week's column explores an id...
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Which of these John Howard statements is more believable?: This one : JOHN HOWARD: There's no way that GST will ever be part of our policy. REPORTER 1: Never ever? JOHN HOWARD: Never ever. It's dead. It was killed by the voters in the last election. Or this one ?: "The changes...
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[photopress:record.jpg,full,pp_empty] TEACHERS who express radical left-wing views in the classroom are facing a new tactic in America: conservative parents are encouraging students to make recordings of their views. The use of micro-recording devices, often in mobile phones o...
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As the Courier Mail moves to a tabloid format they've informed me that they won't be taking my column. So that's a bit of a pity. But I was grateful for the chance to do it for over a year. I've written around 70 columns so I've had a fair chance to get some ideas out there. P...
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The orgy of political analysis triggered by the tenth anniversary of John Howard's prime ministership has been extraordinarily variable, ranging from shallow hagiography ( The Howard Factor ) or vitriolic abuse right through to penetrating insight. Among the latter is an excel...
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The classic statement of this doctrine is provided with all the easy authoritativeness of a harangue at the pub by Alex Sanchez, a former Mark Latham staffer. In today's world, paying more than the company tax rate of 30 per cent is optional. After you've gone beyond that thre...
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In contrast to John Howard, apparently Bomber Beazley mostly didn't bother to read much of the MSM until recently. It's said that he's now begun taking a leaf out of Howard's book in this respect, and assiduously reads the op-eds every morning. It certainly looks like he reads...
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There's a certain nastiness about a certain cadre of Australian expats. The big four are Germaine Greer, Barry Humphries, Clive James and Robert Hughes. They didn't like the Australia of the fifties and early sixties, and a lot of them think we're still the same. This was the...
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A weekly wrap of what's been happening across the Top End news-wise, which might be handy for former residents who really miss reading about this sort of thing. May contain cane toads and/or crocodiles. JUST THE TICKET The NT Government has been losing hundreds of thousands of...
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Courtesy of Slashdot, a nice bit of culture clash and mutual incomprehension broke out in England when an anti-piracy bureaucrat approached the Mozilla Foundation reporting that someone was making money selling Mozilla software. The representative of Mozilla said that that was...
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I while back I attended a very informative talk by Ken Harvey of Latrobe University. It was about prescribing software for medical practitioners. Your doctor probably has a computer on their desk by now the Federal Government gave grants of $10,000 in 1999 to GP practices to a...
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For Darwin-based Tropodillians, I'll be on ABC Local Radio (105.7) at about 5:10pm this evening, musing about 10 years of John Howard and his impact on the NT, along with a distinguished panel which also includes former Nationals leader Tim Fischer and CLP spin doctor Peter Mu...
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Because all the manufacturers are scared of the restrictive practices of Microsoft. Please comment below if you can think of any other reason why Dell computer, having a Linux desktop machine on sale won't cooperate with journos who want to give them some publicity on it. Cour...
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While researching my column on John Howard's ten years as PM, I came upon the quote from Howard which I used in the column - that 'multi-stage VATs' involve "enormous" administration and compliance burdens. I also came upon a quote from the Regulatory Impact Statement for ANTS...
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