I found this post from 2007 mysterious sitting deep in the bowels of the software on Club Troppo. I don't think it was published then - not that it's any great shakes. But it's published now. Tonight Alison Tate, the International Officer for the Australian Council of Trade Un...
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Oh, Darling... please don't ask.. it's too horrible! Here, for the record, are Troppo readers' election predictions from the last two editions of Missing Link. No more entries will be accepted unless they fall outside the current range, in which case they'll be accepted until...
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Recently, we had a policy discussion forum about the issue of whether Australia should follow most of the rest of the OECD and introduce the right to paid maternity leave. For the full slides, see here . During the discussion I introduced the topic of paid maternity in the con...
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From Crikey! (the figuring behind the blue line is set out here ).
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I was disappointed and perplexed that an excellent service run by Regional Express (REX) between Melbourne and Canberra was discontinued a few years ago. The tickets were a fair bit cheaper than the competition - and you just had to sit in a turbo prop for an extra half hour o...
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"It's like the Ferrari of bikes" says photographer Sam Ash. In Friday's Financial Review Magazine Ash is pictured standing next to his red Tommasini fixie -- a bike with one gear and no brakes . Given that the average age of AFR Magazine readers is 46 this doesn't bode well fo...
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I recently picked up a remaindered copy of a strange and compelling book by John Lukacs the author of Five Days in London: May 1940 a gripping account of five of the first days of Winston Churchills Prime Ministership in which he faced down the defeatists and appeasers in his...
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A sense of gloom settled in as I ploughed through The Weekend Australian yesterday. It felt like February 2003 again, only worse. Then, an optimist could at least excuse the thumping of the drums of war as the triumph of hope over experience. In the light of the last four year...
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Cub Troppo readers have presumably been following my discussion with Brendan Halfweeg on the comments thread of Nicholas's post on interest rates and tax cuts , with the eager fascination normally reserved for a match-point rally in a Wimbledon final. The ball is currently in...
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The column below the fold was published in the AFR two Thursdays ago while I was in Korea. It began as a post and then I decided that I felt strongly enough about the points - and wanted to do what I could to advertise them to others - that I'd write it as well as I could and...
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Alan Moir on the election, via Apathetic Sarah . If Alan Moir is prepared to put his reputation on the line, and so is Alan Ramsay (despite having forfeited his spectacularly in 2004), why can't bloggers and blog commenters be as bold? In response to last week's challenge, a f...
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We had an interesting recent economic policy discussion here at QUT about the topical issue of urban water management, chaired by Clevo Wilson, a senior lecturer in environmental economics. The full presentations can be downloaded here . The essence of the debate was whether i...
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For a limited time only - until Nov 1 to be precise. And if you might want to buy more than one book - I know it seems silly but print out multiple copies of the coupon - which is located by clicking on the image.
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The Age asked me to do another 300 word piece for today's production on the subject of wages and inflation. They haven't rung today so it looks like there'll be nothing from me tomorrow! In any event, below the fold, for the record, is my piece. It is a pleasant surprise that...
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Michael Short the excellent editor of the Age's excellent business pages asked me at pretty short notice to write a little op ed - 300 words - on the issue du jour - which is whether the bipartisan policy of handing back the revenue windfall from the mining boom will increase...
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One of Labor's proudest achievements is that it introduced compulsory super. A good thing too. What a pity that when it did so it did it in a manner that provided much larger benefits to the rich than the poor. Super has a flat tax of 15% - or rather a range of flat taxes whic...
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What happened today in 2136 BC? No doubt Google will come to the rescue of those who don't know (mutters beneath his breath that the world is not what it used to be)
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I seem to be the only one, that I have seen anyway, in the Australian blogosphere who is excited about the 37c tax bracket going the way of the dodo in Labor's tax policy announcement. Peter Martin even suggested it might be bad politics . Hopefully this policy becomes 'common...
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Hearts were aflutter and the paparazzi were nowhere to be seen as Jen McCulloch married middle aged sweetheart Ken "Troppo Armodillo" Parish in a deliberately low key ceremony in Fitzroy Saturday. Naturally your Troppo correspondent was there and enjoyed the proceedings immens...
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Which one do you like best? The Debate was a worthwhile exercise. The format worked pretty well, and ninety minutes was a reasonable time to cover most of the issues. I wonder why the ABC bothered to telecast it, given that Chanel Nine had both the worm and Annabel Crabbe. How...
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To which organisations do these two logos belong?
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I've written about this before. As the material I linked to in my previous post seemed to show, while there are a bunch of good reasons - both experimental and observational for assuming that mobile phone use will be associated with higher accident rates, it's still hard to fi...
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If you're not with us, you're against us. Thanks to Arleesher at Stoush.net . As was made clear in the previous edition, we don't discuss politics in the Introduction to Missing Link. Aussies prefer to talk about sport. On Election Day we watch TV all evening with the intent a...
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As the Government turns up the heat in this campaign and tries to araldite the 70% Union Bosses tag to Mr, Rudds forehead, damning information about the Governments own front bench has surfaced which places this debate in a whole new light. One of the Governments key lines in...
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Not exactly home-grown art, but irresistible. Via Remember the West , original provenance unspecified. The News and Politics section is full of links on the election. But the Introduction to Missing Link is reknowned for its dignity and fair-mindedness, and not the venue for d...
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Not because I don't want to, but because I can't. I have been purged from the electoral roll. Like many Australian Diasporans I am in the curious position of being completely disenfranchised. My home country has kicked me off the rolls, yet I am not a citizen of another countr...
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Thirty Four Billion Dollars. Sounds a big number right? Its more than Ive got and Id hazard a guess that its more than youve got too. Its a number so large, such a very very big number, that only a Government can throw it around and still be taken seriously. Today Mr. Howard a...
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Review of Tao: On the Road and On the Run in Outlaw China by Aya Goda. Translated from the Japanese by Alison Watts. Published by Portobello Books. The painting reflects the artist, Young Number Four Son. If you want to paint, you must start by building your character. Paintin...
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So Mr. Howard has this morning climbed into the back of the Prime Ministerial Comcar slid across the shiny leather seat and ordered Jeeves to the Governor Generals pile to officially name the date for the election. It would, I suppose, have been a surreal moment. Sitting in th...
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The Dunera association had its celebration of the 67th anniversary of the Dunera's arrival in Sydney recently. Since my daughter had recently done a major assignment on the Dunera she and I flew up and she gave a little talk on what she'd found. I always enjoy being with these...
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Want to buy an expensive Swiss watch? Not everyone can afford a real one-a Patek Philippe timepiece can be worth many thousands of dollars, and some very exclusive makes, such as a Vacheron Constantin, can cost over a million! Still, you may have found a convincing lookalike i...
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When first drafting I'd intended this to be a one part post. But by the time the first post went up it had became a two part post. But when I got to writing up part two I continued and extended the discussion with Damien Eldridge which had begun in part one. Now it's time to m...
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Wilcox on the McClelland Affair, via Ken Lovell Hard on the heals of the Sudanese Affair is the Pine Boxes Affair; between them the two have raised the fury of the Government's boo-squad to new heights, whether from outraged principle or from fear that the tactics may work. An...
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Here's a guest post by an Open Source Programmer Con Zymaris You may not be aware of this, but you're probably reading this editorial using a product sourced from perhaps the world's largest monopoly market. A monopoly more profound and more ingrained than any run by a former...
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The emotional politics of Howard's aspirational nationalism There's a difference between guilt and shame. When you see yourself as a good person who's done a bad thing, you feel guilt. But when you see the bad thing you've done as evidence that you are a bad person, then you f...
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In an earlier piece on economic freedom I raised inter alia the issue of Australias welfare to work measures under Howard. This attracted some debate and it seems appropriate to reiterate my views on the topic. Australias welfare to work measures have involved a tightening of...
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This post is filed under life. How long have you got?
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CEDA have proposed a gradual extension of the age at which you qualify for the pension from 65 to 67 . What with all that hard policy lifting that Peter Costello's been doing on behalf of intergenerational equity (at the same time as lining the pockets of the country's aged su...
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Yes folks, that's what Julie Andrews says in the Sound of Music , and this week, amidst the ruins of all those securitised sub-prime loans, the International Financial Law Review tells us that the first rated securitization of subordinated microcredits securitisation took plac...
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Where do they get these numbers? It completely beats me. Reminds me of a line in Annie Hall in which Woody's mother says to his father in conclusion of their latest argument. "Have it your own way, the Atlantic Ocean is a better ocean than the Pacific Ocean." Or as Keynes said...
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The AES has an interesting graph which shows trending on how people consumed political information during elections. Unfortunately the trend ends at 2004, however, the internet was already rivaling talkback radio, newspapers and radio for media consumption patterns. I am sure...
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Paul Krugman's blog - at its pithy best on how right is wrong . And Steven Levitt making some very good points about how laborious the process is for publishing peer reviewed material. We're making progress but in many ways given the opportunities presented by the net, progres...
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Strange but true - in case you haven't heard, the world is full of amazing people with amazing stories who do amazing things . Perhaps this is a portent that the hideous catastrophes of the twentieth century are behind us. Well - obviously they're behind us. What I mean is, he...
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The Government's opponents are routinely accused by its supporters, and even by self-styled sensible centrists, of having a 'visceral hatred' of John Howard. Either that or it's a 'hysterical hatred ', a 'rabid hatred' or a 'deranged hatred'. Because the poets in our midst can...
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Via Gary Sauer-Thompson : The Australian Electoral Study's Trends in Australian Political Opinion [PDF] is a goldmine of graphs, polling and trending all thoughtfully gathered into the one document. Especially for graph junkies . It is also interesting to see where the polling...
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The Patriot, courtesy of Mark at Seeking Asylum Down Under If there was a topic of the week it was the Immigration Minister's decision that Australia will accept fewer African refugees, and the associated furore about Sudanese gangs. Andrew Bartlett reports on a forum of the E...
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A few days ago I got invited to participate in the Melborune Uni Debating Society's annual debate "That the Howard Government has failed the Australian Economy. Andrew Charlton, author of a recent book called (inevitably) Ozonomics pulled out and I'm the consolation. Regulars...
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Microsoft is a remarkable company. When you run the world's biggest internet mail operation, the default option for most high school students, when you're being threatened by companies that make better stuff but don't have your head start, it's not that difficult to respond to...
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This month's edition of Ceteris Paribus the newsletter of the Victorian Economics Society carried the article below by Gerard Brody on regulatory gatekeeping. I don't agree with all of it, but it's general point (highlighting the fact that our regulation review institutions te...
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I can't. Confession 1 : American track star Marion Jones admits using performance-enhancing drugs and will almost certainly be stripped of the five medals she won at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. She will probably face a maximum of six months in jail for perjury, but that could be...
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In the last two and a half decades, the idea of economic freedom - low levels of government intervention in the economy and wide scope for individual freedom of choice -has been widely embraced by both conservative and social democratic governments. This is because of the wide...
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Hayek has an enlightening concept of the 'extended order' in society. Society begins around a community order which extends only to the hunting group or whatever and families and clans within it. Often those groups, later villages are at war with other groups. As human, econom...
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Reading the Dunera News (of all things) - the Dunera is the prison ship on which my father came to Australia during World War II - I came across some fun quotes. Some I'd heard before but not recently and some I'd never heard - including one from one of my faves - Oscar Wilde....
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The posting rate on this blog is sufficient that the initial post has already disappeared into the blog ether. But the story so far is that I posted a link to an article that Dani Rodrik had praised to the skies. It argued that economists make all manner of short cuts when arg...
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Apropos of my piece a while back on bullshit , since I found the cartoon of the concept in Andrew Charlton's book Ozonomics (I think Ozzinomics sounds better) I thought I'd share it with you - as they say. Since you won't notice that I've also used it to illustrate the piece....
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THERES no doubt that housing affordability has deteriorated substantially over the past decade or so. Indeed as conventionally measured in terms of the income required to service the mortgage needed to purchase a median-priced house in any of Australias major cities purchasing...
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Today's column in the AFR . Exporting Australian Funds Management As the AFR reported late last week, a small new front is opening up in the election at least at the big end of town: Turning Australia into a funds management hub for the region. Its a worthy aspiration. But rea...
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I guess I might have made it to this post by Richard Freeman on WorkChoices as both the blog he wrote it on and another blog that it was reproduced on are on my blog reader (now featuring 477 unread posts!) But thanks to Helen for linking to it in the earlier thread on George...
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Some interesting speculations from Brad Delong.
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The following article appeared in today's AFR. Australian living standards (measured, albeit imperfectly, by real net national disposable income per head) have soared by about 16% or nearly $8000 per person in just the last five years a great leap forward unequalled in any sim...
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Telstra's just made my life easier by forcing me to upgrade my account from wireless broadband I to wireless broadband II. Having locked me into a 2 year contract on the first system, they cancelled it after about a year (their right to do so was all in the contract) and said...
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Crikey asked me to comment on this article itemising some likely initiatives on superannuation by the ALP. So I did. The result is over the fold. Walking and chewing gum Contrary to the opinion of his critics, John Howard has not robbed from the poor to give to the rich. Hes l...
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