Club Troppo

"Hug a hoodie" — For years Conservative leader David Cameron has struggled to live down the catchphrase. In 2006 he made a speech about crime and young people in “hoodies”. While bad behaviour must be punished, he insisted, we also need to show a lot more love and understanding to those at risk of criminal offending. Before long, Labour MPs and the media had distilled the message down to three short words.

A leader writer at the Telegraph decided that they knew exactly what Cameron meant — and didn’t approve:

The idea that society is to blame for criminal behaviour is passé. It flies in the face of common sense, empirical evidence, Christian doctrine and modern evolutionary biology.

Australian prime minister Malcolm Fraser was also saddled with a catchphrase that his opponents used against him — "life is not meant to be easy". As Tony Stephens writes: "His political opponents seized on the sentence, arguing it revealed the attitude of the privileged and wealthy towards less-fortunate Australians." And unlike Cameron, Fraser did use his catchphrase in a speech.

Other catchphrases have been kinder to those who used them. Like his brothers, Robert Kennedy liked to say : "Some people see things as they are and say why? I dream things that never were and say, why not?" And curiously, Kennedy’s quote has the same source as Fraser’s catchphrase.

One thing all of these catchphrases have in common is that they do not originate with the politicians themselves.

(Continued)

Justin Madden – boofhead, retired AFL hero, Labor Minister and perhaps soon to be unwitting definer of the bounds of Westminster democracy

A dispute has arisen in Victoria’s Upper House of Parliament which seems to show some promise of throwing legal light on a dim aspect of Australia’s evolved version of Westminster responsible government, namely whether and to what extent an Upper House can compel a Ministerial officer to give evidence.

Before explaining why the answer to that question remains obscure, although many would imagine it should be clear and long-settled, the context in which the issue arises is explained in an article in The Age yesterday:

An inquiry on the planning process behind the Windsor Hotel redevelopment descended into farce yesterday after Planning Minister Justin Madden tried to appear without being invited.

Sitting in a seat reserved for his former media adviser, Peta Duke, whom the committee had subpoenaed, Mr Madden attempted to answer questions on her behalf.

”Excuse me, chair, I’m the responsible minister and I’m prepared to answer questions today,” he told the inquiry.

But committee chairman Gordon Rich-Phillips wanted to have a closed-door discussion about whether to hear from Mr Madden.

There was some loud disagreement among the committee before Labor MP Matt Viney shouted: ”You want to close this down and have a secret hearing so you can have your … McCarthyist witch-hunt.” Opposition MPs then walked out.

Outside, Mr Madden denied he had provoked the breakdown, saying it was appropriate for him to answer questions on behalf of his staff.

The inquiry, instigated by the upper house Finance and Public Administration Committee, is investigating the Windsor Hotel planning approval process after a media plan written by Ms Duke was accidentally emailed to the ABC.

The plan outlined a strategy to manipulate public opinion to help the government halt the proposed $260 million redevelopment of the Windsor. A development application was lodged last year and is under consideration. Mr Madden has said Ms Duke came up with the plan and that it was wrong, leading him to remove her from his office.

You can readily see why the Opposition is interested in exploring the issue.  Moreover I suspect most thoughtful political observers would think the matter is one of genuine public interest and importance.  Was this just a hare-brained scheme hatched by a renegade ministerial staffer?  Or was there a strategy endorsed by the Planning Minister to subvert the planning process for which he is responsible by orchestrating public opinion?  Obviously the Minister would deny the latter interpretation (although interestingly he hasn’t yet done so, at least judging by his words quoted in The Age article), hence the upper house committee’s enthusiasm to see what the sacked ministerial staffer might have to say.

(Continued)

Gather round and listen to this tale.

One of the promises made by the current government in opposition that they managed to get in place without much difficulty was the Lobbyists Register.  This was to make the whole lobbying process more transparent. Any firms wanting to lobby the parliament would have to register themselves, and their staff and their clients and update it three times a year.

Whatever the benefit of these regulations, they seem to entail alot of red tape, particularly for smaller firms, or those for whom lobbying is only part of their activities. New regulations are meant to be assessed by a Regulatory Impact Statement.

I asked to see it. There wasn’t one.  I asked why.

A long process followed.

(Continued)

Gutless. The government and the opposition joined forces in the Senate to vote down Senator Xenophon’s proposed inquiry into the Church of Scientology.

Both the ALP and the Coalition have folded like cheap garden chairs in the face of organised evil. Shame on both of them.

Well, I probably won’t be there, but I must say this is coooool. Very cool.

An auction of old old radios. They’re little bundles of nostalgia these little guys. What about this one!

Or perhaps you’d like it in blue. Blue we can do.

Joel’s, the auctioneer reckons they’ll go for around 1.5K.  Then again this cherry red Emerson AU 190 Cathedral will set you back 8-12K.

The other day I was at Toby’s Estate’s Wooloomooloo outlet when I became inordinately interested in the menu pricing.

From my notes (I did mean inordinately) :

Short Black/Ristretto : $2.20

Long Black/Piccolo Latte : $3.00

Latte/Flat White/Cappuccino : $3.50

Here’s my puzzlement. It’s clearly not marginal cost pricing.  Whilst the extra labour and milk obviously add a slightly greater cost to the flat white compared to long black, these extra costs are also present to a marginally smaller extent in the piccolo latte which is priced the same. And the effort involved in adding already heated effectively free water to a cup for a long black can’t represent an 80 cent cost on top of a short black.

But we don’t expect perfect marginal cost pricing in many places anyway.

But the prices don’t reflect what I’d expect from typical price discrimination either. (Continued)

Most of the initial reactions to Tony Abbott’s maternity leave proposal have focussed on its political motivation, on how it squares with his personal ideology, and on reactions of the business lobby.

As far as the politics are concerned, it looks like standard Howard era populism, seizing on the winds of prevailing opinion. As for the financing, the interesting aspect is not that business will pay for it. In fact, it would take it a bit of detailed modelling to work out how the incidence would ultimately fall. Businesses forced to pay the levy would recover part of it from salaries and part from consumers via higher prices, with shareholders paying the balance. The cost will fall fairlly broadly on the community as a whole, just as it would if it were taxpayer funded.

Therefore, what is interesting from an economic point of view is the insurance aspect — that there would be no connection between what firms pay and whether their female employees take maternity leave. The alternative private-sector funded scheme might have been a compulsory scheme in which each employer pays for its particular employees who took leave. That would have created a disincentive for firms to hire potential new mothers, and Abbott’s scheme avoids this.

At the aggregate societal level, it amounts to subsidisation of working mothers, in the form of six months’ free time, by the rest of the population. I had a go at unpicking the welfare implications a couple of years ago (and Paul Frijters before that), and this seems an apt moment to review the issues briefly. (Continued)

On Sunday I wrote: "It’s never been easier to check quotations". It’s time for an update.

While checking some of my own words on Monday, I discovered that many of my old blog posts had been attributed to Danger Mouse and Admin. A part of my online identity had been sucked down the memory hole.

While it’s easier than ever to check quotes from well known figures like John F Kennedy, Groucho Marx or Winston Churchill, it can be surprisingly difficult to check quotes from bloggers. As John Quiggin notes, some bloggers try to fend off criticism by stealthily correcting their mistakes. And some blogs just disappear.

Online content is more ephemeral than paper and ink. So an interesting question whether a shift away from physical texts to online texts will make checking some sources more difficult.

(Continued)

The Great Troppo Migration of 2010 continues to be approximately 10,000 times more stressful than planned.

The latest episode of madness was an attempt to more fully bring across user details from the previous database.
(Continued)

It’s always nice to get a name for something that is rummaging round in one’s mind.  Autoantonymy has – believe it or not been doing that in my tiny brain for many years.  So I’m greatful to the great Three Quarks website for giving me the word (and grateful to Ingolf for telling us all about Three Quarks many moons ago).

As explained on the site:

Antonyms, of course, are pairs of words that have meanings opposite to each other. Autoantonyms, in turn, are single words thatthemselves can mean either one thing or its opposite. This can happen either by convergence –e.g., the English verb ‘to cleave’ comes from two separate but similar Anglo-Saxon verbs, and today can mean either ‘to separate’ or ‘to latch on’– or it can happen through a cleavage, so to speak, within a single lexical item– thus ‘to dust’ means either to remove the dust from something or to cover something, perhaps that very thing, with dust or a dust-like substance. You might think that autoantonyms of the latter sort are rare birds in the dictionary, but in fact they are all over the place, particularly when the opposition between motion and rest is in question. Thus the adjective ‘fast’ means both ‘swift with respect to motion’ and ‘bolted down’, i.e., ‘motionless’. A little reflection will also convince you that most prepositions are capable of autoantonymy. This in fact may have happened to you already: when confronted by a well-intentioned fund-raiser in the street, who tells you that she is raising money ‘for breast cancer’, does a little part of you not wish to reply: ‘Sorry, no, I’m against breast cancer’?

The thing with a lot of the autoantonyms in the article is that they typically do not lead to ambiguity or problems in conveying meanings because context and/or the form of the sentence makes it clear what meaning is intended.  To cleave a marriage in two and for one partner to cleave to the other are opposites in meaning using the same word, but in each case we know what is meant.

The autoantonym that’s always bugged me (since we’re already in the bowels of pedantry here perhaps I should say autoantonymic clause!) is the expression “if not”.  When this expression is used it is generally the case that it could mean either what was intended, or its opposite (here again, pedantry leads me to say that the expression ‘opposite’ is being used slightly loosely to mean not ‘the negation of the proposition’ but ‘the assertion of a proposition at direct odds with the stated proposition).Anyway, consider the statement:

He was a good player, if not a virtuoso.

Here the expression ‘if not’ could either intensify ‘a good player’: “He was a good player, so much so that he might even be called a virtuoso”. By contrast it could signify the downplaying of the description as a good player: ”He was a good player, even if you couldn’t say he was a virtuoso”.

I guess with ‘pure autoantonyms’ like that it’s a case of “we report, you decide”.