It has been an interesting few months in Europe. The Greeks have just had their first round of parliamentary elections and need at least another round before a government can be formed. The French have just elected a new president on an anti-austerity platform, making it a cle...
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I wonder how much, if any of our aid budget is going into stuff like this . . (video over fold): http://youtu.be/dWdy_BmleJ0 .
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Well folks, the World Chess Title is being decided right now. I didn't want to bug you as the players played the first twelve games - each taking several hours. The score after those games is 6 Anand (Reigning world champion) and 6 Gefland (Challenger). It hasn't been the best...
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On all recent polls, it appears that the Coalition is still unbeatable. But Newspoll suggests that Abbott’s leadership of the Liberal party is viewed with suspicion by the electorate – for good reasons. First, Abbott has still to reveal how he is going to close the budget blac...
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Today's column is pretty self-explanatory. I would have liked to say a fair bit more about the system and how it works, but there's a haiku like pleasure in getting it down to 800 words (OK well, that's not haiku, but you get my meaning). Here it is: I FIRST came upon the rema...
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http://youtu.be/FF-tKLISfPE Steve is all the rage. Run your company like Steve Jobs. Do nuclear physics like Einstein. I doubt anyone should try to run their company like Steve Jobs. But that doesn't stop it being interesting to listen to things he says. In any event, I ran in...
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http://youtu.be/lU-Uwl7AZ7o
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E-gad it's hard to keep those heterodox ideas from popping out - especially if they're the plainest commonsense. Brad Delong quotes Matthew Yglesias: Mitt Romney on Fiscal Policy : The GOP candidate sounds like Paul Krugman except without the qualifications about the zero lowe...
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[caption id="attachment_19919" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Bob Collins"] [/caption] I had a bit of a cyber-chinwag on Twitter this morning with a couple of other legal academics about the rather obscure topic of the torts of maintenance and champerty. Melissa Casta...
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Just as almost anyone has a near veto power in a bureaucracy even if they don't have much power, so the street theatre of outrage can have a powerful effect on politics even if the majority of people think that the minority putting on some show are way out of line. When things...
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Seems like an important paper - which I've not read yet. Trustworthy by Convention, By: M. Bigoni, S. Bortolotti, M. Casari, D. Gambetta, URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:bol:bodewp:wp827&r=evo Social life offers innumerable instances in which trust relations involve multiple...
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Having promised myself that I'd buy a Mac when they brought out a netbook sized MacBook Air, I did just that about nine months ago. I got forced out of Macdom many yearsafter I began on a Mac in 1986 I've been meaning to write a review of my experience FWIW but haven't got rou...
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http://youtu.be/9fXuREZu_BQ Well humans are still competitive - for now.
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[caption id="attachment_19887" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Craig Thomson addresses Parliament (note Andrew Wilkie's expression)"] [/caption] More often than not these days, even day-to-day political "footie commentary" is purveyed with greater depth and perceptiven...
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If Don McLean could write a smash hit about the death of Buddy Holly , I can at least do a blog post about the death this morning of Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees. The Bee Gees were hardly the most fashionable of pop groups among the cool kids, either at the time or now. But I re...
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Access to justice should be a big issue in Australia, as my Introduction to Public Law class explored yesterday in the context of discussing administrative law merits review.As commenter wilful observed on my last post about lawyers : I can reflect on my sister’s recent experi...
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There is quite a bit of current public controversy over refugees indefinitely held in immigration detention as a result of adverse ASIO security assessments which they cannot effectively challenge. Secret evidence provisions in ASIO regulations mean they can be denied all know...
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With low unemployment, low inflation and 20 straight years of economic growth, the Sydney Morning Herald's Jessica Irvine is astounded at how so many Australians are carrying on as if they live in a debt-wracked European basket case. Younger Australians have never seen a reces...
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[caption id="attachment_19809" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Rose Ashton-Weir and her mum"] [/caption] The twitterverse erupted in response to this story in yesterday's papers about a student suing her former school Geelong Grammar for compensation, saying that it pr...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKkgcKoPa9I&feature=channel&list=UL I've been having to go further and further in the world to get anyone to listen to me. But in any event, I enjoyed this breakfast radio interview in Regina Saskatchewan.
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http://youtu.be/TuIbEJz23uY I've often thought that in politics, the signature of honesty is not lack of dishonesty - an impossibility in party politics - but a certain discomfort with the the lies you have to tell. I'm giving Joe the benefit of the doubt on this one. And good...
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I'm doing a fortnightly column for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald and here is the first column . Of course the thing that's missing from the column is how I think they should have handled fiscal policy - which would have involved not just more straightforward and confid...
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This year my accountant got sent accounts which as far as I could see involved writing the totals of a spreadsheet into the tax return and pressing 'send'. OK, it might have been a bit more than that, I don't really know, but what bugs me is that the documents she got indicate...
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Pseudonymous blogging lawyer Private Law Tutor confesses her occasional feelings of "shame" at being a lawyer: I’ve thought and talked and written about the deep discomfort that ebbs and flows in me with my work. Well, not my work as such, but the work that I do. The industry...
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In a piece for the Sunday Age , Chris Berg says progressives think conservatives are heartless because they "don't realise the right has a different and legitimate moral framework." Perhaps so, but what about libertarians ? Berg draws on Jonathan Haidt 's moral foundations res...
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I just happened upon this story in which Mike Rann who served SA as Premier for about a decade has been given a driver, an office and staff in a policy which provides such things to Premiers who have served for longer than four years. Other than the car - I don't know what's w...
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In a recent book on social justice , former Labor politician Gary Johns argues for "a major reconsideration of social justice as a rationale for the welfare state". In his essay 'When too much social justice is never enough' Johns suggests that social justice is primarily abou...
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Having recently congratulated John Quiggin on his many translations of his Zombie book, I was informed by a Korean today that the Government 2.0 Taskforce was translated into Korean here . Which, since it was written with a wider set of circumstances than just those appertaini...
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After I posted a comment on Ken's recent post about swimmer Nick D'Arcy and his decision to file a debtor's petition in bankruptcy, he graciously invited me to contribute a post if I am insistent on disagreeing with his take. Ken argues that there is something that doesn't see...
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Here's a picture of the moon and the sun juxtaposed. They cycle between being the same size in our heavens and being a bit bigger or smaller than each other. It's spooky. Just the right size to deliver a total eclipse, or an annular one, depending on how they are feeling at th...
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Want to save time and identify the best in Australian blogosphere writing? See these features built into the recently re-designed Troppo front page. If you can't find several excellent articles every day of the week among that lot, you're very hard to please: "Blog reading sel...
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[caption id="attachment_19655" align="alignright" class="pull alignright" width="262" caption="Swimmer Simon Cowley"] [/caption] There's been lots of media coverage of the washup of swimmer Nick D'Arcy's bashing of fellow swimmer Simon Cowley in a bar some 4 years ago. Underst...
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e1xvyTdBZI Readers as geriatric as me will probably remember British comedian Benny Hill's famous spoof song Ernie (He drove the fastest milk cart in the west). It topped the UK Singles Chart in 1971, reaching the Christmas number one spot, and...
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I offered this comment in a LinkedIn discussion, and thought I might 'put it out there' as my daughter says. In the process I edited and played around with it a little. One of the things that the last few years have shown I think is that rank cynicism plays much worse for the...
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First it was David Brooks' Harold and Erica . Now it's the Obama campaign's Julia . Harold, Erica and Julia are all fictitious characters born into a perpetual present. They live and grow old in a world that doesn't change. As Michael Shear at the New York Times writes : At ag...
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Your editorial ( Politics of envy threatens our economy and ethos , 2 May) claims that “Research by the National Centre for Social and Economic Modelling has shown that all income levels prospered in the Howard years and that under the Rudd-Gillard governments the gap between...
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At the Lowy Interpreter Sam Roggeveen speculates about the possibility of a company (particularly Apple) buying a country. There has been at least on fictional treatment of a corporation taking over a country in John Brunner's wonderful 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar . It is bas...
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A while back I blogged about the spate of mandated product information when one buys medicine. I just got a scrip from the chemist with a new format consumer information in it and I'm afraid I'm pretty pissed off with what an organised piece of stupidity it really is. Previous...
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I'm not much of a fan of giving to wealthy causes. Like private schools for the well healed. I was asked to attend an interview to see if I'd go on the Council of my daughter's private school - which I said I would. I was then asked if I was Jewish (it's an Anglican School) an...
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Interest rates in Australia have just been reduced by 0.5% in the hope that this will stimulate the economy. Will it work? Uncertain. But will politicians say it will work in the coming federal budget? Almost undoubtedly. Perhaps displays of optimism are not such a bad thing,...
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Measuring the Effects of the 1991 Federal Alcohol Tax Increase , Philip J. Cook and Christine Piette Durrance "[A tax induced increase of 6 percent in alcohol prices] resulted in a reduction of 4.7 percent in injury deaths nationwide." ecause consumers reduce alcohol consumpti...
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Though our fiscal stimulus was exemplary (except by the standards of The Australian Newspaper which requires 20,000 investments to all go off without a hitch), there was one area where I argued at the time , that could have been improved. For reasons that are a tad mysterious...
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Debt Overhangs: Past and Present by Carmen M. Reinhart, Vincent R. Reinhart, Kenneth S. Rogoff Abstract: We identify the major public debt overhang episodes in the advanced economies since the early 1800s, characterized by public debt to GDP levels exceeding 90% for at least f...
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