The Sydney Morning Herald's article on the Sea-Eagles trying to sign Willie Mason has fallen to cost cutting journalism and now the server just returns a meta-comment which saves on journalist labor the and reader's precious time: Forbidden You don't have permission to access...
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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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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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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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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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Like many of you I saw this on facebook: Graham Young is fighting attempts to expel him from the Liberal Party this Sunday. This is Graham's article on Ambit Gambit from July describing the situation and why the party is seeking to throw him out. I hope Graham gets the result...
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I remember as a young bloke reading an ad for a Holden FJ that was nearby for $3,000. I rang the seller and then jumped in the car to look at it. Unfortunately even back then three grand only bought you a rustbucket FJ that is up on blocks. I ended up buying a 1962 EJ Holden i...
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Bryan Palmer writes : This gives an average of 58.25 for Labor and 41.75 per cent for the Coalition. Plug these numbers into the election calculator and see what you get. A pie chart of the "see what you get" with a uniform national 11% swing (normal caveats etc): The red area...
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There is speculation building that Holden is gearing up to full production in order to export the Ute to the United States. Holden Ute - Pontiac G8 Ute photochop by Aych Es Vee The traditional Ute platform in the US has been the Chevrolet El Camino, but it appears that the Ute...
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Where The Engineers Are looks at engineering in the United States, India and China under globalisation and the role economics, commerce and education have in the development of engineers. The paper discovered that the US and India were pumping out about the same number of Engi...
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The American innovation on English Constitutionalism was that there is fundamental law - expressed in the constitution - that cannot be ignored by the executive and cannot be statutorily pasted over by the legislative. The Americans called them natural rights and entrenched th...
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The Parliamentary Library released a research paper which divides numerous economic trends up by Governments from Whitlam to Howard . It turns out party hats don't work so well in analysing these trends. This is an interesting graph with a nice trend. Economic policy makers ov...
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With the national government digging its selective anti-federalist paws into the Tasmanian health system it might be a good time to look at the nationalist (as opposed to federalist) structure of government. This usually takes the form of state abolition ; where the states are...
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This is Andrew Bartlett's speech in the Senate upon the second reading of the Migration Amendment (Detention Arrangements) 2005 bill. The amendment itself is littered with the appearance of oversight and consistent process but none of it is compellable and the process can be h...
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Those crazy westralians. Telling us t'othersiders we would starve without them . Plains of our pastures boundless, Seas of our rainbow'd pearl, Destiny is your breezes Liberty's flag unfurl! That they supported the eastern car manufacturing with tariffs on coal and iron ore! T...
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That graph is from the 2001 census . One of the problems in Australian politics is that everything is viewed from the national level. From Imagining Australia : If our Indigenous people comprised one tenth rather than one fiftieth of the population there would be widespread ou...
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California contributes approximately 14% of of the US GDP. If it were a nation its economy would rank just behind China's and Italy's for size. New South Wales contributes 33.1% of Australian GDP. Victoria is next with 24.2%, Queensland with 18.9% and Western Australia with 12...
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There has been a media and blogger gotcha moment when Nelson mentioned that armed intervention in Iraq was related to securing energy supplies. We know that the Carter Doctrine from 1980 stated clearly that the US would use military might in the Gulf region if American nationa...
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The graph is from the ABS' population statistics from June 2006 . Queensland and Tasmania are the only ones that people are migrating too on a positive basis and Tasmania barely so. The migration to Queensland is mainly Novacumbrians where 289,000 moved to Queensland between 2...
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Holden reports a 120 million loss . Ouch: Despite the Commodore maintaining its position as the number one selling vehicle down under in 2006, total revenues were down 7.8% over the period, which meant that Holden ended up with a substantial $123.7 million loss. That is about...
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The Australian Democrats, when faced with an argument in a Senate debate, which they think has merit, they decide to support it [pdf] . Senator Bartlett (Queensland) (6.46 p.m.) - I thought I should make a few short comments to indicate support for the Labor amendment. Senator...
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The War of Jenkin's Ear between Britain and Spain has a bizarre origin. Robert Jenkin's ship was boarded by the Spanish to determine if he was complying with the Treaty of Seville. Jenkin's claimed the Spanish cut his ear off - he pickled it, and took it to Parliament. War was...
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Over the fold, a screenshot of Windows' Vista advanced search interface. What the hell were they thinking? It is a confused and cluttered mess. Unfortunately I am trapped on the Windows platform for the moment due to commercial reasons. The best pairing of hardware and softwar...
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The military coup which suspended the Thai constitution occurred in September 2006 - which is eight months ago now. Since then Thailand has been run by a military junta that is operating under a state of emergency. Australia signed a Free Trade Agreement with Thailand in Janua...
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I was in Washington DC yesterday renewing my passport. The US is still imperial, so to comply with Australian metric standards I had to order A4 paper and the photos took two goes before they were within the bounds of the 'biometric' software reader. But the passport is just a...
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Steven Pearlstein has written an article in the WaPo [reg] arguing that the oil companies in the US require a nationalised competitor in order to make the market, especially refineries and trading desks, efficient. He writes: Standard's first order of business would be to expa...
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Via the Tele : A FRIDGE, underwear and a Darth Vader voice distorter were some of the items bought by Darwin's lord mayor using stolen council funds, a court was told today. Darwin's Lord Mayor Peter Adamson, 46, is facing four charges, including stealing, obtaining property b...
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Via MeFi . This gave me a good laugh, someone is trying to describe Australian politics to an American audience: It's all perfectly simple. Australia's ruling conservative party is called the Liberal Party. The opposing, allegedly more liberal party is called the Labor Party (...
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IANAE but in June last year there was a spate of discussion over productivity and real wages having a one to one correlation. Nicholas Gruen wrote in a comment to his article Economic Nonsense : But in the long run, you expect to see income trending towards productivity. Peopl...
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Paul Kelly is on the button, he tells us : The policy and strategic flaws of the Howard Government have been exposed this week with the appointment by ALP leader Kevin Rudd of Australian National University economics professor Ross Garnaut to produce Australias version of the...
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One of my favourite quotes from World War I is John 'Jack' Wright, a flight commander with 4 Squadron Australian Flying Corps [AFC]. Like many of the AFC pilots and servicemen he came from the Lighthorse after having served in the Middle East. He missed Gallipoli as by the tim...
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From a recent Michael Kirby speech [pdf] : For example, our Constitution is too rigid. It is one of the most difficult in the world to amend. This feature of Australian legal arrangements can sometimes protect us from the risk of mistakes, as in the Communism referendum of 195...
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In 1806, the Bowman's of Richmond, NSW flew a flag to celebrate the English victory at Trafalgar. The amazing thing about this was, the Bowman flag looks very similar to the modern coat of arms. It has a Kangaroo and Emu holding up a shield adorned with heraldry. Kangaroos hav...
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I argued in a prior post that a directly elected and separate executive is a more democratic form of governance. Not content with that, over at SSR we developed a gubernatorial constitution for NSW. This constitution is nothing new. It contains concepts and existing constituti...
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One thing everyone can agree on: people, media and politicians: is that elections are important. Democracy is the moral under-pinning of our political system. I remember watching the HBO documentary on Diebold and when it was shown that the electronic voting machines could be...
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Elections are surprisingly poor determinants on whether a Prime Minister will change in the federal government. The following graph has a post-1942 pie chart of Prime Ministers removed by general election (orange) vs those removed by just about everything else (maroon); includ...
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This week saw three curious events in Australian foreign policy. First, the Prime Minister's attack on a US Presidential candidate, the release of allegations against David Hicks, and a letter from the US Department of Defense stating that the F22 Raptor will not be made for e...
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Deinococcus radiodurans is an amazing bacteria . It can happily live in the waste tanks of nuclear reactors. Bacteria is a brutally simple and resilient form of life. It can survive vacuum, cold, heat, radiation, pressure: you name it, a bacteria has evolved to solve that envi...
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It looks like they have cracked the US market such they are becoming a regular exporter into it. The Chicago Motor Show debuted the VE Commodore as the Pontiac G8 . The photo below shows Bob Lutz introducing the car to the American motor press. The pre-show excitement was quit...
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The thesis for Chalmers Johnson's book, Nemesis , is that democracy and empire are incompatible. A nation must choose between one or other as the two cannot co-exist. He writes: Over any lengthy period of time, successful imperialism requires that a domestic republic or a dome...
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Cesare Beccaria 's reasoned argument against torture in 1764: A cruelty consecrated among most nations by custom is the torture of the accused during his trial, on the pretext of compelling him to confess his crime, of clearing up contradictions in his statements, of discoveri...
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HBO just aired Alexandra Pelosi's Friends of God . Given that the maker of the documentary is the daughter of the current Speaker of the House, it could be expected that the documentary would be politically charged - but like any good documentary maker there are no judgements:...
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The decision to ban the Australian flag and items bearing its likeness is a curious one. It is apparently for Sydney and only on the 25th of January. Presumably organisers of the Big Day Out have determined this is an efficient 'politically incorrect' method to determine the l...
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Allan Gyngell and Michael Wesley write in Making Australian Foreign Policy : Changes in foreign policy direction are rare but important. The most significant postwar changes in the focus of Australian foreign policy came with the election in 1972 of the Whitlam Government, whi...
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Outside of the arguments of political parties, ideologies, policies etc; government is predominantly an administrative structure. We would expect government to be relatively fluid as it changes in size, shape, boundaries and structures in order to remain at maximum administrat...
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Sun Microsystems is open-sourcing Java under the GPLv2 license . Naturally this made Richard Stallman very happy who was recently quoted as saying: It'll be very good that the Java trap won't exist any more. It will be a thing of the past. I have spent the majority of the last...
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The [US] National Venture Capital Association released a study titled: American Made. The impact of immigrant entrepreneurs and professional on US Competitiveness [PDF] . The report studied venture capital backed public and private businesses consequently it does not cover imm...
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In the late 1500s England was rising as a maritime nation. It was beginning to dominate the important technologies of cartography and longitudinal calculation. In 1598 Edward Wright produced the most accurate map the world had seen. Apart from using the new technology of Merca...
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The December 1st Senate Hansard had an interesting exchange during the debate over the Independent Contractors amendment to the behemoth Workchoices legislation. First Andrew Murray ; As the chamber knows, various state legislatures have attempted to grapple with this but at t...
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The British Empire League was a bunch of Australians in the early 20thC who wanted imperialism to prevail rather than nationalism in Australia. The prominent politician of the time, Alfred Deakin, was the great compromiser and saw no difference between being Australian and a B...
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Another blogger was arrested in Egypt for being critical of the government ; Rami Siyam, who blogs under the name of Ayyoub, was detained along with three friends after leaving the house of a fellow blogger late at night. ... No reasons have been given for Mr Siyam's detention...
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In Alexander's time the amphitheatre was a sign of Macedonian power. Especially for the new and conquered cities in modern-day Turkey. The amphitheatre combined the Macedonian dominance of technologies such as architecture, construction, science, art, culture and wealth. The R...
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A while ago I categorised the referendums at the federal level to see what voters were rejecting. It turns out it was centralisation; or the constitutional increase of power to the Commonwealth Government. Of the twenty-seven referendums for increased centralisation only three...
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Senator Alan Eggleston has some interesting comments on the Western Australian boom with its economic and foreign policy implications . The Westralians have enjoyed the pressure that a booming China and India have put on commodity prices. Eggleston opens with an anecdote on th...
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America was in the grips of civic excitement last night; televisions, websites, phones - all running hot. A friend of mine who runs a prominent political website spent his day watching the loads on the webservers increase as the east coast Americans left work, and the west coa...
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There are two possible dominant political entities in liberal democracy, the individual and the state. Progressivism, republicanism, liberalism and libertarianism see the individual as the dominant entity whereas conservatism and nationalism sees the state as the dominant enti...
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I am reading David Kuo's book, Tempting Faith . It is an entertaining read. Kuo is up and down like a dunny seat - running from radicalisation to depression to radicalisation again and then back to depression - but he is a good writer. It is also rare in that it is one of the...
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There was an interesting debate in the Senate on October 16th between Andrew Murray, Chris Evans and Eric Abetz. It pretty much represents all that was good and bad with the Senate. Andrew Murray argued for discrete budgeting, line by line, in parliamentary entitlements which...
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One of the curious aspects of an open economy is that economic liberty is synonymous with economic integration. In this respect immigrants have taken to Australia with a will and make up a significant proportion of our productive output. According to the 2003/2004 Tax statisti...
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Given the discussion on liberty and liberalism below , it might be a good time to revisit what Australian Republicanism is. Unfortunately most current perceptions of republicanism have been defined by the 'minimal' campaign run before the 1999 referendum which ended up promoti...
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A mate of mine made this tongue in cheek comment the other day to a Canadian fellow; Why do you hate America so much that you decided to be born somewhere else? Which is an appeal to the absurd in nationalism and the arbitrary nature with which it deals with individuals, citiz...
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In 1963 the Australian Government ordered the F111 at the then astronomical cost of $112 million with the final cost a decade later being 324 million. It has been the best bang for the buck purchase Australian has made in defence. Like all good deterrents it will be retired wi...
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The shelves in American bookstores relating to politics over the last few years have become dominated by titles such "How to kill a liberal and get away with it", or "How to dice a conservative and serve them for dinner without wasting pepper". I often think when faced with al...
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