The latest figures on intimate partner femicide show much of a recent rise in men killing women has now been reversed, at least temporarily. Prologue : Violence against women is a bad thing, and it’s still bad even when, as the article below points out, it used to be far worse...
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No-one really knows the most cost-effective treatments for mental ill-health. But among the most promising options right now: take the dog for a walk. Illustration: A cost-effective mental resource takes a break from promoting healthy exercise and lifting spirits ... Meet Otis...
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Most credible researchers believe immigration affects house prices. The questions are: how much, and at what cost? This post aims to establish some baseline facts on the basis of which sensible arguments can be made about immigration and housing. Key points: Academic research...
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Advice for homebuyers and citizens: home-deductibility and housing guarantee schemes both deserve your derisive laughter, whoever backs them. Introductory note: Things move fast in the race to sway the aspiring Australian homebuyer. A few minutes after publishing the first ver...
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Donald Trump is still trying to slash his nation's trade deficit. Australians may recognise this task: we tackled it in the late 1980s, failed, and found that it mattered less than we thought. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7st2oG5AwU?si=7N7nfVCxlmkOcf7D] Video: Don...
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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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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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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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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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Many of us still venerate books. The evidence says they are not very good at what is supposed to be their primary job: putting new ideas in our heads. We are slowing developing new ways to achieve this old aim. Many of us own thousands of these. They cost too much, too many ha...
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Scott Morrison's "secret powers" are being heralded in much of the media as proof that he was up to no good. The simpler explanation is that on governance issues, he was often just not much good. "No worries, mate; I'm just nominating us both for Australia's official list of b...
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Labor's May 2022 federal election win seems to confirm the approach taken by US political analyst David Shor. The 1 in 20: Paul Fletcher will become the sole remaining Liberal member in the 20 federal seats with the highest number of people holding postgraduate degrees. I don'...
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Looking at Australian politics right now, one thing stands out: the federal ALP has become a little Shorist. That seems like a good idea. The federal ALP has gone a bit Shorist. I don't know how long it will last, or whether it's even a conscious strategy. But it's definitely...
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The international reaction to Russia's invasion of Ukraine is delivering China a message: its current approach to the world won't keep working much longer. Does that title above seem odd? Surely it's Russia that's losing in Ukraine – in May of 2022, anyway. China hasn't been d...
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The twin threats of "hidden persuasion" and artificial intelligence have now convinced most of us that Google and its ilk are almost uniquely powerful. These threats are overrated. The digital giants can do less than we fear – and we risk regulating them where we should not. 1...
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We have a broken process for evaluating costly government investments. The evolving plan for an underground railway through Melbourne's middle suburbs reminds us that we need something better. The Victoria government is currently in the early stages of building what would like...
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One of economics’ most famous papers – the 1994 minimum wage study by David Card and Alan Krueger – has just won David Card (pictured) half of a Nobel Prize in Economics. The overall reasons for Card's award are well explored here and here and here , and by Card himself here ....
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[caption id="attachment_35117" align="alignleft" width="1024"] Melbourne Suburban Rail Link preliminary route[/caption] I spent some time last year planning a piece for a commercial media client about the Melbourne Suburban Rail Loop, a planned underground rail tunnel through...
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News Corp is telling us what Google should really pay for linking to its sites. It's telling us in code – HTML code. And the answer is ... $0.00. What is an Internet link worth to the linker? For most of the Internet's life, this question has been pointless. On the Internet, l...
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The legislated "bargaining" process between Google and News Corp is unmoored from reality. Its "final offer arbitration" is unsuited to the task. [caption id="attachment_34634" align="alignleft" width="300"] He's loaded the gun. (Photo provided by Eva Rinaldi on Flickr; CC BY-...
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We may be headed for a world of endless moral bubbles, where targets for outrage can be identified and turned into bogeymen in record time, with record audiences. It would be QAnon, but for anything you can think of and some stuff you can't. Author's note: What follows is spec...
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Note: This post was original published on 6 July 2015; I've updated it several times because both parties keep revisiting a decentralisation agenda. [getty src="587183652" width="509" height="339"] Once again we're hearing the argument that Australia would be a much better pla...
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Note: Article expanded on 24 April and again on 27 April. The middle now has more meat. So you can read it again! As Paul Frijters has recently said on this site, many countries will soon ease their restrictions on social isolation. As Paul has been pointing out , we pay a hig...
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Here's a potentially unpopular proposition: The bulk of government economic action over the next few months should be directed to keeping businesses alive. Specifically, we need to keep afloat the many businesses with coronavirus-related short-term cash-flow problems. The corr...
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The Financial Services Royal Commission is in theory a general inquiry into the financial system. In practice, however, something else is on trial: Australian regulatory systems. As I set out in my latest column for The CEO Magazine , many of our regulators, including ASIC, AU...
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[caption id="attachment_31852" align="alignleft" width="800"] Actual picture of the Universal Basic Income idea[/caption] In my latest column for The CEO Magazine I take aim at the idea of universal basic income (UBI). The column uses the insights of the always terrific Peter...
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There seem to be more and more claims that "hate speech" should not be entitled to the normal privileges of free speech. To my surprise, one of them is George Lakoff - famed cognitive scientist, philosopher and metaphor expert. Here’s the admirably clear Lakoff writing a blog...
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My latest column for The CEO Magazine looks at the bank regulator's latest enthusiasm: changing banks' cultures. APRA is now doing what the Dutch have done for several years now: bring in a team of organisational psychologists to work out what drives behaviours within a bank,...
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Senator Nick Xenophon, a man of great integrity, has reportedly struck a deal with the government over media reform. One aspect of it, as reported by The West Australian , is that the the government will subsidise 200 journalism scholarships of up to $40,000 a year. (I have no...
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[caption id="attachment_31194" align="alignleft" width="640"] Artist's incorrect impression, from the film "Minority Report". In the real future, these autonomous cars would be travelling much closer together, and there would be more of them.[/caption] This month's print and o...
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[caption id="attachment_31109" align="alignleft" width="708"] Hat tip: Richard Halcomb[/caption] Barnaby Joyce is in the news a bit right now . Coincidentally, I wrote an assessment of his abilities in a column for The CEO Magazine way back on 31 July, before the section 44 sc...
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"Research has shown that cultures with greater gender equity have larger sex differences when it comes to job preferences, because in these societies, people are free to choose their occupations based on what they enjoy." A month ago, a Google employee wrote a memo about his t...
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[caption id="attachment_31072" align="alignleft" width="640"] Smurfing, sans cuckoos ...[/caption] There's a weird sort of dissonance in today's Australian Financial Review. On the front page, CBA CEO Ian Narev argues that CBA culture is "strong". Meanwhile, a detailed Neil Ch...
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[caption id="attachment_30982" align="alignleft" width="600"] The massed battalions of The Oz were quickly brought up to the front[/caption] Many hundreds of hours ago now, our foreign affairs community and parts of our media were consumed by the North Korean ICBM emergency. H...
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You've heard it a million times: in developed nations, populations are ageing. But what does that mean? At the extremes, it could mean either of two quite different things. It could mean a host of frail elderly people stuck in nursing homes for 20 years, or it could mean a bun...
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https://youtu.be/i772m4UdadE?t=32s Watch as right-wing commentators Tucker Carlson and Ralph Peters go to war over who's defending American values. Carlson suggests making common cause with Vladimir Putin; Peters says Carlson sounds like Charles Lindbergh defending Hitler in 1...
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Just had to put this up here, because it's wonderful: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZnBNuqqz5g[/embed] These people were waiting for a Green Day concert when Bohemian Rhapsody started playing over the speakers ...
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My latest column at The CEO Magazine asks whether Australia's 3.3 per cent minimum wage increase will cause any job losses . It focuses on a few pieces of research, including a new study of Seattle's minimum wage hike, older work by ALP frontbencher Andrew Leigh, and one of ec...
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Until yesterday I had never heard of Trevor Phillips. He is a former chairman of the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which means he was in charge of enforcing British anti-discrimination laws in the Blair years. The documentary below is one of the more intere...
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[getty src="622166468" width="594" height="396"] What are the effects of having a US president who is diminished in stature and yet not facing imminent job loss? I try to think this through in my latest column for The CEO Magazine . One likely result: less stability in US fore...
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[getty src="171148424" width="498" height="344"] My column last week for The CEO Magazine reiterates a point made previously at Troppo : the weight of research shows decisively that high marginal tax rates have little effect on the efforts of most high-income earners. Sample q...
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In the comments section of my earlier post about hatred of the banks , John Walker (no relation) asked: If the big four did pass on the tax to their customers, do you think the ‘non big four’ banks, building societies etc would grab the chance to be more competitive or grab th...
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Via Andrew Gelman's site , here's a TED talk by US philanthropist Laura Arnold entitled "The Four Most Dangerous Words? A New Study Shows". It details her journey through the world of social, medical, psychological and other research. It's a lively and concise summary of the d...
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[getty src="483245425" width="507" height="338"] With airport rail links in the news in both Sydney and Melbourne, here's my recent column for The CEO Magazine arguing that most transport systems have higher priorities . Most people seem to love the idea of airport rail links....
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My latest column for The CEO Magazine sees Scott Morrison enjoying his move to the political centre via the new bank levy . I still haven't worked out whether this particular $1.5 billion a year bank liabilities tax is actually good policy. But it has at least some policy just...
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On the assumption that everyone in the online universe has now viewed the video of a plain-clothes policeman dragging a United Airlines passenger off his flight (see below), a few brief observations about United's deeply evil nature failure of problem-solving skills. [youtube...
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[getty src="527045000" width="508" height="339"] My latest column for The CEO Magazine looks at how the automation deal is breaking down . Normally the deal in modern economies is that we accept that technological change and automation will screw up a bunch of people's lives,...
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[getty src="579024746" width="509" height="339"] My latest column for The CEO Magazine looks at Malcolm Turnbull's recent Snowy announcement and asks: isn't there a better way to make infrastructure decisions? The particular process I'd like to see around the Snowy announcemen...
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If you're at all like me, you see and hear a bunch of people complaining that with the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency, the world has gone mad and anything could happen. The New York Times today published a column by a former assistant attorney general in the Geo...
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[caption id="attachment_30174" align="alignleft" width="600"] Melbourne from the Yarra[/caption] My latest column for The CEO Magazine extends my updated Troppo post on decentralisation . As I dug further into the issue for this column, I was startled by the extent to which go...
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ABC Radio National's The Spirit Of Things is a long-running show about spirituality presented by Dr Rachael Kohn. Its territory extends from straight interviews with interesting people to the more way-out fringes of spirituality. Kohn and co-producer Geoff Wood journeyed out o...
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There's a reason that the UK's vote on EU departure seems so strange, and it applies regardless of whether you like Brexit or not. It's this: the UK has made what might be a very substantial change to its own nature based on a simple majority vote – and such changes should be...
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Super-high-speed version: Australia has better things to do with $100 billion than building a high-speed rail line. It's all summed up in this exchange from the ABC TV series Utopia : A new high speed rail proposal is being put to Malcolm Turnbull, and already Rhonda is excite...
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Here's something I only noticed while writing a short piece for INTHEBLACK magazine : the rise of globalisation is not only slowing down almost to a halt, but in some places (like the Netherlands) may have been slowing down since around the turn of the century. That's well bef...
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As Greece's situation has gone in recent days from bad to worse to worser to even-worserer-than-that, I've seen a lot of claims that the European authorities treated Greece's private creditors too generously back in 2010-2012. My natural tendency was to accept those claims, pa...
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There are reports today (12 November 2014) from Fairfax and News Ltd that Prime Minister Abbott is urging Vladimir Putin to follow the example of the US government after the Iran Air Flight 655 shootdown — and that he has said the US both paid compensation and apologised. In p...
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[caption id="attachment_26366" align="alignright" width="584"] A Soyuz spacecraft docking with the International Space Station. As the picture makes plain, typical human-occupied spacecraft orbits are very close to Earth; SpaceShipTwo wouldn't get even this high. NASA photo.[/...
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Just a note to record the fact that blogging is 20 years old this month, maybe. New media legend Dave Winer, a rare combination of great writer and programmer, started posting at DaveNet on 7 October 1994 , as Philip Greenspun points out. There was no announcement that Winer h...
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If you want to understand what bank regulators were doing in 2008, and what people like APRA and the Reserve Bank worry about here, try reading Matt Levine's latest column . Leviine's piece is nominally about a weird court case involving AIG, the insurance behemoth which almos...
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So the Senate will conduct an enquiry into the Queensland government – on the pretext that, to quote Senator Glen Lazarus , it has made "many questionable decisions". Never mind that state governments are elected by the same people who elect senators, or that senators are elec...
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As we head back to Iraq, I'm struck by the way in which those making the case both for and against are avoiding certain ideas which seem to me to be true: This is not 2003 all over again . At least on a moral level, and at least as far as action in Iraq goes. We have been invi...
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Ross Douthat in the New York Times presents a compelling theory about the waves of sexual abuse scandals , from Roman Catholicism to Rolf Harris to Rotherham. Remember that these scandals are scandalous precisely because their perpetrators all got away with rape and abuse for...
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The latest cost-benefit analysis of various Australian broadband proposals is out. It's part of a report from an inquiry chaired by former Victorian Treasury head Mike Vertigan. And it says in essence that Australia's expected growth in demand for bandwidth is big enough to ma...
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A question for Troppodillians: does anyone have a record of the Australian Government's response to 1988's accidental US shootdown of Iran Air Flight 655? I ask because the parallels with the MH17 shootdown are so clear. At a political level the government's response has so fa...
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Ben Hills has a new book out - Stop the Presses! How Greed, Incompetence (and the Internet) Wrecked Fairfax . It's published by (surprise!) News Corp's HarperCollins. Its essential thesis is that the Fairfax media group, owner of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, is in tr...
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An experiment in occasional linkage to insights that might outlast the daily news cycle. If you find any of it interesting, let us know in the comments. Prepare for the knowledge automation transition to take decades (ABC Radio National Future Tense) – How long might it take f...
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Much of the time, the public can make up its own mind on public events once it get a decent helping of facts; the theatre commentary from the parliamentary press gallery – a little of which I used to write – is more entertainment than vital input. But on the running of the par...
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The current inquiry into institutional child abuse holds some interesting lessons about the nature of religion, which I'll stay clear of here. But it also holds a larger lesson about the ability of organisations to act morally and to act properly in the absence of external reg...
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Is there any area of public policy in Australia that gets weaker treatment than agriculture these days? Whether it's milk prices or agricultural investment , the normal Australian tough-mindedness about policy gets shunted aside in favour of emotive puffery. Not too many peopl...
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This is an experiment in occasional linkage to insights that might outlast the daily news cycle. If you find any of it interesting, let us know in the comments. [caption id="attachment_25174" align="alignright" width="240"] Clock Tower, Freetown, Sierra Leone, October 2009, by...
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Now that Holden is to stop making cars in Australia, we're already hearing about the impending death of Australian manufacturing . Before you descend into gloom, take a look at this manufacturing data from the World Bank . It sets out how manufacturing value-added has been mov...
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[caption id="attachment_24901" align="alignright" width="584"] In the grain fields near Horsham[/caption] Joe Hockey has just announced he is blocking the foreign takeover of Graincorp by Illinois-based Archer Daniels Midland. It's a lousy decision. But it at least has the vir...
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The most interesting aspect of the reaction to the governor-general's last Boyer lecture , with its last-sentence support for abolishing the monarchy, is the thinness of the opposition from the left to her expression of her political views. As the events of the past few days h...
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The sight of the raw institutional dysfunction in the US government at the moment provides a useful reminder to Australians that we should both treasure and encourage the respect that Australians have for our federal government institutions. By "government institutions", I'm p...
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From the ever-wonderful XKCD , seeming to comment on current US governance: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="381"] XKCD: world's sharpest comic?[/caption]
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One of the popular economic memes of the 2000s has been that Australian needs more infrastructure. It has filled out many a think-tank report . In the form of the National Broadband Network , it helped Labor win government in 2007. It has led to a current crop of serious propo...
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With racism and racially-charged language much in the news right now, we're getting some interesting signals about people's beliefs. One of the most interesting popped up again in this Mama Mia article by The Project's Charlie Pickering, titled " I know nothing about racism in...
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One of the peculiar features of debates about big monolithic infrastructure projects, such as universal broadband networks and high-speed rail lines, is the way their supporters talk about them in public. To advocates, the wisdom of these projects is obvious. You can never hav...
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Two years ago, I wrote a Troppo post on Coles' decision to sell milk for a dollar a litre . I took particular aim at the claim by consumer group Choice that regulators should investigate whether Coles is engaged in predatory pricing . Said Choice: “It is difficult to see why a...
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(Cross-posted at shorewalker.com ) I like trains. For a while when I was a kid, I spent Saturdays clambering around Adelaide's Mile End Railway Museum and most of my pocket money buying items for an elaborate train set. Which may explain how I found myself today reading KPMG's...
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A video and an essay all on the same subject: measurement in the social sciences. Summary: It's really worth doing and doing better, even though it's really hard. First, health statistician and visualisation expert Hans Rosling, co-founder of Gapminder and justly famous for hi...
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[caption id="attachment_22323" align="alignright" width="307"] The 1947 Grand Ozzie winner holds our restrained Austin Holmes Memorial Trophy.[/caption] The Ozzies are, of course, Club Troppo's annual awards for think-tankery. Handed out ever since Troppo's founding in 1863, t...
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Here's a short note to everyone I know in the print media industry; Please, when you bemoan the state of media today, do not tell me that it's "management" that has got the industry where it is. I hear this all the time, particularly from Fairfax staffers and ex-staffers. If o...
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Amid all the praise for the Daniel Craig era of Bond films, it's time for all patriotic Aussies to understand the case for the only home-grown James Bond, George Lazenby. I am not especially a Bond fan, but I've long maintained that his sole Bond film, 1969's On Her Majesty's...
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The very sharp Waleed Aly has joined the debate over whether Catholic child abuse justifies a legal requirement for priests to break the confessional seal . Aly's take: it's an argument with almost no practical consequences, because most priests see excommunication as a far wo...
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To my astonishment, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney George Pell spent part of a press conference today claiming that the news media are exaggerating the scandal of Catholic Church child abuse in Australia . There was "a persistent press campaign against the Catholic Church's ade...
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Reuters' Counterparties blog assembles Marcos-like numbers for China : "The perception that China is ruled by wise leaders adhering to neo-Confucian ideals has been contradicted by revelations of the massive wealth accumulated by its elite: an estimated $2.7 billion by the fam...
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US election-watching is a great spectator sport for many Australian politics-watchers. As Bob Carr says, it's The Greatest Show On Earth. But in the actual real lives of Australians, the dull reality is that US elections generally have big direct effects on just one issue: the...
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I've just finished listening to the ABC's Waleed Aly interviewing Jock Laurie, president of the National Farmers' Federation, on the newly-announced register of foreign investment in agricultural land. (You can listen to it too, here .) Laurie's position was effectively: "We k...
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Interesting piece by well-known IT figure Jeff Atwood: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/09/computer-crime-then-and-now.html On one level, this piece is a terrific summary of how hacking is done. It's mostly not about messing with computers; it's about messing with people....
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"The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date" was released a last week. It's dedicated to the idea that knowledge not only changes, but changes in a systematic way. From the blurb: Just as we know that a chunk of uranium can break down in a measurable...
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The graphic below comes from the University of Michigan's Professor Mark Perry, who runs a libertarian and market-oriented blog called Carpe Diem . It shows, essentially, the collapse of the advertising revenue stream in US newspapers. Adjusted for inflation, US newspapers wil...
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In the torrent of words over the job cuts at Fairfax and News Ltd, not many people seem to have noticed that these events also further undermine the already teetering argument of the Finkelstein Review for a new system of media regulation. How's that? Recall that the Finkelste...
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As Ken Parish's post below shows, there is now a widespread view that Gina Rinehart will win control of Fairfax , publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and then seek to move their editorial stances well to the right. From people who believe that, you hear both wa...
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"Make the media more accountable for their sins, and worry less about new technologies and freedom of speech". That's a one-line summary of Ray Finkelstein's Independent Media Inquiry . It argues for a new system of media regulation to apply to journalists, commentators and mo...
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We keep reading claims that Tony Abbott is a low-grade politician who would be wiped off the face of Australian politics if the ALP could only get its act together . Since Abbott has already knocked off one of Australia's most popular prime ministers and taken another to withi...
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The picture of Kevin Rudd's prime ministership painted over the weekend by former speechwriter Jamie Button ought to be fatal to Rudd's leadership bid. It jibes with a number of other assessments , including some just this week by senior Cabinet ministers like Nicola Roxon . T...
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A small plea to Kevin Rudd and everyone else in the country: can we restrict the term "faceless men" to people who are actually unknown? Today I see a reference to "Crean and other faceless men". For pity's sake, Simon Crean has been in public life since 1979 and in Parliament...
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For discussion: one of the far right's greatest achievements in the past decade has been to show post-modernists how wrong they were. Let me explain. In a famous 2004 article on the Iraq War, the New York Times journalist Ron Suskind quotes an aide to George W. Bush (possibly...
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Last week I was ready to write off ABC Melbourne interviewer Jon Faine for ill-judged rudeness and inadequate research . Now he's gone and redeemed himself with a Tony Abbott interview . Faine at his best is smartly, aggressively prosecutorial without actually being rude. Abbo...
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The bank debate now seems officially out of control. Increasingly foolish notions about banking are being served up day after day. One example: the developing meme that claims the banks have decided they will no longer be bound by official interest rate policy. One morning las...
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Right now Ray Finkelstein and Matthew Ricketson, the two members of the federal government's Independent Media Inquiry , are trying to finish off their report to the government. It's due by 28 February. Writing these reports is frequently difficult, but Finkelstein and Rickets...
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The ABC's Australia Talks program ran a show this week about the troubles of the Australian book industry. Its starting point was that the local bookselling and book publishing industry is in a heap of trouble. Not for the first time, the program did a deal of hand-wringing ab...
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Adelaide's "Festival of Ideas" last month featured a useful discussion of the mining industry's contribution to the economy, since replayed on the ABC program The National Interest . Towards the end there was a brief discussion of how mining damages prime farming land. Asked a...
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With the Media Inquiry in full swing and the Greens' Bob Brown complaining loudly about News's lack of fairness and accuracy , now might be a good time to travel back in time 20 years. Let's visit another era when a powerful paper was unashamedly boosting one side of politics...
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[Cross-posted to Online Opinion ] I spend my working life running an online media firm - WorkDay Media, publisher of Banking Day - with its owner and editor-in-chief, Ian Rogers. Last month, Ian and I wrote a submission to the federal government’s Independent Media Inquiry. Yo...
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The Senate Economic References Committee has this week released its findings on the supermarket milk discounting war . The main findings, blessedly, were that cheaper milk really is good for consumers and that there was nothing obviously awry with the competitive market that g...
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I was all set to fulminate against the evils of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in the wake of the Federal Court's verdict against Bolt and publisher News Ltd in Eatock v Bolt . And then it turns out the the Bolt case is not, after all, the perfect opportunity to...
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ASIC, one of our main financial markets regulators, has today declared that short-selling is a "legitimate business in the market" . Good on them. Markets need short-sellers, far more than most people realise. The reason is that financial markets are markets in ideas - ideas a...
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If Julia Gillard is known for one policy direction, it is her advocacy of making educational opportunities available to all. Her passion for this idea is clearly genuine, and has survived her move from Minister of Education to Prime Minister. It is also personal. She enjoyed h...
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A bunch of new rules are being introduced to Parliament today governing what is usually called the "financial planning" industry. Big new regulatory schemes often have large unintended consequences, and this one could too. But if ever an industry needed to change its behaviour...
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Ian Verrender in the Sydney Morning Herald recently wrote of Victoria's two oldest power stations that they were bought by their owners "when the issue of climate change was well known". Though he made that remark in the middle of a longer article focused on different issues,...
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My first reaction to Coles' recent milk discounting was that this is good news. Milk is not a huge expense for our family; we buy all our milk at the deli. But for those doing it tough, paying $1 a litre for milk (and lower prices for several other staples) could conceivably m...
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I admire SA independent senator Nick Xenophon hugely. He's a rare combination of brains, enterprise and principle. I knew him at Adelaide University; he had all those qualities then, and he seems to have kept them intact over the quarter-century since. But I have wondered for...
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RBA governor Glenn Stevens always goes to the big issues. His latest speech notes that we are becoming more dependent on China and India buying our resources, and adds that these countries will probably have their ups and downs over the next quarter-century. So then he asks: h...
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Occasionally a report comes along which should give people a whole new way of looking at a public policy debate. A new report on universal high-speed broadband (UHSB) via fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP), titled "Superfast: Is It Really Worth a Subsidy?" , does just that. Written...
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If you want to know why Senator Barack Obama excites so many US Democrats, take a look at the video below. Speaking in late 2002 (when he was still an Illinois state senator), Obama lays out the major risks of an Iraq invasion, all the time looking both reasoned and tough on S...
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Back in 2002, then aspiring US presidential candidate John Kerry began arguing that "the war on terror is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering law enforcement operation". To my ear back then, this sounded like one of Kerry's more thoughtfu...
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Back in late 2005, a brilliant young US moderate-left commentator named Matthew Yglesias and his colleague Sam Rosenfeld penned a prescient essay for The American Prospect called " The Incompetence Dodge" . They began by noting how many policy figures were coming to the conclu...
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George Bush's announcement of extra troops for Iraq is significant not for its announcements of actions, but for its official admission that Iraq is a horrible mess. See the official US government PDF for details. The scariest bit is the official admission that the Coalition c...
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A Beautiful Mind? If you've never taken much of a look at Andrew Bolt's columns in the Herald Sun, you may wonder which category of columnist he falls into. Is his the anger of a sharp mind frequently impatient with the foolishness of those around him - Melbourne's own Tom Wol...
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� Mr Rudd by Colin Wicking The media is inevitably full of predictions about the Rudd/Gillard Labour leadership. What follows is the case for flipping straight to the sports pages. Because none of the punditocracy have much of a record of accurate judgment in the week after...
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Ahead of this weekend's announcement of the 2006 Australian Idol , today's Age Green Guide acknowledges the popular culture phenomenon. The paper then labels the show, for about the tenth time, as "karaoke". The Age is not alone; a large part of the Australian pop/rock music i...
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