Not a show I watch I admit, but as Troppo's reality TV correspondent I read this piece from New Matilda "Reality TV Sh!ts In Its Nest" It's an expose of Ladette to Lady. I though it would explain how the girls were exploited in the sense of being deliberately set up to be type...
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I was once on a tram in Melbourne and got talking to the woman next to me. She asked what I was doing and I told her that I was down from Canberra for the day. I told her that I was advocating a particular policy. Being the son of an academic I was brought up to believe that t...
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From the US General Accountability Office. HT - an email from David Lian. The federal governments financial condition and fiscal outlook are worse than many may understand. Despite an increase in revenues in fiscal year 2006 of about $255 billion, the federal government report...
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I'm re-reading the Theory of Moral Sentiments . Some of it's great. Some of it, not so much. Anyway a well known phsychological phenomenon is they way that our happiness reverts to our mean level of happiness which tends to be determined more by our temperament than our circum...
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Full of relevance for our own brand of muddling through. Here's the column . Labours affair with bankers is to blame for this sorry state In Wednesdays Budget statement, Alistair Darling acknowledged that even on his optimistic assumptions a decade was needed to repair Britain...
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From Dani Rodrik's blog . Macroeconomics doesn't get much plaudits around now, but here is a real-life story that should hearten those who think the field is really broken. It concerns Andres Velasco, a distinguished macroeconomist who is currently the minister of finance in C...
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Reclaiming Americas Soul, by Paul Krugman, Commentary, NY Times : Nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. So declared President Obama, after his commendable decision to release the legal memos that his predecessor used to justify tortu...
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I've had a few requests for more of these - so I'll pop them up when they're especially classy. Click on the link to the game Breyer vs J Esser to see the answer. And of course any day you want a fix, just go to Chessgames.com White to play Breyer vs J Esser 17. ? See game for...
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It's quite tricky to teach undergraduate law students about the Whitlam Dismissal. You have to cover it because it's the only example of exercise of vice-regal reserve powers of dismissal of an elected government since federation (at least at federal level; there's also Sir Ph...
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Australia's economy may be officially in recession, but Lateral Economics at least is doing its bit to reduce the effects. In addition to the research assistant Nicholas advertised for earlier this week, we also need someone with some web design and Wordpress backend experienc...
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On today's Science Show .
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[caption id="attachment_31877" align="alignright" width="332"] Our Cate, looking stunning just three minutes after giving birth to her latest accessory. Really how does she do it?[/caption] The night I got Kevin Rudd's email advising me that the Government had got its full res...
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And fair enough too. If someone is brain damaged perhaps they shouldn't be punished for bludgeoning their mother to death, after that is he had stabbed her, dug his hands into her face and on one occasion tried to choke her. But then you wonder why they're being convicted and...
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What Martin Wolf thinks of Britain's national debt, I think of our foreign debt . I have no idea whether the government can both get away with this optimism and postpone the moment of truth at least until after the general election. Markets have been forgiving. The difficulty...
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HT Brad Delong: In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use : The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods u...
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Not if you read fellow second generation Dunera Boy Peter Brent's analysis , it makes you relieved if the prospect of the paranoia of the past gives you the willies as it does me. Brent's analysis is calm and persuasive. I'll reproduce it below the fold. HIS WAS THE WEEK the f...
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Am I mistaken or is this a reasonable description of the last - say - thirty years in cinema. A generation ago, you could do a film about foreigners in a normal English speaking accent. The Sound of Music was done in a mix of fairly unobtrusive (to us) English accents (the adu...
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Here's how you do free association economics? You start writing a piece on the politics of the budget and then you just say pretty much anything that comes into your head. You use the general riffs that are doing the rounds at the moment and just see how it comes out. You make...
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The High Court this morning rejected an appeal by former radio star John Laws' employer Radio 2UE against a defamation verdict for comments he made about fellow shockjock Ray Chesterton. The SMH seems to summarise the judgment accurately as far as I can see from a quick scan r...
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I see PJ O'Rourke is in the country to strut his schtick for the Centre for Independent Studies. He wrote an opinion piece in yesterday's Oz along predictable lines: the keynesian socialists are squandering our money on all these GFC stimulus measures, when the best thing to d...
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The Thomas v Mowbray thread has taken an unexpected but fascinating turn, at least from my viewpoint as a public lawyer. It's kickstarted a productive debate about the form of an Australian bill of rights. As this is only tangentially related to the topic of the post, I've dec...
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There's been a lot written about this subject lately, but this two pager (pdf) from Paul Ormerod seems pretty good to me.
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Alex Sloan at ABC Canberra and I have a chat on air about fortnightly usually corresponding to one of my columns. We had a chat on Adam Smith and the Theory of Moral Sentiments last Thursday and I was in some trepidation that I might become rather incoherent as the ideas are q...
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In 2008 a group of people and organisations coming together under the name of Australia 21 invited both John Quiggin and me to discussions in Sydney to discuss the issue of resilience with them. Resilience, they suggested was something that we should be concerned about general...
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[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Steven Hawking"] [/caption] [caption id="" align="alignright" width="246" caption="Richard Pratt"] [/caption] If 'gravely ill' is a euphamism for 'dying' spare a thought for the two souls pictured.
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Well it was a great success - last time I mentioned that I was after a research assistant I got about twelve applications in the space of a couple of days. Most of them were very good. Since then three people have done occasional work for us mostly very well. In the case of ea...
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Occasional visitor "Edward Carson" wrote a somewhat cynical comment on my previous post about asylum seekers : Does this mean that if they fill out the appropriate forms in duplicate, we are then obliged to accept them all into our country? Although I strongly suspect "Edward"...
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Andrew Norton wonders how the term 'neoliberalism' came to Australia . After searching the literature, he thinks it "probably started in Latin America, and came to Australia via US academia". Andrew's probably right. There's some evidence that, during the 1960s, free market su...
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Given the grim circumstances the world faced, I've always been queasy about being too gung ho in criticising the bombing raids of the allies in World War Two (though the allies circumstances were less and less grim, victory more and more inevitable when some of the worst raids...
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A question that seems obvious once it's been asked. Find out the answer in this revealing video. The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest
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"Jihad" Jack Thomas I've been meaning for ages to write about the High Court's 2007 decision in Thomas v Mowbray , in fact ever since it was handed down. Complex constitutional decisions are really difficult to write about in a way that's accessible and interesting to a genera...
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Notes written at 12,000 metres. On various planes between Australia and Europe going hither and yon I had the chance to see most of the film Australia. Ive just filled in on most bits I missed going hither (from Beijing to Helsinki) going yon (from Helsinki to Honkers). There...
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As Chris Dillow from Stumbling and Mumbling argues David Semple thinks the left should join American tea parties, which protest against high taxes. I think I agree. The desire to shrink the state should be a leftist aim. I say so for four reasons. 1. Big government cannot be r...
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In case anyone's interested, some time commenter on Troppo and IP analyst turned impresario of rupute Duncan Bucknell asked me to participate in a podcast on manufacturing for export - one of my causes du jour . So feel free to have a listen if you like. Of course there are ge...
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Sometimes videos detract from an original piece of music. This vid is just too obvious and adds a little too much schmaltz to Mitch Benn's funny and rather moving little number. I think it's better with your eyes closed.
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Yesterday's "boat people" explosion near Ashmore Reef west of Darwin, in which 3 people were apparently killed outright and many more seriously injured, has eerie if obvious parallels with the "children overboard" saga of 2001 which helped John Howard to his third successive e...
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I don't have time right now to read the essay which is abstracted below . But I'd love to. And I don't really have time to defend the propositions that I'll put before you here, nor to get them into a state that I would be confident I wouldn't have to revise once I'd posted th...
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President Iloilo [ Cross-posted from the blog I run for CDU public law students ] There doesn't seem to be anything especially remarkable about the current (2009) Fiji coup whereby Fiji's ageing and ailing President Josefa Iloilo sacked the Fiji Court of Appeal which only last...
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Not so long ago Nicholas Gruen published a post lamenting the extraordinary cost and complexity of civil litigation in Australia and common law countries generally. He ascribed it partly to the adversarial system and canvassed the possible advantages of a more European-style i...
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(*This was posted elsewhere for my CDU Intro to Public Law students, so it might be a bit dry and technical for some. Nevertheless others might find it worth reading) The Rudd government's proposed reforms to the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Cth) ("FOI Act" ), sponsored by...
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East Point beach, pretty much where the channel and lock would go through for "Arafura Harbour" according to the concept plan. I suspect this aspect of the plan will change to force the channel to emerge on the north side of East Point, which would make a lot more sense. I've...
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Richard Ackland has an enjoyable rant this week about an upcoming UN talkfest in Geneva known as Durban II. It's organised by the UN Human Rights Council, which in a delightful (but typical of the UN) irony is chaired by Libya. As Ackland points out: The Human Rights Council i...
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Fiji's president takes charge (SMH) Fiji is in a state of political flux after President President Ratu Josefa Iloilo announced he had repealed the country's constitution, appointed himself head of state and set a 2014 election deadline. He said on Friday he had also sacked al...
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Internet company to be sold by 2022 (SMH) THE Rudd Government will next month try to lock Parliament in to approving the sale of its new broadband company by 2022 in a bid to avoid a repeat of the bitter Senate debates over the privatisation of Telstra. In an interview with th...
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Herewith my column in today's SMH , replacing Ross Gittins as you eat your Weeties. Thanks as ever to James Farrell for reading an earlier draft and making suggestions - something he does and I fail to acknolwedge on many columns. Cut-throat behaviour makes empathy flow Ages a...
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The police have been dusting for prints. There are dark smudges on the laundry door around the handle and locks. The forensics officer suggested I wipe it off with a dry cloth. It turns black if gets wet, she said. The powder is surprisingly difficult to remove and seems to ha...
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I'm in a London pub thinking of all the Troppodillians back home and of course I'm thinking of intellectual property. Today's column in the Fin outlines a very stupid situation we have gotten outselves into. (This was a direct washup of our previous Prime Minister's leadership...
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I dont know whether youve noticed, but theres a bit of an obsession with crime thats built up the last few years. I put it down to the Underbelly effect. The writhing naked bodies and the brazen offhand, almost pedestrian depiction of violent and murderous crime, has been migh...
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Dave Bloustien looks like a cross between Dr. Who and a 1960s mod with a cravat, waistcoat and sideburns. Certainly a contrast to the t-shirt and jeans that constitutes the usual comedy clobber, but Mr. Boustein doesnt deliver the usual stand-up routine either. Instead he offe...
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At last, a brief article on the financial crisis that goes behind the facade to look at some of the deeper structural issues. The author is Satyajit Das and the article ("Built to Fail ") was published in the latest Monthly . He sees the principle cause as excessive debt: The...
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Well it may not impress many of you, but I've just been heading North from London to Edinburgh and the train has wifi (though like most things in the UK it doesn't work very well). In any event, on line I found Ken Parish burning the midnight oil and have been gasbagging to hi...
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Earlier in the week, I raised the question of what might happen to Turnbulls argument if we did a counter-factual calculation - and in particular what might happen to debt levels over the next few years if the Government chose to do nothing (in response to the budget). Nigel R...
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New Page 1 I finally got around to seeing The Reader , and for once I'd read the book first (it helps that it's short). The film was well made. The acting was impressive, especially by young David Kross -- I was confirmed in my hypothesis that Kate Winslett deserved her Oscar...
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Costello went through all the documents relating to the summit, to see if there was anything at all on the global financial institutions. He said he looked hard and found nothing . He failed to look hard. This is my submission .
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