Kevin Andrews is a sanctimonious, god-bothering twerp who acted as John Howard's cypher in torpedoing the Northern Territory's ground-breaking (if slightly flawed) euthanasia legislation some years ago. In fact, he's one of the few politicians on either side whom I instinctive...
Continue reading →
Political thought can be classified in many different ways, having regard to ones attitudes to economic freedom, the environment, personal morality (abortion, gay rights etc), welfare, income inequality, inequality of opportunity, etc. Trying to build them all into a comprehen...
Continue reading →
Real Australians from the award-winning Sentence Management Unit at Wolston Correctional Centre Now that the issue of Haneef's incarceration has been resolved, attention has turned inevitably to how the issue will affect Australians' voting intentions. I was struck by this rem...
Continue reading →
This is the best op ed length informative article I've ever read. It's 713 words. It's by Freeman Dyson and every sentence is worth a book, every paragraph worth a sub-discipline. It explains how Darwinian evolution was (yes - 'was') a special period of the earth's history pre...
Continue reading →
Nicholas Gruen looks distinctly dubious about the tucker at this week's "grogblogging" function in Brisbane. 1. News and Politics Stuff 2. Life and Other Serious Stuff 3. The Yartz 4. T.S.S 5. Mad, Bad, Sad and Glad No intro, let's cut straight to the guts. This (late yet agai...
Continue reading →
Just print this page out and turn up at Borders before the 2nd of August and get 30% of any 'full priced' book. Or that's what they say. If you want to buy more than one book, print out the corresponding number of coupons and if they tell you it's one book only, make a separat...
Continue reading →
Many of the comments on my previous posting have been about the monetary effects of budgets. While not dismissing the significance of money supply, I prefer to look at inflation in real demand terms and hence I like to focus on the Budgets effects on aggregate demand pressures...
Continue reading →
On ABC Lateline yesterday evening (25/7/07), the Prime Minister sought to offload any blame for the ugly inflation figures in the June quarter (up 0.9% for the quarter and 2.7% over the year in underlying terms) by pointing out that his government (unlike State Governments) ha...
Continue reading →
This is Andrew Bartlett's speech in the Senate upon the second reading of the Migration Amendment (Detention Arrangements) 2005 bill. The amendment itself is littered with the appearance of oversight and consistent process but none of it is compellable and the process can be h...
Continue reading →
Once again we're late with today's edition of Missing Link, but we do have a good excuse! Due to work pressures, Jason Soon is going on an extended Missing Link hiatus, and we've had to scope out a replacement. Stepping into Jason's shoes will be Peter Black, a contender for O...
Continue reading →
I couldn't help noticing this Reuters story at Fairfax Digital: BERLIN - A mysterious blonde has set pulses racing in Germany after walking into a petrol station wearing nothing but a pair of golden stilettos and a thin gold bracelet. Unlike the oz MSM, one of the advantages o...
Continue reading →
You may talk o' bat and ball An say Warneys great an all, An' pay omage to The Don just like yer mean it; But about that funny thing On yer head ol Dunga Gin Did yer get it cleared by Customs when yer brung it? cause weve got standards ere yknow Were not yer alf-baked bloomin...
Continue reading →
the BBC website alerted me today to the linked paper by my ex - Free University colleague Richard Tol, who is still an environmental economist but has become somewhat famous since. The paper and the i nterview makes fascinating and sobering reading. Let me give you some highli...
Continue reading →
A reminder that there's a bit of a 'do' on tomorrow night in Brisbane. At Hotel Bravo, 455 Brunswick Street, Fortitude Valley at 8 pm. A couple of maps are below the fold. If you'd like to come mbahnisch (at) gmail (dot) com would appreciate an email. See you there!
Continue reading →
One of the the many things that has been preoccupying me lately (and not leaving time for blogging) is that Jen and I have decided to make it legal and get married. It's the second time for both of us, so we're aiming for a comfortable rather than glitzy event. The wedding is...
Continue reading →
Those crazy westralians. Telling us t'othersiders we would starve without them . Plains of our pastures boundless, Seas of our rainbow'd pearl, Destiny is your breezes Liberty's flag unfurl! That they supported the eastern car manufacturing with tariffs on coal and iron ore! T...
Continue reading →
That graph is from the 2001 census . One of the problems in Australian politics is that everything is viewed from the national level. From Imagining Australia : If our Indigenous people comprised one tenth rather than one fiftieth of the population there would be widespread ou...
Continue reading →
Not such a fat issue this time - on this anniversary of the 1944 bomb plot - which is just as well - you'd all be read out otherwise. Still, there's been lots of goodness on the intertubes, and I'll pop a few recommendations up front before hopping into Missing Link proper. Fi...
Continue reading →
Here's a repeat of some stuff I've written here at least a couple of times - on each occasion provoking the usual Pavlovian responses of rent seeking. Crikey rang me and asked me for a comment on the Ford closure which is reproduced below. In the wake of the downsizing of Ford...
Continue reading →
I've posted over the fold a draft of a speech I'm delivering at a seminar being held tomorrow on indigenous policy in the wake of the recent Howard-Brough intervention in the Northern Territory. In part it's a more reflective version of the angry post I wrote here at Troppo on...
Continue reading →
I'll be in Brisbane next Wednesday night - so it would be nice to see anyone who wants to come along. Mark B has posted some suggestions on LP . I can make it from around 8 pm.
Continue reading →
I sometimes get into trouble for drawing sentences to the attention of Troppodillians that look too light to me. Well maybe someone can set me straight. I've not checked out the cases, but they look wrong to me. Case 1. An 11-year-old Canberra boy who sexually assaulted a 12-y...
Continue reading →
Below the fold is an example of Telstra making life easy. I don't know if you've ever heard Mike Nichols and Elaine May's great sketch from 1960 but that's what it's been like. I may keep you posted if there is further cause. The initial email was in response to being told tha...
Continue reading →
Well, Mohammed Haneef and the Bail Dance... or not, as the case may be. It certainly got Ozblogistan going in a big way, with lots of lively commentary and legal input. For my money, bloggers really showed where they can do a much better job than the MSM, simply by being able...
Continue reading →
I have just disonnected a phone/fax machine which I've used as the main phone on my desk for years. It's of no further (foreseeable) use for me. So if you want it - the first person to arrange to get round here (to Port Melbourne) to pick it up can have it. Price: $0 The catch...
Continue reading →
My apologies to all and sundry; the reason Missing Link is late is because yours truly got overconfident about getting over the dreaded lurgi, which I'm now paying for in spades. Missing Link will be up this afternoon, after I've been to the doctor (yes, me going to a doctor;...
Continue reading →
Killing a night in Sydney I went to see Knocked Up which I'd heard good things about. Thoroughly accurate things. It's terrific. I'm afraid I couldn't take my eyes of Katherine Heigl. These are the unfair things that Hollywood does to us little people out here. Anyway, go and...
Continue reading →
KERRY O'BRIEN : Okay. The Federal Police were also given every opportunity to convince the magistrate hearing the case against Dr Haneef that he should be held in custody, and the magistrate rejected their arguments. Have federal police given you information that they haven't...
Continue reading →
California contributes approximately 14% of of the US GDP. If it were a nation its economy would rank just behind China's and Italy's for size. New South Wales contributes 33.1% of Australian GDP. Victoria is next with 24.2%, Queensland with 18.9% and Western Australia with 12...
Continue reading →
I've just been to see Romulus my father. To the left is a picture of the actual Romulus. The filmic version is another story. I enjoyed the book a lot when it came out. Recently I heard Raimond Gaita reading some sections of the book on 'first person' on the great Radio Nation...
Continue reading →
A couple of highlights from Radio National from Troppo's resident insomniac. This ship and its sister ships were built in the first decade or two of the twentieth century in a last ditch attempt to match steam power. They eked out an existence until 1949 running grain between...
Continue reading →
A friend of mine - Stephen Rimmer has proposed an Aboriginal Rights and Responsibilities Commission. If you're wondering what that might be, you get a clue from the fact that Stephen is an old hand at the Productivity Commission (having spent a great deal of his time in regula...
Continue reading →
Housing and blogging, blogging and housing. Since we did some navel gazing in the last issue, I thought we'd better leave the blog v MSM stoush to the news and politics section, and bring housing affordability up to the top of this issue of Missing Link. This is such a juicy t...
Continue reading →
News today that Prime Minister John Howard is on the nose in New South Wales must surely be a big blow to the morale of the Committee to re-elect the PM , that has been trying desperately to claw its way back into the game at this point of the election cycle. Machine Rudds ste...
Continue reading →
As Christopher Hitchens puts it: Try this: Call a TV station and tell them that you know the Antichrist is already on earth and is an adult Jewish male. See how far you get. Then try the same thing and add that you are the Rev. Jim-Bob Vermin. "Why, Reverend, come right on the...
Continue reading →
A couple of months ago I wrote a newsletter for Peach Home Loans clients on the price of housing. Ever since being put on the 'drip' of Hugh Paveletich's daily broadcast emails I've been intrigued by the argument that the massive rise in housing prices has been driven by gover...
Continue reading →
A whip around a couple of sites commenting on the Adelaide Festival of Ideas and the issue of 'MSM v blogging' leads me to post this observation. I think Radio National is a fine thing, but I much prefer it when a program finds someone who's written something interesting, the...
Continue reading →
A bit of navel gazing never hurt anyone, and in this issue, various bloggers engage our (oftimes troubled) relationship with the MSM, along with the role of new communications tools. Particularly worthwhile in this context is Peter Black's ongoing examination of Facebook v oth...
Continue reading →
Today, in essential reading for all patriots, Ruperts Organ of Freedom throbs big time with big ideas and larger than life loftiness. Beginning at Planet Janet we find ourselves once again saving Western Civilisation as she goes suborbital around Muslim Terror. Its Good v Evil...
Continue reading →
There has been a media and blogger gotcha moment when Nelson mentioned that armed intervention in Iraq was related to securing energy supplies. We know that the Carter Doctrine from 1980 stated clearly that the US would use military might in the Gulf region if American nationa...
Continue reading →
Well maybe not, but this review of what sounds like a great book is a great read. The book is The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries Are Failing and What Can Be Done About It. The author of the book is Paul Collier and the author of the review of it is Niall Fergusson....
Continue reading →
Last weekend Bruce Chapman sent me another of his little bits of econometrics about Don Bradman. Bruce calcualted how much the Don increased gate takings and concluded that the ACB got a pretty good deal when he batted! In any event, with due acknowledgement, here is Bruce's l...
Continue reading →
In an obvious bid for some inter-thread Missing Link stoushing, Amanda has decided to do her arts review as a series of links (or, alternatively - and more likely - I have seriously screwed something up). We are also down on some personnel, with Ken Parish still snowed under a...
Continue reading →
It's a good question which the Investment and Financial Services Association (IFSA) had the good sense to ask Lateral Economics. You can take in our answer to the question in under 700 words as they appear in the Fin Review today, or at much greater length in the report we did...
Continue reading →
Another fascinating insight into the current Iraq counter insurgency strategy by Lt. Col. David Kilcullen. Reading this you can't help thinking that maybe - finally- they've got the right people on the job.
Continue reading →
Here's an early review of the iPhone . I'm not actually a fan of the iPod though it's amazing how large its market share is in a market in which it doesn't have many strong natural monopoly advantages - just 'first mover' advantages. It doesn't record radio so I buy other mach...
Continue reading →
First up, some housekeeping. The Missing Link crew have added a new committee member, and we'd like y'all to welcome Legal Eagle to the fold. For those of you who've been following this illustrious publication, you'd know that Legal Eagle is a young mum, legal academic and (fo...
Continue reading →
Every picture tells a story ... As a former Northern Territory public servant who spent over 20 years dealing with policy development and program management in a range of fields relating to Indigenous people, I wont dwell on my anger at the way the Brough/Howard plan was annou...
Continue reading →
The graph is from the ABS' population statistics from June 2006 . Queensland and Tasmania are the only ones that people are migrating too on a positive basis and Tasmania barely so. The migration to Queensland is mainly Novacumbrians where 289,000 moved to Queensland between 2...
Continue reading →
This post is exclusively for anyone who saw The Lives of Others , which I finally got around to seeing. If you haven't seen it, you won't know what I'm talking about; and what you do understand will spoil it for you anyway. I enjoyed it enormously, for all the reasons other di...
Continue reading →
I am prepared to give John Howard the benefit of the doubt on his Northern Territory intervention. If, over time, it reduces alcohol and drugs and child abuse (whether as a direct result of the federal intervention or indirectly by stirring the States into more vigorous action...
Continue reading →
Holden reports a 120 million loss . Ouch: Despite the Commodore maintaining its position as the number one selling vehicle down under in 2006, total revenues were down 7.8% over the period, which meant that Holden ended up with a substantial $123.7 million loss. That is about...
Continue reading →
