Last time I raised this subject Richard Phillipps hopped into me suggesting that I wasn’t being helpful. In any event I’m at it again. I’ve not researched this case in any detail, but it sure looks strange on its face and the report from The Age does not appear to be sensational.
As reported by The Age father who killed his five-month-old daughter was jailed for a minimum term of five years. Continue reading
You can tell this is the good Peter Saunders because he looks like Santa Claus … |
Somewhat by accident, (happy accident though it is) Troppo seems to have become a place for really excellent policy discussions about welfare, the labour market, inequality and poverty with contributions from around the world from experts. Fred Argy mentioned how good some of the contributions were and what a pity they risked being lost in the comments. As a consequence I emailed some of the contributors inviting them to post here should they wish.Within hours . . . Backroom Girl’s first post. Thanks BG.
It’s a tricky thing, this poverty business
In today’s papers, Ross Gittins reports on recent research (pdf) by the SPRC Peter Saunders (in conjunction with various well-known welfare agencies) that attempts to redefine poverty by reference to whether people can afford a variety of items commonly regarded as ‘essential’.
The researchers think (and Ross seems to agree) that this is a more fool and argument-proof method of working out whether people are poor than just looking at how much income they have. It is also supposed to get away from sterile academic arguments about how poverty should be defined and measured, topics on which consensus is apparently impossible.
Saunders and his fellow researchers first asked a random selection of the population what they regarded as essentials of life. The same survey was then given to a group of welfare agency clients, who by and large agreed with the general population on which items were most essential. To quote the SPRC directly: Continue reading
Sometimes being played for a sucker has positive but unintended consequences. My recent ‘free’ subscription to Crikey confirmed what I had always suspected. The average quality of their articles isn’t crash hot, not when you consider how much they charge for a subscription. The best of Australian blog posts are much superior and anyone can access them without charge. All Crikey offers is a convenient, predigested and minimally quality-controlled newsletter for busy office workers who want a mid-afternoon 20 or 30 minutes break from the tedium of their job, and who don’t have a spare hour or two to browse the blogosphere every day searching for quality posts amongst the dross.
That’s where I come in. Crikey’s behaviour has galvanised me back into active blogging. From now on I’ll be blogging the blogosphere. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday I’ll be linking the best posts from the Australian blogosphere here at Troppo in a new feature called Missing Link. Now you can get that mid-arvo office op-ed break without forking out $115 for a 12 month subscription to Crikey.
The posts linked below are all from the last 2 days. So much for Guy Rundle’s assertion (unsurprisingly published at Crikey) that Tim Dunlop’s “defection” to News Ltd spelled the end of the independent Australian blogosphere. In fact, with any sort of luck Tim’s blog will help to direct a whole new mainstream audience to the wealth of free access resources of the blogosphere, and this new Missing Link feature can only help. Feel free to draw my attention to worthy new posts that should be highlighted in the next Missing Link.
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Tim Dunlop highlights the fact that Australian average weekly earnings have fallen for the first time in many years, and reveals the real story behind the Fair Pay Commission’s decision on minimum wage for lowest paid workers.
Meanwhile, Jason Soon argues the classical liberal case for abolition of minimum wages (and slags trade unions just to keep in practice).
Psephologist Mumble reckons Ted Baillieu didn’t do too badly.
In a rare departure from bitchy pop culture trivia at Spin Starts Here, insertnamehere (sparing no effort in adopting a creative pseudonym) observes that lots of journalists were conned by the Greens.
And Jeff Wall argues that ABC election night commentator and former Liberal leader Robert Doyle was mean-spirited and bitchy towards his former colleagues. Well, if it was good enough for Mark Latham …
I was browsing over at Lava Rodeo a few minutes ago, and noticed that Mark Bahnisch was asked about whether he was paid for the articles he writes for Crikey. His answer rather surprised me:
The answer would be no and yes. I’m not on a retainer or a contract and can submit articles at will, and they decide whether or not to publish them. I get paid a fee for each article published.
I was specifically approached and asked by Crikey to write an article about the East Timor situation a few months ago. Not only that, they demanded it on a 2 hour deadline, which was very inconvenient for my university commitments. However Timor is a longstanding academic and personal interest of mine, so I agreed to the request and duly produced an article within two hours. Naively as I now realise, I didn’t ask about financial terms. I just assumed that I would be paid any applicable fee according to Crikey’s standard arrangements (that’s certainly what occurs with the mainstream media). I knew that Graham Young’s Online Opinion doesn’t generally pay for articles, and I thought that perhaps Crikey operated on a similar basis. Thus I wasn’t really surprised when no payment was offered. Instead they offered me a 3 month ‘free’ subscription to Crikey. As it turned out I didn’t even get that. Some days the newsletter arrived in my inbox and sometimes it didn’t, but sure as eggs even that irregular performance ceased after 3 months.
Now I discover that they do in fact pay contributors, but presumably only if they demand it. I suppose that’s not really too surprising either. Commercial wisdom has never been one of my strong suits. That’s why I’m best advised to stay at a university rather than ever return to private legal practice. I operate on the old-fashioned (and, I admit, utterly impractical) assumption that people I deal with will act honourably. When they don’t, I simply decline to deal with them in future. It doesn’t work too badly overall, but there are certainly times like now when one gets disappointed unexpectedly. I can’t help regarding Crikey’s behaviour as dubiously ethical, even though I was a mug not to protect my own interest. I hope the pricks at least read this and feel a passing moment of shame.
Iranian President Ahmadinejad |
If you had imagined that expansionist militaristic ”neocon” influence over the Bush administration had been vanquished following the Democrat victory in the US mid-term elections, the sacking of Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary, and the appointment of the Iraq Study Group under conservative foreign policy “realist” James Baker, you might have relaxed too soon. Vice-President Dick Cheney, the biggest neocon of them all, is still running the joint, and thinktank neocons are still spinning assiduously to resuscitate the American imperial dream.
The latest is American Enterprise Institute shill Joshua Muravchik in this morning’s Sydney Morning Herald. After shamelessly spinning recent history to claim that the neocons won the Cold War single-handed and were also responsible for Bosnian intervention in the face of the lily livered liberals and old-fashioned “realist” conservatives (a claim that involves a considerable logical stretch given that the Bosnian intervention occurred under the Clinton administration), Muravchik goes on to pitch the resurgent neocon line on Iraq:
As badly as things have gone in Iraq, the war has not disproved neoconservative ideas. Iraq is a mess, and if the US mission fails, neocons deserve blame because we were key supporters of the war. But American woes in Iraq may be traced to the conduct of the war rather than the decision to undertake it.
Hopes have risen that the former secretary of state James Baker and the Iraq Study Group will devise an alternative approach to neoconservatism, one more in the mode of traditional conservatism. Rumour has it that this will rest on courting Iran. Others suggest Baker will link Iraq to an Israeli-Palestinian settlement, but this has been sought for decades without success.
Until someone comes up with better ideas than these, the neocon strategy of trying to transform the Middle East, however blemished, remains without alternative.
However, the neocon agenda is actually much more ambitious and sinister than Muravchik’s half-baked apologia might suggest.
The British Empire League was a bunch of Australians in the early 20thC who wanted imperialism to prevail rather than nationalism in Australia. The prominent politician of the time, Alfred Deakin, was the great compromiser and saw no difference between being Australian and a Briton which was to become the popular sentiment through to Menzies. The British Empire League agitated to have Empire Day be a public holiday and chose Queen Victoria’s birthday of March 24th to have it.
The Australian Catholics didn’t like the idea of imperial promotion much and called it “Australia Day” instead. St Mary’s in Sydney chose to run up its flag poles the Irish Harp Flag and the Blue Ensign (our current national flag).
The Australian National flag at the time was the British Union Flag (Union Jack) and would remain so until the Flag Act of 1953. The Blue Ensign was intended for use on government buildings only and the Red Ensign for Australian merchant ships.
The Sydney Morning Herald was out-raged at this lack of respect and its newspaper led with the headline, “No Union Jack is Flown”.
Here is the last post on primate sentiments – and as I said at the end of the last post, it’s really a postscript. It doesn’t further develop the points made in the last two posts, but tidies up some loose ends.
Smith himself cooked up a theory of the evolution of language at around the time he was working on the Theory of Moral Sentiments. But as befitting someone whose first academic post was in rhetoric and someone for whom rhetoric was always important (The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a very self consciously rhetorical work – more so than the Wealth of Nations) his focus is strongly on the development of grammar and syntax and less on the time when some critical break is made between animal ‘proto-language’ and human language.
Smith’s theory is an interesting one, but his Theory of Moral Sentiments is the central text in the context of Dunbar’s theory of the evolution of language.
A very quick summary of Smith’s theory of language is this. Continue reading
Andrew Leigh wonders why Labor performs so well in state and territory elections but so poorly in national elections. His favourite theory is one Andrew Norton floated a while ago — voters think of the nation as a family where Labor is mum and the Coalition is dad. State and territory issues favour mum while national issues favour dad.
Labor is mum because it’s seen as the more caring and nurturing party. Voters see Labor as better on issues like health and education. The Coalition is dad because it’s seen as stricter and more demanding. Voters see the Coalition as better on defence, border security and terrorism. Andrew N’s idea is that ‘mum’ issues play a larger role in state and territory politics and ‘dad’ issues play a larger role in national politics. According to the theory, Labor has a natural advantage campaigning at state and territory level because elections are more likely to be fought on issues that require a caring an nurturing approach. Crime is the only major ‘dad’ issue at the state and territory level.
The mum/dad metaphor helps make sense of why the parties ‘own’ the issues they do. When voters are asked which party is best on education, health, immigration etc a stable pattern emerges over time. Some issues belong naturally to Labor while others belong naturally to the Coalition. It’s the same in the UK and US. American political scientist John Petrocik calls it ‘issue ownership.’
If this is right, you’d expect that support for the parties would roughly track voter perceptions of issue importance. All things being equal, you’d expect an increase in the importance of the law and order issue to benefit the Coalition at state and territory level and an increase in the importance of education to benefit Labor. And you’d also expect parties to try to spin their opponent’s issues into their own. For example, the coalition might try to spin education as a discipline issue rather than as a resources issue.
So far so good. But how do we make sense of political cross-dressing — when dad tries to get all caring and nurturing and when mum gets all strict and punitive? It’s the kind of thing that’s going on now in the UK. Under Tory leader David Cameron, the party’s logo is now an environmentally friendly tree rather than Margaret Thatcher’s aggressive fist holding a torch. Cameron likes to talk about ‘mum’ issues like poverty and the environment.