What if we held an Australian broadband crisis and nobody came? That's pretty much what happened in Australian broadband policy over the decade to 2025. Governments, forecasters and the media can all learn lessons from this episode. Illustration: Fibre optic cable in a Telstra...
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The Gregorian revolution gave rise to a form of organisation that was gradually stamped out all over the Western world and then to its followers. Constitutional monarchy: A pyramid with a chief executive at the top with the rest of the pyramid made up of checks and balances on...
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Posted in Philosophy, Innovation, Best From Elsewhere, Ethics, Cultural Critique, Death and taxes, Bullshit, Employment, Sortition and citizens’ juries, Isegoria, Coronavirus crisis, Criminal law
I was reading some arguments by Bettina Arndt recently about women dominating the legal profession, especially in the Family Law sphere, so I thought I would the check the facts. This is my modus operandi . Read polar views on an issue (I also consult OurWatch and White Ribbon...
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If scientific fraud represents five per cent of scientific papers, surely we should expect at least as much philosophic fraud. But how can we detect philosophy's fraudsters? Here's a first attempt at some rules of thumb. This is a long post. So here's the short version: this p...
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As the US presidential election count continues, it becomes increasingly likely that Donald Trump will win. It appears that the majority of Americans believe that Trump is more trustworthy than Kamala Harris on economic issues, and they say that the economy is their principal...
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The possibility of one or more Very Fast Train (VFT) lines for Australia has been debated for more than 40 years, most often being treated as a complete joke. However, perhaps that's about to change. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has long been a supporter of VFT transport fo...
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There’s a strong gerontocratic tinge to US politics of late — the youngest of Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Elizabeth Warren and Mitch McConnel is Chuck at 73. Many a theory has been propounded to explain this phenomenon, but a simple on...
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As I argued in a recent article, the election of Donald Trump as President would be disastrous for climate change compared with the current Democrat administration of President Biden. The situation is quite different in Australia. The election of a Coalition government federal...
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Cameron Murray’s The Great Housing Hijack is self-recommending. You certainly don’t need a review of any sort to tell you to go read it if you have any interest in the peculiar case of the housing market. Nevertheless, here I supply my own review of sorts and extrapolate on wh...
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As you can see we've adopted a new Wordpress theme. Many thanks to our web guru Tony Sarhanis. What do you think? I really like it, although I have one reservation. You can't scroll down the main posts column until the cursor gets to the bottom of the comments column. I suspec...
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Most people throughout the world (except dedicated right wing American Republicans) are contemplating with horror the very real possibility of Donald Trump being re-elected as American President next week. I share that horror, but not to the rather extreme extent being asserte...
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David Tiley was one of the early generation of bloggers in Australia, starting in 2003, approximately the same time as I started. I first met him at a blogging meet-up in St Kilda (where David lived) in about 2005. Blogging was much more social in those days, and there were fr...
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The common view from politicians and so-called experts is that minority government is dreadful. I don't agree. Nor, it seems, does former Rudd and Gillard ministerial advisor Sean Kelly. In an article in today's Age newspaper, Kelly says: [caption id="attachment_37261" align="...
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A few years ago I read a book by the iconic Australian author Helen Garner titled "House of Grief". It dealt with the trial and conviction of a man named Robert Farquharson for the murder of his three young sons Jai (age 11), Bailey (age 7) and Tyler (age 3) on Fathers' Day in...
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The federal Coalition's adoption of a policy involving government-owned construction of 7 nuclear power plants around Australia has raised an argument that most people thought was over 30 years ago or more. Labor and the Greens are opposed to it, as are several state Liberal P...
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As longstanding readers will know, I was one of the founders of Troppo along with Nicholas Gruen and several others including Mark Bahnisch and Don Arthur. The latter two moved on to other things (Don was a research at the Federal Parliamentary Library last time I heard, a rol...
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(Not to mention Overton’s Elephant and Overton's Mouse) With inflation stuck at 4%, what a terrible problem that it will probably take a deliberately engineered recession to get it back into target. If only the optimal rate of inflation were 4%. Oh wait … No-one can be sure wh...
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I recently published this musing in my Substack newsletter. And coming across a further free kick from the policy world — something that would have negative costs and do a lot of good — I thought I'd publish both. Think of this as continuing the series begun over a decade ago...
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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="507"] A young Mondrian in 1908 channels an old Monet but is really thinking “I wonder if a bunch of rectangles on canvas would sell? If it did it could solve a lot of problems, perhaps not for everyone, but certainly for me.”[/caption] O...
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Adolf never had much time for planet sensible. Here he is after the Reichstag fire with fellow traveller Sefton Delmer who was Berlin correspondent for the "Daily Express" from 1928 to 1933, To the left of Hitler: August Wilhelm of Prussia. In the middle of the picture, half h...
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Right at the outset of this conflict, I worried that Israel was overestimating the strength of its hand. In the US, the Israel lobby’s lobbying has been as successful as the NRA’s lobbying. And it follows a similar strategy — zero tolerance. It holds a very tough line and then...
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Amid Australia's justified concern over male violence against women, it seems worth keeping in mind our achievements. Femicide, in particular, has more than halved in the past three decades. Prologue 1 : Violence against women is a bad thing, and it's still bad even when, as t...
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https://youtube.com/shorts/_XXLgZ8rYew?si=i8EWpLRcHJ3-rpjF I recently took my son to the stage play of Yes, Prime Minister. … The decades have made a huge difference in the sensibility of the new production … . The series ran through most of the 1980s, a period that contained...
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Just a decade ago, Australian labour was easy to find and infrastructure projects were often no-brainers. Now our economic times seem to have changed, resources are constantly sucked up – and policymakers may need to adjust to a new set of rules. The world is always changing,...
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