I am about to break my indication that I am unlikely to post again until after Jen's death. I am bored to death in this Regis joint filled with old codgers with assorted disabilities. How many I will write is another question. I have been thinking about Nicholas Gruen's sortit...

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Troppo readers may be wondering why I haven’t been blogging lately, after making a comeback several months ago after a long absence. The reason is that my wife Jen is in hospital dying from ovarian cancer. It’s very distressing, both for me and our daughter Jessica (not to men...

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This article deals with Federal Coalition Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s election promise to force gas producers to reduce the price of gas for Australian consumers to $10 per gigajoule. However, according to a debate on last night Q &A between Labor Climate Change Minister...

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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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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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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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Yesterday I was chatting online about Wednesday evening's dreadful shooting massacre in Darwin (like many shocked people here). I posted a comment listing the various murder scenes, saying: "A fourth was murdered at 18 Gardens Hill Crescent (or Gardens Rd, not sure which)." A...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="649"] Hong Kong actor Eric Tsang Chi-wa, NT Chief Minister Michael Gunner, Donghai Airlines chairman Mr.Wong Cho-Bau and Donghai Airlines Chief Executive Officer Yang Jianhong following the arrival of the first Donghai airlines flight fr...

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Long-ish article but a must-read in my humble opinion for Territorians interested in NT economic development (especially tourism). The Gunner government isn't keen to disclose the terms of its "partnering" agreement with Donghai Airlines that resulted in the airline's inaugura...

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[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB6V7XU5H6A] It seems like time to review progress on the Gunner government’s quest to create a vibrant Darwin CBD. They actually appointed an assistant Minister for that noble quest (Paul Kirby) on achieving government in 2016. In term...

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As far as I can tell, the position of the Australian Republic Movement ever since the failure of the 1999 Republic Referendum has effectively if tacitly been that there is no point in another referendum while the current Queen remains on the throne. Certainly the ARM’s current...

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This article is a follow-up to my recent long piece titled Northern Territory development, debt and deficit - the long and winding road . Urban development ideas are invariably bedevilled by community dissension, much of it uninformed and anything but constructive. However, pa...

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I posted the piece over the fold some time ago (early January) but the fact that the federal Parliament's Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters is about to publish its report into the ongoing legal and constitutional debacle surrounding the Parliamentary disqualificati...

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The media debate about last Monday’s NT Budget sure could do with some context and perspective. The Australian ’s Amos Aikman was an honourable exception: Everyone could see this mess coming. You can’t have a mining boom, two new gas plants, a whole lot of federal indigenous s...

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[caption id="attachment_31685" align="aligncenter" width="1000"] "Arrival" by Brett Whiteley, painted for the Bicentennial celebrations of the arrival of the First Fleet on 26 January 1788[/caption] We’re a weird mob, we Australians, even weirder than we were in 1957 when John...

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* cross-posted from Screen Hub . The #MeToo sexual harassment tsunami generated by the unmasking of American screen industry heavyweights Harvey Weinstein and Kevin Spacey has hit Australian shores with a vengeance. As an old Monty Python sketch observed: ‘Nobody expects the S...

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Australia has a backlog of issues that will need to be resolved by constitutional referendum sooner or later: Indigenous recognition (especially the Voice to Parliament); resolving the problems caused by archaic and unworkable parliamentary disqualification rules in section 44...

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The extraordinary outpouring of national happiness following the passage of the same sex marriage legislation on Thursday unavoidably gives rise to the question of whether some similar community consultation/plebiscite/survey mechanism (perhaps a well-designed and secure onlin...

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The following is a guest post by RHONDA PRYOR , a recently retired senior manager in the Australian aged care sector. We are hoping Rhonda may become a regular contributor to Troppo. If you woke up to read the Government had announced that they have a totally new approach to S...

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[vimeo 224904259 w=500 h=328] Helen Parish Funeral 7Jul17 (1) from Ken Parish on Vimeo . As the first of the four offspring of Helen and Cecil Parish, my job is to deliver the first section of a two part eulogy, commemorating but most of all celebrating the life of our mother...

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The Gunner Labor government came to office last August promising to restore the trust of Territorians in government, after it had been shattered by four years of chaos, division and dubious or worse ethical behaviour by various members of the Giles CLP regime. Enacting and boo...

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The NT News’ front page on Saturday is a vintage piece of Murdoch tabloid journalism – aggressively funny but without any meaningful regard for fact or fairness. Of course portraying any politicians as “bastards” is bound to meet with general public approval, especially when M...

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Hans Christian Andersen’s famous story The Emperor’s New Clothes epitomises the phenomenon of the truth hiding in plain sight as a result of collective delusion or selective vision. There is just such a collective public delusion at the heart of our current understanding of Au...

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Experienced Troppo readers will be aware that I fairly frequently post articles about topics relating to crime and punishment, especially crime statistics and patterns. Quite often those articles consist partly of impassioned diatribes against sensationalist tabloid crime “sho...

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Here is a link to a companion article to Treaty: Yeah, Nah, Maybe which I cross-posted here at Troppo from The Summit a week ago: What might a treaty look like? Another article published there a couple of days ago ( The hidden karma of Aboriginal affairs policy … ) is also rel...

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Cross-posted from The Summit . It was surprising (at least to me) that there wasn't more discussion at the NT Governance Summit surrounding the question of a possible treaty between Aboriginal Territorians and the Northern Territory Government. It seemed as if most of the curr...

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An article in today’s Northern Territory News (online version marked “premium” – I read the paper version while sipping coffee at the Roma Bar) gives what the newspaper describes as a six month report card on the Gunner Labor government. It’s a peculiar article. Its principal...

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Sky News' Matt Cunningham is unimpressed by the actions of the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory, in restricting cross-examination of detainees, failing to proceed with hearings before Christmas, and obtaining a five month...

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[caption id="attachment_29556" align="alignright" width="300"] Yingiya Mark Guyula and other newly elected Independent NT MLAs[/caption] In contrast to the almost continual chaos and dysfunction that marked the former unlamented Giles CLP government, the period of almost 2 mon...

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Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (Cth) is a perennial favourite topic for right wing politicians, and conservative pundit Andrew Bolt has never stopped moaning about it ever since he ended up on the wrong side of a Federal Court decision Eatock v Bolt in 2011. But...

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Like quite a few other despairing commentators, I have on occasions referred to the Northern Territory as a "failed state", most recently here : Until now, although holding grave fears about the quality of Northern Territory political governance under both the previous Labor g...

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It appears that the newly dominant Labor Party in the Northern Territory may be contemplating a legal challenge to the validity of the election of former CLP Chief Minister Terry Mills as an Independent MLA in his former seat of Blain. Labor will likely hold 18 of the 25 Legis...

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It's not often that I agree with hyper-ventilating Murdoch columnist Andrew Bolt, but his column this week on the Don Dale Centre juvenile detention controversy is a useful antidote to the equally hyperbolic reactions of most commentators to ABC journalist Caro Meldrum-Hanna's...

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The following is a guest post by David Morris, Principal Lawyer of the Environmental Defenders Office (NT). The Northern Territory already carries a 1 billion dollar burden for legacy mines. These are mine sites where the company has walked away and left ongoing environmental...

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Will the Coalition get to 76 seats? The ABC's Barry Cassidy 'can't see that happening'. But is the prospect of minority government really as horrific as much of the media is portraying? The only real problem (for both Malcolm Turnbull and Australia) with a Coalition minority g...

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It's well past time to reconsider our communal attitude towards professional sport. We're subjected almost daily to scandals about drug cheating, gross and usually drunken behaviour by sports people, rorted salary caps and match-fixing by players colluding with bookmakers and...

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La Trobe University has now retreated from acting against academic Roz Ward (as I suggest below that it should). However I concluded it was still worth publishing this post, because it analyses important constitutional and legal issues that arise repeatedly in cases where an e...

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As some may have noticed, I've been musing of late about the likely future social and economic effects of the increasingly rapid and interconnected development of ICT, artificial intelligence and robotics. This article is a bit silly in some respects but makes some useful poin...

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Preselecting Nova Peris as a "Captain's Pick" for Labor senator for the Northern Territory must have seemed like a good idea at the time in early 2013 to then Prime Minister Julia Gillard. The election of Ken Wyatt as a Liberal federal MHR from Western Australia in 2010 had sp...

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As a long-term resident of Darwin, where you can drive from anywhere in the metropolitan area to just about anywhere else in not much more than 25 minutes (even in the peak hour such as it is), it always takes me a couple of days to get used to the traffic snarls of Sydney and...

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Chris Lloyd's comment on my previous Uber post prompt some further thoughts that I think merit a separate post. Chris said: “If you want to make a living off of Uber, you’re going to have to drive an insane number of hours.” I am surprised that Uber cannot offer cheaper fares...

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A story in this morning's media highlights the vulnerable position of pseudo self-employed "independent" contractors under Australian law: A Perth-based Uber driver is suing the Silicon Valley giant for terminating him without notice, leaving him with $80,000 worth of car loan...

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It looks like we may be getting a six star hotel across the road from our place at Cullen Bay. A proposal by Paspaley the Pearl King has been shortlisted by the Giles government along with two others. Apparently the winner will receive unspecified government largesse to kickst...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtpgkX588nM With the ongoing partisan squabbling about tax accompanying the imminent federal election, I thought it might be worth setting out my own “wish list” for an ideal tax system. As readers know, I am not an economist or accountant, and...

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The Coalition government’s Budget plan for internships for the long-term unemployed was instantly condemned by the trade union movement and the ALP, but given qualified support by at least some social welfare groups. Internships potentially provide a path for the long-term une...

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Former ABC Media Watch host Jonathan Holmes has predictably been pilloried on social media over the last few days for an article about asylum seeker policy that repeats some themes I have discussed here at Troppo over the years. Holmes picks up especially on suggestions that p...

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Prime Minister Turnbull and Treasurer Morrison are currently refusing to admit the cost to revenue of the Coalition’s ten-year corporate tax cut plan which will reduce company tax for all corporations to 25% by 2025-26. Chris Richardson of Access Economics estimates that the c...

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The starter’s gun has almost been fired on the forthcoming Federal election which will almost certainly now be held on 2 July. However, there is also another Australian election due to take place soon after that: the Northern Territory election due on 27 August under the fixed...

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This post is a follow-up to one I wrote last week (see the latter half of it) and also a response to a more recent post by David Walker . I certainly wouldn’t argue with David’s assertion that a Sydney-Brisbane Very Fast Train route is not likely to be remotely viable even in...

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For mainstream and social media partisans the current prolonged election campaign is an essential life or death struggle for premiership victory by one's chosen team. But to my way of thinking it doesn't really matter very much which team wins. The two major parties are Tweedl...

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Apparently Labor doesn't intend reverting to the full Fibre to the Premises ("FTP") version of the National Broadband Network it previously championed if returned to government later this year: The opposition leader admitted that he would not unpick all of the Coalition’s chan...

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Last week’s adventure in federalism by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, in which he proposed fleetingly that the states be given back their own income taxing power including (after a transitional period) the ability to either raise or lower the tax rates, has attracted various...

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As you can see from the above image, the Daily Telegraph revived John Howard's History Wars the other day. Indeed they even disinterred Howard's favourite undead RWNJ historian Keith Windschuttle to lend an air of faux integrity to the whole unedifying clickbait exercise: Wind...

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With Fairfax culling 120 journalists (in the wake of previous mass redundancies), Murdoch/News apparently contemplating more cuts, and newspapers in general losing money hand over fist, some pundits are suggesting that Fairfax at least is likely to stop publishing the Monday t...

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It appears clear that the Governor-General (acting on the advice of the Prime Minister as per Westminster convention) can under Constitution section 5 prorogue the current Parliament and then appoint a new session to commence on 18 April. Presumably that is what occurred this...

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Some interesting constitutional questions seem to have arisen in the wake of Thursday/Friday's marathon Senate sitting which passed voting reforms for that House. Both Independent Senator Bob Day and veteran psephologist Malcolm Mackerras are threatening to launch High Court c...

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Paul Frijters' fascinating post analysing Turkey's successful employment of ruthless realpolitik tactics is fairly depressing. But maybe there's some qualified good news hidden amongst all the cynical manoeuvres. Reported arrangements between the EU and Turkey for dealing with...

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This week's announcement by Pangaea Resources that it is suspending its NT onshore gas exploration drilling program and laying off 140 workers, following the Labor Opposition's indication that it will impose an indefinite moratorium on fracking, has provoked predictable respon...

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Way back in the 1980s and 90s when I was a Labor "apparatchik" and then for a short time a local politician in the Northern Territory, the Opposition of which I was a part was for a time led by Brian Ede. He married Anne Walsh a daughter of arch neoliberal Federal Labor Minist...

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What strange times we live in! The Red Star Line's passenger cruise freighter SS Labor, despite a seemingly lacklustre captain with a mutinous history, is sailing full steam ahead for port carrying an impressive cargo of solid policies and fiscal measures to fund them. Meanwhi...

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Federal Liberal backbencher Dr Dennis Jensen is a right wing MP with views not unlike those of his colleague Corey Bernardi. He "distinguished" himself this week in Parliament with a diatribe about Indigenous communities supposedly living a ‘noble savage’ lifestyle: “I put it...

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I don't understand why Prime Minister Turnbull and Treasurer ScoMo are busily demonising Labor's entirely sensible announced policies in relation to negative gearing and Capital Gains Tax for residential rental properties. I can only assume that the politician's instinct to co...

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The Giles Country Liberal NT government managed to ram through legislation this week which not only implements optional preferential voting for Territory elections but also prohibits handing out of "how to vote" and other candidate materials to voters on polling day within 100...

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[caption id="attachment_28231" align="aligncenter" width="676"] From National Geographic[/caption] Julie Bishop is in strife with the left-leaning Twittersphere for making light of the plight of Pacific Islanders, who are seemingly in peril of sinking beneath the waves due to...

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Here for my sins is the text of another letter I have just submitted to the local Northern Territory News: Dear Editor The statement in your editorial of 2 December 2015 that "neither of the major political parties is in a position we would consider as ready to govern beyond 2...

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I can only assume that op-ed pundit/pop historian Peter FitzSimons must have been wrapping his trademark red vanity hijab too tightly around his head and cutting off the blood supply to the brain. It is the only plausible explanation for this idiotic piece: At the very same ti...

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If next Tuesday's Labor "no confidence" motion against the minority Giles Country Liberal government succeeds in the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly, it will mark the first real test of the 4 year fixed term election arrangements that have become increasingly common in...

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This article was published at UNSW's Gilbert & Tobin Centre for Public Law site Australian Public Law. However they seem to be having some virus/accessibility issues so I am parking the article here for the moment. Statehood for the Northern Territory is on the national politi...

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The Twittersphere was abuzz with pointless debate a couple of weeks ago when Annabel Crabb had a televisual meal with Coalition hardman Scott Morrison on her perniciously vacuous program Kitchen Cabinet . My own views about that controversy are well encapsulated by Jennifer "N...

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I've created a categorised featured posts list to highlight the rich diversity of material posted here at Troppo. I intended to have it here on the front page but it takes up too much room. Please check it out over the fold. Politics INTERNATIONAL NATIONAL STATE/TERRITORY Open...

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Today marks the end of a 20 year saga that has indelibly scarred my life and those of my daughter Bec and former wife Jenny. I've written partial accounts of it before here at Troppo. I hope you'll forgive another one, it's catharsis. On 27 July 1995 Jenny's mother Rene Chambe...

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I've written a few Northern Territory posts recently. This is another one, but it has some significant national implications (I think). Tuesday's announcement of Asian conglomerate Jemena as the preferred bidder to construct a gas pipeline connecting the Northern Territory to...

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There has been yet another failed political coup in Darwin overnight, with the minority CLP government failing to carry a motion to sack Independent (and erstwhile CLP) Speaker Kezia Purick. Keen watchers of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera known as Territory politics will...

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Could the High Court employ EU/UK/Canadian structured proportionality analysis recently embraced in McCloy v NSW to achieve a viable constitutional resolution of the dilemma posed by the need to protect secret national security information in anti-terrorism matters while at th...

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The effective sacking of NT Corrective Services Commissioner Ken Middlebrook is sad but politically inevitable. It came in the wake of the escape and subsequent voluntary surrender of axe murder and rapist Edward Horrell from a Sentenced to a Job work gang near Nhulunbuy. Mini...

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Further to my post on Tuesday , the result in yesterday's High Court decision in NAAJA v NT [2015] HCA 41 will not have made either side completely happy. The Court upheld the validity of the NT government's "paperless arrest" law by a 6:1 majority i.e. the NT government won....

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I understand that the High Court is likely to hand down its decision in North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency v Northern Territory of Australia (‘NAAJA v NT’) within the next week or so tomorrow. So what, you might say? The context – NT “paperless arrest’ law Well, the im...

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There are just over 9 months until the 2016 Territory election next August, unless there’s a successful “no confidence” motion in the Legislative Assembly in the meantime, or next May’s Budget is rejected. Both those possibilities presently look fairly unlikely despite endless...

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Sentenced to a Job is a prison-based program in the NT first planned under Labor but implemented and developed under the current Country Liberal government. It seems like a good idea but is it working? Crime and punishment are subjects that have fascinated me ever since I move...

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One of the great truisms of Australian politics is that federal/state relations are unavoidably bedevilled by "vertical fiscal imbalance", a phenomenon whereby the Commonwealth controls the great bulk of revenue-raising powers while the States bear the burden of providing many...

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NT Chief Minister Adam Giles announced yesterday that his government had signed a deal to lease the Darwin Port to the Chinese-owned Landbridge Group for 99 years for $506 million. The deal involves the NTG/Australian interests retaining a 20% interest in the ongoing port busi...

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Statehood for the Northern Territory is in the air again, with COAG having recently voted to support a statehood process (albeit with no assurances as to the outcome). Whether it was any more than a distraction tactic for both then PM Tony Abbott and the equally beleaguered NT...

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Last weekend I flew down to Sydney partly to attend the 50th anniversary party for the Class of '65 from Harbord Primary School on the northern beaches. Many old school photos were exchanged, including the one above showing me (circled in red) at the age of seven. The function...

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The Northern Territory Country Liberals’ early start to election campaigning looks to be just as chaotic as the rest of its term of government. The last month of taxpayer-funded blatantly party political advertising doesn’t seem to have had much of an impact on voters, except...

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Nicholas Gruen recently posted about the high cost of civil court proceedings in Australia (and for that matter throughout the common law world): A more promising kind of imperialism would be the application of simple economic principles to the way various social systems are m...

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This is the second of two posts musing about Labor's failure to deal with the full implications of the neoliberal revolution that the Hawke-Keating government unleashed from 1985. That revolution was significantly easier for the Coalition to embrace, because extreme classical...

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The furore of the last few days over the Trade Union Royal Commission and revelations about serious and illegal underpayment of workers (especially foreign students) by 7-Eleven, Australia Post and others have brought into sharp focus a wider political question. This article d...

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Despite the fact that Federal Labor has consistently led in opinion polls over the last year or so by between four and six percentage points, most pundits (including the writer) have very little confidence that Labor will win the next election. In fact I expect they will more...

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The chorus of public concern over the constitutionality of the Abbott government’s citizenship-stripping proposal is growing. Malcolm Turnbull has again been emboldened to break ranks with his Prime Minister while denying he is doing any such thing. It will be ironically appro...

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Human rights lawyer Kerry Murphy has a very useful explanation of the weakness of judicial review as a safeguard against new laws foreshadowed by the Abbott government which would permit arbitrary ministerial stripping of Australians’ citizenship from those accused/suspected o...

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Queensland's judicial system looks to be in quite a bit of strife at present. The former Newman LNP government's ill-advised appointment of an utterly unsuitable Supreme Court Chief Justice in Tim Carmody is continuing to cause serious problems. Mercifully, at least Carmody CJ...

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Delia Lawrie's announcement today that she was resigning as NT Labor Opposition Leader isn't really surprising in light of yesterday's news that Attorney-General John Elferink had referred her conduct over the Stella Maris controversy to both NT Police and the Director of Publ...

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( NB See my previous post on this important NT Supreme Court decision ). News that CLP Attorney-General John Elferink has referred the Delia Lawrie matter to the Director of Public Prosecutions is hardly a surprise, given adverse comments about her behaviour in a Supreme Court...

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[caption id="attachment_27165" align="alignright" width="300"] The old, heritage-listed Stella Maris Seamen's Mission in Darwin's CBD[/caption] Northern Territory Labor Opposition Leader Delia Lawrie is a fearsome political warrior, a divisive figure who seldom compromises or...

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Grossly offensive political ads about the alleged dangers of Chinese purchase of electricity “poles and wires” during the last week of the New South Wales election campaign say much more about the Labor-affiliated unions who placed them than they do about the Baird government’...

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In answer to my post earlier today about the data retention bill, frequent commenter Patrick Fitzgerald made a rather important point about the data retention zeitgeist: Embrace the panopticon Ken, buy yourself a webcam, attach it to your head and stream live 24×7. Plus for go...

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Data security and retention are very much in the news at the moment. Indeed the Abbott government’s data retention bill is currently being debated by the Senate and will inevitably be passed given that the Coalition did a deal with Labor whereby the latter will support it in r...

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That Tony Abbott should have been forced this week to concede defeat on fiscal reform by declaring partial victory over “debt and deficit” (“the glass is half full”) is both ironic and fitting. As I discussed in a fairly recent post , Abbott was responsible for bringing to des...

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Amidst all the depressing events of last week's failed leadership coup in the Northern Territory, there was at least one redeeming feature, at least for constitutional lawyers. Adam Giles' refusal to resign as Chief Minister, despite losing the confidence of the majority of hi...

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*First published as "Abolish NT self-government". Last section now significantly rewritten. Political chaos continues in the Northern Territory in the wake of last Monday’s failed leadership coup against incumbent Chief Minister Adam Giles. Today’s Northern Territory News repo...

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NB This post makes extensive use of the footnote plugin. The footnote numbers are very small, but they are hyperlinks so you can jump to them by clicking. NBB The fact that I argue below that a major reason for the demise of the Newman government was the standard template oppo...

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[caption id="attachment_26684" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Junction Oval[/caption] Victorian Premier Dennis Napthine announces a “plan” to spend $20 million upgrading Junction Oval at St Kilda to accommodate the AFL team named after the suburb, even though it hasn’t playe...

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The announcement by Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull that the ABC’s budget will be cut by $50 million per year for the next five years has generated predictable kerfuffle in mainstream and social media circles. Whether it will have any real effect on the broader voting...

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But maybe it doesn't matter ... Hardly anyone seemed to notice at last weekend’s G20 meeting in Brisbane that the Climate Emperor had no clothes. Nor did I hear anyone remark on the obvious contradiction involved in issuing a communiqué which simultaneously committed participa...

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The legal misadventures of some colourful Darwin characters in A Territory Testamentary Tale at Parish McCulloch website.

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The NIMBY Brigade is a blight on urban civil society. These people have never seen a new development that they don't oppose, unless it's a community vegetable garden or possibly a Montessori preschool built from mud bricks (although only if they're very quiet middle class kidd...

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For some time I have been posting specifically legal articles/posts over at the bloggy part of the Parish McCulloch, Barristers & Solicitors website. I cross-post some of them here at Club Troppo. I have just posted quite a long article there which discusses yesterday's High C...

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Tony Abbott might well be the last bloke on earth who could plausibly demand a "mature debate" on tax reform. But that doesn't deny the crying need for such a debate in Australia. Nor does the fact that it's the antithesis of what Abbott did in Opposition mean that Bill Shorte...

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My father died early this year at the age of 90, after a long but slow slide into dementia. The discussion on another thread about euthanasia and mental capacity has led me to decide to post the eulogy I delivered at his funeral. My dad was still relatively compos mentis at th...

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The Northern Territory News reports that veteran euthanasia campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke faces a five-day hearing before the Medical Board starting today. Nitschke's arguments will include: Mr Nitschke says suicide is a lawful activity and the appeal was a question of whether...

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This is the second of a two part article about Aboriginal affairs policy in the wake of Noel Pearson's speech last week at Gough Whitlam's funeral. See From assimilation to Black Power to Gordon Gekko to where? (I) . Then read on. NB A very long post. I hope at least some will...

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[caption id="attachment_26455" align="alignright" width="300"] Noel Pearson delivers the Greatest Australian Political Speech in Recorded History[/caption] It didn't take long for the Aboriginal knockers to start tearing into Noel Pearson in the wake of his delivery of the Gre...

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[caption id="attachment_26429" align="alignright" width="248"] John Brumby: deregulated the VET sector while Premier.[/caption] Ben Eltham has posted an article in New Matilda about the financial and regulatory travails of Victorian VET private mega-provider Vocation: Christop...

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[caption id="attachment_26386" align="alignright" width="300"] Rosie Batty (insert son Luke)[/caption] I commend to you an article about homicide survivor, mother and crusader Rosie Batty by Martin McKenzie-Murray in the relatively new publication The Saturday Paper . I was pa...

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[caption id="attachment_26358" align="alignright" width="275"] We can be confident that Tony isn't demonstrating the size of Scott's heart, or his brain for that matter ...[/caption] I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago which inter alia condemned the drastic breach of Australi...

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I don't have a particularly high opinion of Senator Nova Peris. I certainly don't think Prime Minister Julia Gillard should have effectively sacked long-standing and well regarded Senator Trish Crossin to get her into Parliament. Moreover, even if it was reasonable to aim at g...

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Monica Attard reports in The Hoopla on a very recent speech by Russian President Vladimir Putin in which he forcefully puts his country's side of the current conflict with Ukraine. I was especially struck by this observation: The US, [Putin] said, had instigated a “ coup d’eta...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GchWJasxVYY It looks as if prominent and obsessively determined euthanasia campaigner Dr Philip Nitschke may be in trouble again. He has already had his right to practise medicine suspended and is facing Medical Board disciplinary proceedings ari...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqMCZBjvmD4 In the midst of all the Whitlam nostalgia over the last week or so I couldn't help thinking of the contagious hope and excitement that was generated by the "It's Time" campaign theme in 1972. It still sends tingles down my spine liste...

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Here is quite a good article seeking to "reframe" the asylum seeker debate. It takes a reasonably moderate, non-hysterical approach. I haven't written on the subject recently myself, because I have been feeling a little conflicted. On the one hand, long-time Troppo readers wil...

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You may notice that I have changed the masthead motto, which until now read "the suppository of centrist wisdom since 2012". It was a somewhat snide and gratuitous reference to a Tony Abbott malapropism uttered in the leadup to the 2013 federal election (and pretty much on a p...

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In an everyday political sense I suppose we can't really blame Little Bill Shorten for cynically and dishonestly demonising the Abbott government's mooted tax increases and spending cuts. After all, Abbott cynically, dishonestly and very successfully demonised Labor's carbon a...

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Troppo author and frequent commenter John Walker asks: Ken The Bolt case was just one case- is there much information about how 18C has been applied, on a wider scale. Its pretty hard to judge whether there is a problem needing changes to the law , or not, on the basis of just...

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I don't pretend to understand the detail of the current situation between Russia and Ukraine, but it seems entirely reasonable to fear that this may well be the most significant threat to world peace since the Berlin Wall Crisis and Cuban Missile Crisis of the early 1960s. Eve...

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This piece is inspired by Paul Frijters' post titled The Benefits of Being Dumb in Politics . I don't actually think it is possible meaningfully/reliably to distinguish between politicians who are "really smart and great actors as well, who thus have no problems with telling o...

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As conversational topics go, productivity is hardly a barbecue stopper. Nevertheless, adopting policies that boost national productivity is really the only way for Australia to avoid a slide into national penury as our population ages and the Chinese mineral boom ends. That's...

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I don't often agree with Greg Sheridan, and I certainly don't agree with the whole of his article on asylum seeker policy in today's Weekend Australian . But he certainly says a lot that is worth thinking about and makes numerous points similar to things that I've been saying...

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Kevin Rudd got elected in 2007 by convincing people that he was a slightly younger and more vigorous version of nerdy John Howard, with similar conservative policies except that he would abolish that nasty Work Choices legislation and introduce some fairly meaningless warm and...

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To an even greater extent than previous election campaigns, this one seems to consist almost entirely of lies and grossly misleading mischaracterisations of opponents' policies and performance. Kevin Rudd's claim of a $70 billion Coalition black hole, his claim that Abbott has...

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Troppo readers who have followed my meanderings about asylum seeker policy over the years will realise that I have some fairly basic differences with the Greens on that issue ((although not on the fundamental fact that many if not most of them need our compassion and support –...

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Kevin Rudd's announcement yesterday of a Special Economic Zone in the Northern Territory surely comes very close to the silliest election promise of the last decade, matched only by Tony Abbott's almost identical promise a couple of months ago. The only positive aspect of eith...

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In Part I of this article I outlined the major shortcomings of the Refugees Convention and traced the ways it was contributing to the current influx of boat-borne asylum seekers to Australia and the ongoing political controversy that has engendered. ((I am not suggesting that...

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Liberal Catholic priest and legal academic Father Frank Brennan thinks Australia's current asylum seeker policies, which are effectively bipartisan despite the electorally-driven sound and fury, exhibit a disturbing "race to the bottom" tendency. Sydney Morning Herald columnis...

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Last week a prostitute was murdered on the streets of St Kilda in Melbourne, where I am currently living part of the time. Journalist Wendy Squires yesterday drew parallels between that crime and the horrific rape and murder of ABC employee Jill Meagher by serial rapist Adryan...

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Recently I published a post suggesting that the performance of the Rudd/Gillard governments in policy terms was actually quite impressive . On the other hand, Julia Gillard's ability to sell that message has been spectacularly poor, for a variety of reasons some of which I don...

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This is a guest post by Rob Bray, economist and research fellow in the School of Business and Economics, Australian National University. Thanks to Rob for his contribution to an important conversation. [caption id="attachment_23392" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Courtesy Ma...

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The most striking thing I found about watching the ABC docudrama Whitlam: The Power and the Passion over the last two weeks was the extent of the parallels between Gough's crew and the current Gillard government. We (or at least I) often think that the Internet and the general...

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*Guest post by Paul "Gummo Trotsky" Bamford (I've invited Paul to join the Troppo stable/pony club, and am pleased to advise that he's accepted. So expect more from Paul very soon). The mythical – or legendary if you so prefer – figure of the dole bludger has haunted our polit...

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Troppo readers may have noticed a Christmas "silly season" debate about an ill-advised assertion by Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs Jenny Macklin to the effect that she could live on Newstart Allowance (aka "the dole") if she had to. T...

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Jacqueline Maley has an article in today's Fairfax media musing about who might succeed Julia Gillard as Labor leader after an election loss later this year. It seems a tad premature in the circumstances, though only slightly more so than the subject of this post, which addres...

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Australia is one of the most prosperous and best-governed nations on earth. Our politicians, at least at national level, are mostly competent, honest and hard-working. And yet our mainstream media conveys an almost opposite impression, and the blogosphere and twitterverse proj...

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There has now been quite a bit of discussion about this week's dismissal of James Ashby's sexual harassment proceedings against former Speaker of the House of Representatives Peter Slipper for abuse of process (although nowhere near as much as the salacious coverage when Ashby...

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My post on the Territory's recent mini-budget has resulted in an interesting comment box discussion about Darwin property prices. At first blush general Troppo readers might not find it all that absorbing, but in fact the dynamics of Darwin's property market provide an instruc...

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I haven't been posting on Troppo much lately, mostly because I'm pretty fully occupied establishing with partners a new private legal practice in Darwin, Melbourne and Adelaide by early January. However I haven't been able to restrain myself from indulging in the first sign of...

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[caption id="attachment_21735" align="alignright" width="300"] You have to wonder why even a young-ish Julia Gillard didn't smell a rat given Bruce Wilson's eyes ...[/caption] The hive-mind that is the Canberra Press Gallery has apparently decided that PM Julia Gillard's activ...

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As some readers may have noticed (assuming you can access us at all), the performance of Troppo is still distinctly dodgy despite Jacques shifting from his original choice of Wordpress web host. Its name was WpEngine and it provided next to no service during the day in Austral...

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[ This was written on Sunday. An edited version was published at the G8 universities site The Conversation late this afternoon. ] The Northern Territory's Labor government led by Chief Minister Paul Henderson was swept from power at yesterday's election by Terry Mills' Country...

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By sheer chance, on Sunday I found myself listening on ABC Classic FM to part of the 18th century opera ' The Good-Hearted Curmudgeon '. In her inimitable way, Jen couldn't help suggesting that the opera might have been named after me. Little did I know that within an hour or...

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I wrote recently about the prevalence of personal smear tactics by both major parties in the current NT election campaign. It is one of the more repugnant aspects of modern politics, exemplified at federal level by the current Ashby v Slipper shenanigans. Last week the tactics...

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[caption id="attachment_21240" align="alignright" width="200"] Socrates Plato Paris Aristotle (it's all Greek to me - sorry couldn't help it)[/caption] Today's report on asylum seeker policy by Prime Minister Gillard's Expert Panel seems so far to have received a more positive...

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[caption id="attachment_21207" align="alignright" width="231"] Charmanjot Singh[/caption] Not before time, a NSW Legislative Council committee is considering the possible abolition of the provocation partial defence to murder. If the defence is successful it reduces murder to...

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One of the more fascinating aspects of the current NT election campaign from an afficionado's viewpoint is the phenomenon of intersecting and overlapping fear campaigns by the two major parties. Spin doctors take exactly the same set of facts (in this case NT net debt and defi...

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"One punch" or "king hit" homicides have been in the news recently, especially since the killing of young Thomas Kelly in Kings Cross in Sydney a couple of weeks ago. In the Northern Territory dreadful events of that sort have been frequently discussed ever since the killing o...

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Law and order themes are always popular in NT election campaigns, even more so than other parts of Australia. It's hardly surprising given that violent crime rates are more than twice as high as the Australian average. Almost 6% of Territorians experience a violent crime every...

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It wasn't enough that we were all recently exposed to the unbelievably tone-deaf talents of Craig Emerson. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1pEt7bgY2U Before that there was former Senator Mary Jo Fisher's very strange spoken rendition of the Rocky Horror Timewarp number, eerily...

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Maybe it's time for Labor and Julia Gillard to start thinking about their legacy rather than retaining government.((Note the supposedly incompetent Whitlam government's enduring legacy: - ending conscription and getting out of Vietnam, recognition of China, legal aid, Medicare...

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The left-leaning twitterverse went into predictable convulsions of outrage yesterday when it emerged that (equally predictably) the four Coalition States had declined to pony up dollars for the 4 year trial phase of the proposed national disability insurance scheme. However th...

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[caption id="attachment_21086" align="alignright" width="300"] Debt was a very popular theme with Malcolm as well ...[/caption] Like Tony Abbott at a federal level, NT Country Liberals leader Terry Mills has been trying to fan the flames of a shock-horror theme on government d...

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[caption id="attachment_21050" align="alignright" width="300"] Gerry Wood[/caption] On the surface at least, nothing much has changed since my first two reports on the forthcoming Northern Territory election. The mainstream media campaign is very quiet indeed, even though it's...

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Troppo author and prominent academic economist Paul Frijters has been banging away for years about how current climate change policies (including carbon pricing) are doomed to failure. The sincere (and entirely well founded) concerns of scientists and environmentalists about t...

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I've been thinking about writing something in the wake of Don Arthur's Nanny and the Libertarians post, but until now I haven't had the heart. Discussion threads on posts dealing with such issues always seem instantly to degenerate into a slanging match between, on the one han...

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[gallery columns="1"] (Click on image to enlarge)

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[caption id="attachment_20927" align="alignright" width="300"] Father Frank Flynn (left)[/caption] I was deeply disturbed by Monday's Four Corners program on child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, not because it's any news as such but because very little seems to have changed...

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Amidst all the kerfuffle about asylum seeker policy over the last week, it probably escaped most people's attention that the Gillard government's Orwellian Newspeak-rebadged version of the Northern Territory Emergency Intervention, called " Stronger Futures ", passed through P...

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Erstwhile econoblogger and now federal Labor MP Andrew Leigh has been unjustly traduced by the dastardly Liberals and has complained about it on Twitter. Somewhat uncharitably some might think, I couldn't resist a gentle return poke: As media analyst Andrew Catsaras pointed ou...

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[caption id="attachment_20702" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Sri Lankan asylum seekers in Nauru detention in 2007"] [/caption] Why doesn't the Gillard Labor government swallow its pride and simply accept the Coalition's latest compromise proposal on asylum seeker pol...

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This week's dramatic events in the Australian media have underscored the Schumpeterian "creative destruction" being wrought before our eyes by the Internet and associated technologies and cultures: Fairfax's announcement of the sacking of 1900 staff, closure of print facilitie...

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by Maria Popova - capacity to “learn, unlearn, and relearn” emotional behaviors and psychological patterns is a form of existential literacy.

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[caption id="attachment_20414" align="alignright" width="316" caption="NT government croc catcher Tommy Nichols"] [/caption] News Ltd polling guru Peter "Mumble" Brent disagrees with my assessment of the likely state of play in the run-up to the NT election on 25 August: I don...

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by Anne Twomey - Parliament's abject surrender of its powers of financial scrutiny to the Executive, just to save a few school chaplains.

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From @danilic (zoom in to read some of the smaller text)

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[caption id="attachment_20275" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Hendo"] [/caption] The Northern Territory is facing an imminent general election, on 25 August to be precise. We know this because the Henderson Labor government introduced fixed four year terms after rushi...

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[caption id="attachment_20266" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon"] [/caption] Federal Attorney-General Nicola Roxon's media intervention into the Ashby v Slipper case provoked a Twitter discussion that's worth recording and then musi...

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by Sarah Joseph - considers the moral and practical dilemmas of Australia's asylum seeker policy

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by Jeremy Waldron - some reasons for regulating hate speech are bad ones but some (like protecting dignity) are not.

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by Anne Twomey - Politicians may be more likely to funnel pre-election and other funding through properly legislated and overseen programs.

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by David Ritter - The reality for today's Australians is material abundance, accompanied by tiredness, time-poverty, jadedness and anxiety.

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by Gabrielle Appleby - States may have more to lose than money on legal bills if they join "Twiggy" Forrest in opposing Labor's mining tax.

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For quite a few years Club Troppo has had a self-appointed mission to bring the best of blogosphere writing to a wider audience. There’s a lot of rich, diverse, high quality material out there, much more so than in the mainstream “print” media, degraded as it is by competitive...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnsGc2r0m4k Coroner Elizabeth Morris's findings 1987 Royal Commission (Justice Trevor Morling) Coroner Barrtt's original findings (1981) [caption id="attachment_20121" align="aligncenter" width="500" caption="Doesn't Colin Wicking have a patent o...

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I see John Quiggin is touting Thursday (give or take a few days) as the tenth anniversary of the birth of his blog. I can't be even that precise, because this blog has been through several iterations, and the early days coincided with my marriage breakup so events tend to be a...

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I could have made this a comment to yesterday's dodgy asylum seeker dilemma post, but I thnk it deserves a thread all on its own. One of the more interesting but largely unexamined aspects of statistics about asylum seekers in Australia is the stark disparity between success/a...

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by Jonah Lehrer - Smarter people are even more vulnerable to basic thinking errors than less intelligent ones.

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These articles might be a week or two old, but they're well worth reading if you haven't done so already ...

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[caption id="attachment_20019" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Australian Aboriginal Art is much sought after internationally, but Australians overall and Aborigines themselves benefit little from it (and even less since Labor's Resale Royalty Scheme which is the subje...

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Monday evening's Four Corners program about people smugglers gaining fraudulent entry to Australia didn't derail the Refugee Action Coalition Sydney's propaganda campaign even for a moment: The Four Corners’ people smuggling program has only added to the demonisation that surr...

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[ first published at Prawfsblawg by Paul Horwitz. ] Jeffrey Rosen has a new piece at TNR about what he calls "The New Textualism" -- originalism for political liberals, in other words. It argues that liberals have failed by making non-originalist arguments for their desired re...

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[ first published at The Failed Estate by Mr Denmore. ] The debate over media regulation has reached an impasse: In the one corner, the unrepresentative left-liberal academic elitist swill seeking to silence free media with their jackbooted authoritarianism; in the other, the...

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[ first published at OpenDemocracy by Leanne Weber. ] Since 1993 a staggering 16,136 deaths ? at the borders of Europe have been recorded by the activist network UNITED ? . This will be a considerable under-estimate of the true death toll, since many deaths at sea - which acco...

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[ first published at Curl by Kate Galloway. ] First year law students are invariably regaled with the mantra of learning to think like a lawyer: that law school is all about developing this skill. As some have identified , 'thinking like a lawyer' is a nebulous concept at best...

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[ first published at Normblog by philosopher Norman Geras. ] There's a column by Simon Armitage here headed 'Poetry should be subversive'. I started reading the piece thinking 'No, it shouldn't', because I don't believe there's anything (in the way of political direction or ch...

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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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[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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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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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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Recovering journalist Mr Denmore succinctly summarises the response of the media (at least the Murdoch portion of it) to the Peter Slipper controversy: [T]he Tory regime changers of News Ltd could spin the Peter Slipper story into an imagined constitutional crisis and provide...

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[caption id="attachment_19526" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Magistrate Pat O'Shane"] [/caption] Cross-posted from CDU Law and Business Online With CDU Introduction to Public Law students due to study the topic judicial independence next week, it is an opportune time...

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Journalism academic Terry Flew blogs about a recent paper by a UK colleague: Recently published on Open Democracy has been an influential paper by Angela Phillips on “ The Future of Journalism “. The paper was presented at the Media, Power and Revolution: Making the 21st Centu...

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[caption id="attachment_19320" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Peter Singer"] [/caption] Last week's ABC QandA debate between uber-atheist Richard Dawkins and Catholic archbishop George Pell generated quite a lot of blogosphere debate , not least here at Troppo . Howev...

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It's a sad day in the Aus blogosphere. Leading left-leaning group blog Larvatus Prodeo has folded its capacious tent and joined the ranks of ex- parrots blogs. Supremo senior commissar Mark Bahnisch explains the public rationale: We collectively feel seven years is enough. I t...

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George Monbiot bells the "libertarian" cat: Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the po...

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Gillard government - Not a time for political point-scoring but the sinking is all that mongrel Abbott's fault for refusing to vote for our Malaysia Solution amendments. Coalition - Scott Morrison says "the tragedy confirmed the Coalition's worst fears" but restrains himself f...

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Brian Bahnisch over at Larvatus Prodeo has a useful summary of the state of play (such as it is) at the current Durban climate change talkfest: China, it seems, wants the continuation of the Kyoto Protocol for the developed countries, and wants them legally bound to deeper cut...

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I don't imagine we'll be running Best Blog Posts this year. Certainly I won't have time to be involved. Moreover, we never actually anointed an annual winner in any event, just an undifferentiated group of 30 or 40 of the best from the non-MSM blogosphere. However, if I WAS se...

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New article by me at CDU Law and Business Online (I've written on this topic before at Troppo but this one is aimed at law students and is therefore a bit more academic though hopefully still accessible and interesting for a general audience - feedback in that regard is invited).

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[caption id="attachment_18145" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Judge Michael Finnane"] [/caption] Justice Michael Finnane of the NSW District Court has long been one of my favourite legal characters. But then I'm not a criminal defence lawyer. If I was I'd almost certa...

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I paid a visit to Catallaxy earlier today after my Google reader informed me that Rafe Champion had awarded me and Jason Soon something called the HL Mencken Award . Although it's evidently not intended ironically, I was a bit taken aback given that my last interaction with Ra...

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The ethics of the second oldest profession - new post by me at CDU Law and Business Online .

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Apparently some US journalism academic named Tanni Haas has written a book called Making it in the Political Blogosphere: The World's Top Political Bloggers Share the Secrets to Success . I'm not interested in the subject per se , because I long ago concluded that the recipe w...

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New post by me at CDU Law and Business Online .

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I tend to get increasingly grumpy as I get to the fag end of final exam marking. This morning provided a classic example. I received in my email inbox a typically sanctimonious, patronising communication from someone in another School who is in the habit of sending frequent un...

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I cam across this post in my morning Google reader perusal: A ballot measure that StateImpact Ohio (a creation of local public media and NPR) describes as “a referendum on a constitutional amendment…aimed at keeping the national health care reform law from taking [e]ffect” won...

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One of the less significant but more entertaining aspects of yesterday's parliamentary antics surrounding passage of the carbon price legislation was Nationals Senator Ron Boswell's sledge of former colleague Tony Windsor: Nationals Senator Ron Boswell branded Mr Windsor "the...

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I usually disagree with recently reborn RWDB blogger Professor Bunyip, and his potshots at this week's principal witnesses in the Finkelstein Press Inquiry aren't exceptional in that regard. But I have to confess (not for the first time) to taking a certain guilty pleasure at...

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My post at CDU Law and Business Online .

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Update - Tweets placed in a more coherent context in In search of Qanilingus at CDU Law and Business Online . NB Australian Financial Review arguably has the best coverage and has no paywall for the weekend. downesy Stephen Downes by CDUlawschool Alan Joyce's secret ambition i...

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[caption id="attachment_17786" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="Today's NT News front page (28 October) - a true classic of the genre even for that august journal of record"] [/caption]

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I didn't really expect that my recent posts about the somewhat indeterminate aims of the "Occupy ..." protest movement would result in a lively discussion thread about what I imagined was the entirely uncontroversial proposition that the limited liability corporation is by and...

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Twitter even allows you to convey complex if slightly tongue-in-cheek ideas, but possibly only to people who bother to follow the links: 11 hours ago CDUlawschool CDU Law School 1/2 Houses not o/priced tiny.cc/iwt9a but will fall over time due boomer retirement tiny.cc/2sw9b H...

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[caption id="attachment_17754" align="alignright" width="199" caption="Celebrity lawyer Chris Murphy"] [/caption] Twitter is a much more useful social media tool than I had imagined. I've been using it for several weeks now to produce the daily links to interesting legal stori...

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[caption id="attachment_17751" align="aligncenter" width="612" caption="Occupy Brisbane signage: Vaccines? And what are "chemtrails"? What about whales or nukes or live cattle exports? Must be getting old ..."] [/caption]

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Now it may or may not have any connection with the debate about the pros and cons of the "Occupy ..." movement in Australia or elsewhere, but the following story by Cory Doctorow from techblog BoingBoing is both fascinating and disturbing, as much for the superb associated ima...

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I muse at CDU Law and Business Online about the broader implications of Eatock v Bolt in light of last night's Austin Asche Oration in Law and Governance by Federal Court Chief Justice Pat Keane. Discussion is solicited, there rather than here by preference.

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New post by me at CDU Law and Business Online . An extract: Moreover, yesterday’s behaviour by Murdoch’s Brisbane Courier-Mail of publishing edited extracts of a Liberal-National “dirt” file on Queensland Labor MPs rather suggests that it is high time for media behaviour to be...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ii8m1jgn_M&feature=player_embedded

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Anne Summers' essay on Andrew Bolt in The Monthly is free access for 24 hours. A key extract: Media and politics today are less a contest of ideas and more a continuing conflict of opinion. “Bolt’s genius is that he’s always finding the fault lines and finding an argument,” La...

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At CDU Law Online - Colourful lawyers, police and the media (the Adam Houda wrongful arrest saga).

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My blogging time over the last few days has been absorbed by creating a "social media presence" for my employer CDU Law School. It involves not only a blog but also Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and LinkedIn facilities. It's been something of a struggle to convince the powers-tha...

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I simply can't understand the strategic or even tactical thinking (if any) behind the Gillard government's decision to pursue a legislative revival of the Malaysia Solution. Neither the Coalition nor the Greens were ever going to support it, nor were many voters going to spend...

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With the noteworthy exception of the Fairfax investigative journalists especially Kate McClymont who continue to uncover new aspects of the story, Australia's predictably groupthink-oriented political media appear to have concluded (at least temporarily) that the fact NSW Poli...

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I grew up playing rugby union and rugby league in northern beaches Sydney. But you couldn't call rugby (union) Australia's national game, especially after tonight's depressing tryless loss by the Wallabies to Ireland. A top class rugby game exhibits all the skills, as we saw i...

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Two diametrically opposed takes on the Australian Bureau of Statistics' newly released 2009-10 Household Expenditure Survey : Spending survey busts struggling families myth (ABC news item): Claims that many Australians are doing it tough and households are being weighed down b...

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I've been musing about the possibilities of updating Troppo's "look and feel" (although I haven't yet caucused with Nicholas and Don about it). What I have in mind is a more "newspaper-ish" arrangement, probably a bit like Larvatus Prodeo with the front page displaying a featu...

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A comment by Chris Lloyd on my post about last week's High Court decision brings into sharp relief why it will be a high risk strategy for the Gillard government to adopt a policy of wholly onshore processing of boat-arriving (and by definition visaless) asylum seekers. That e...

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On any view yesterday's High Court decision holding the Malaysia Solution to be unlawful is a smashing blow to the Gillard government and an equally smashing win for asylum seekers and the people smugglers who capitalise on their desperation. In the slightly longer term it als...

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What with the sheer number of journalistic political pundits churning out daily "footie commentary" columns to fill the voracious maw of the media cycle, you'd imagine that no possible play would be left unanalysed. Instead we get a curious brand of groupthink where they all w...

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Yesterday's gathering of angry redneck opponents of the Gillard carbon tax on the lawns of Parliament House scored the sort of blanket MSM coverage its organisers wanted. Actual political significance appears to have little connection with electronic media decisions on what st...

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I don't generally take much notice of Henry Ergas's op-ed pieces in the Oz, but even one-eyed Coalition shills sometimes have important things to say. So it was with Ergas's article this morning drawing attention to actions by the Gillard government to diminish the role and ef...

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Sinclair Davidson at Catallaxy has a post musing about whether carbon emissions trading permits would be regarded as property rights which would entitle the holder to compensation if abolished by a future federal government. The obvious context is the fact that Tony Abbott has...

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I've long been puzzled why Michelle Grattan is seen as an eminence grise of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. Unlike her corpulent male counterpart Laurie Oakes, who still occasionally produces major scoops and penetrating political analyses, I can't remember the last time Grat...

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The reported death of old-time Sydney crim ''Nervous'' Norm Beves has provoked my nostalgia gland. According to the SMH : Nervous Norm's criminal ineptitude was so legendary that for years ''Norm's form'' was used as the case study on recidivism for police officers studying to...

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As ABC 7:30 highlighted last night , it appears that the Gillard government is about to formally sign the deal with Malaysia that will see boat-arriving asylum seekers returned to the back of the queue in that country without processing. Assuming that UNHCR accepts it (apparen...

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I reckon this is the most succinct, accurate and balanced summary I've read of the current state of the carbon pricing debate: Pricing carbon in Australia is about pricing carbon, not saving the planet. As an insurance policy, we need to have a soft mechanism in place that can...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVGcfqj04Qk&feature=related Last night Jen prevailed on me to watch an episode of the doco series The First Australians . Such programs tend towards the irritatingly sanctimonious and question-begging in my experience, and that may well be true o...

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Tonight's 7:30 Report featured a story on gay marriage (yes, I know the "report" bit has been deleted, presumably to signal the new post-Red Kezza regime). Strangely though, it didn't even mention in passing the fact that there is significant doubt as to whether the Commonweal...

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I couldn't help thinking that the media's obsession with presenting a superficial appearance of ideological balance might have gone a little too far when I discovered that The Age has not only a religion correspondent but an atheism columnist . The latter rather crassly bills...

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According to the ABC's Barrie Cassidy "even the most popular decisions taken by this government [are] essentially public relations disasters". It's one of those self-fulfilling media memes, resulting partly from Labor's deficient PR skills and partly from Tony Abbott's cynical...

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My Re-imagining Australian federalism post a couple of days ago resulted in an interesting discussion with Mike Pepperday. Mike argued that my suggestion for tweaking federal division of powers by having the States negotiate for a more adequate assured share of Commonwealth-ge...

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ABC's Alan Kohler is touting an idea I floated a few months ago , namely beefing up Infrastructure Australia's role in assessing federally funded infrastructure projects. However Kohler advocates stripping politicians of the decision-making power and vesting it entirely in IA...

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According to this article , Apple is aiming at converting computer users to using Apple's servers to store their files instead of their own computer's hard drive. It would certainly simplify mobile computing and eliminate problems with syncing between hardware platforms so you...

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Big Tobacco has been bullying and blustering for some time about federal government plans to legislate for plain packaging of cigarettes (i.e. devoid of all branding, trademarks etc). They've threatened to challenge such legislation in the High Court as an acquisition of prope...

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The role of local government in Australia's federal constitutional system is one I've been thinking about while working up the People’s Northern Territory Constitutional Convention wiki. Constitutional recognition of local government was one of several seemingly innocuous and...

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Almost as depressing as the evident plagiarism in HillBillySkeleton's post-truth politics post is its unremitting, one-eyed left wing bias. The Political Sword is the ideological mirror image of Andrew Bolt's blog only much less entertaining. The most recent post there is a le...

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I have distinctly ambivalent views about Statehood for the Northern Territory, as long-time readers will have noted. I even mused not so long ago about whether the existing grant of self-government should be revoked and other governance models explored instead. More recently I...

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This year is the centenary of the handover of control of the Northern Territory to the Commonwealth by South Australia in 1911. It's a fascinating but not very well known story with many dimensions. I was recently asked to deliver a paper to the Northern Territory Historical S...

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I am hoping one or more of the economics and public policy gurus who read and write for Troppo might be be able to help me with the following question: Does the Commonwealth Grants Commission analyse and report on the way States and Territories actually spend their untied gran...

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I heartily agree with Ross Gittins' assessment of Tony Abbott, and I also tend to agree with Harry Clarke about the respective current merits of Labor and the Coalition, although I'm not quite as scathing about Labor and certainly not a long-time Liberal supporter: Because of...

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At exactly the time late last year when the Wikileaks saga was occupying seemingly endless media column centimetres, important amendments were implemented to the Commonwealth's Freedom of Information regime. They flowed from a reform process implemented by Senator John Faulkne...

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I notice that a UK MP has just "outed" soccer player Ryan Giggs as the prominent sportsman who had a well-publicised extra-marital affair. His identity was (and remains) the subject of a "super-injunction" issued by the UK High Court and based on rights to privacy in the Human...

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I wanted to comment on Nicholas Gruen's recent post titled the future of tertiary education , but I didn't have time and there was too much I wanted to say. Hence this post. I agree with most of Nicholas's points (some with qualifications) but there's much more that needs sayi...

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Freedom of expression in Australia is arguably freer than it has ever been, both legally and practically. Oppressive censorship of art and literature is largely a dim memory from the distant past (leaving aside infrequent moral panics like the Henson naked kiddie pic affair)....

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It's hard to deny that the Gillard government's emerging new asylum seeker policy represents a thinly disguised reversion to Howard's Pacific Solution, although both Gillard and Stephen Smith are giving denial a good shot. The thing is that I suspect most "punters" will neithe...

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Now I realise I'm courting extreme feminist abuse by this post, but so be it. Australian popular culture always seems to follow North American examples no matter how silly e.g. "gangsta rap". So I suppose it was inevitable that the phenomenon of the " slutwalk " would rapidly...

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Nicholas Gruen's post about Einstellung (a person's predisposition to solve a given problem in a specific manner even though there are "better" or more appropriate methods of solving it) has given me an idea. I would like to devise a couple of seminars for undergraduate Law st...

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Last night's riot and torching of the Villawood Detention Centre inevitably brings the asylum seeker issue back into the political spotlight, especially on top of the similar incident at Christmas Island a few weeks ago. Some "johnny-come-lately" Troppo readers might have gain...

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This story triggered a bit of childhood reminiscence, not to mention reflection on how times have changed: A West Australian teacher who allegedly tied a five-year-old boy to a chair to punish him for misbehaving has been stood aside while the case is investigated. When I was...

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With miners and tobacco companies running well-funded campaigns against perectly reasonable government policies, it's hardly surprising that the licensed clubs industry is looking at similar measures to combat imposition of compulsory pre-commitment settings on poker machines...

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Fairfax columnist John Birmingham's column raises some interesting issues about the practice of tipping for provision of goods and services, especially the aggressive way tipping is pursued in the US where restaurant tips of up to 20% of the bill appear to be the norm. In Aust...

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Author and Fairfax columnist John Birmingham posts a truly delightful splenetic prescription for appropriate responses to the odious Andrew Bolt, in the context of current racial vilification proceedings against him by a polyglot assortment of prominent Aboriginal activists: T...

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Murdered toddler Evelyn Greenup Last night's Four Corners on the Bowraville murders of three Aboriginal children some 20 years ago in northern New South Wales made rivetting TV. It painted a picture of a dysfunctional Aboriginal community riddled with alcohol and substance abu...

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The Hatfield clan circa 1897 I had a long chat recently with an old mate from my politics days who I hadn't seen for some time. The conversation turned to Aboriginal affairs issues, as it does when you've both worked with and for Indigenous groups for the best part of thirty y...

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There's a certain macabre fascination to watching the NSW ALP's post-election recriminations , a bit like watching the aftermath of an horrific train smash. However, it's an essentially pointless exercise given that the size of the Coalition's majority means that there isn't a...

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Retired diplomat Bruce Haigh has a valid point when he refers to Gillard government threats to refuse to issue visas on "character grounds" to Christmas Island asylum seeker rioters as "revengeful". More accurately it's cynical playing to the populist gallery on a par with Ton...

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The latest situation with damaged Japanese nuclear power plants seems if anything more potentially dire and apocalyptic than what prompted my comment on Don Arthur's post : Seems to me that whatever now happens the nuclear power option is almost certainly a dead duck in all we...

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A lot of nonsense is being written by pundits about Julia Gillard's supposedly terminal leadership situation in the light of the carbon tax issue. The reality is that if she manages to broker a deal that gets through Parliament this year, then she'll be seen as a strong leader...

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Happiness is a recurrent topic in the blogosphere, not least at Troppo where several of us have posted abou t it more than once. There's even a strand of economics that focuses on studying happiness. In part that's why it struck me as a bit strange that Australian writer David...

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I was contemplating writing a post about an ignorant, self-interested op-ed by billionaire mining heiress Gina Reinhardt until I asked myself the question: what's the point? It's a question whose answer increasingly constrains my blogging output after almost 9 years at the gam...

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See over page for Troppo's exclusive revelations. The other day I discovered a new expression: "click-bait". It was used on ABC Media Watch in connection with a concocted story repeatedly published on News Ltd websites about a German bloke allegedly killed and eaten by his own...

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God help the Gillard government with someone like Wayne Swan trying to explain the carbon tax : Mr Swan is now distancing Labor from the term "carbon tax" and accused Opposition Leader Tony Abbott of lying about how it will operate. "What we're talking about here is an interim...

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Like Canadian UQ legal academic James Allan , former NSW Premier Bob Carr is a vehement long-term opponent of a bill or charter of rights for Australia (or any State). A post on Carr's blog only last week confirms that his attitude has not mellowed: More judge-made law a fine...

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Veteran econoblogger John Quiggin is the blogosphere's pitbull terrier. Once he gets his teeth into an issue he just won't let go. One of JQ's current worthy obsessions is the utter untrustworthiness of Murdoch's flagship newspaper The Australian (see here , here and here ): A...

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I was reading an article the other day that I can't now find, by a pollster whose name I can't remember (increasing age is like that). It dealt with Coalition strategist Mark Textor's highly successful four part 2010 campaign theme for Tony Abbott: stop the boats, no big new t...

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The ABC's Chris Uhlmann is undoubtedly correct in detecting in the actions of Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison a clear intent on the part of the Coalition to play the race/immigration/asylum card against Labor. It's a recurrent gambit in Australian politics, played successfully...

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Jon Faine - the Alan Jones of the Left? In a Coalition government the Immigration portfolio can be a career-enhancing opportunity. A Minister with a bleeding heart reputation like Philip Ruddock can prove that he's just as capable of ruthlessly opportunistic bastardry as anyon...

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As PollBludger notes , the latest numbers present conflicting stories of the state of play in federal politics. Essential Research shows Labor and the Coalition still neck and neck as they were at the election and have been ever since. Nielsen on the other hand shows the Coali...

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I should concede that the analogy drawn in this post between Dave Tollner and Tony Abbott is an imperfect one (image from NT News ) Northern Territory politics is nearly always very silly but equally unfailingly highly entertaining. It was the inspiration for the "Troppo" in t...

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Observant Media watchers might have noticed a story on the ABC The Drum site this morning to the effect that Club Troppo and Larvatus Prodeo had quit the Domain blog group headed by Graham Young's Online Opinion . LP's letter to Graham was apparently leaked by person/s unknown...

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* Below is a guest post written by Ken G, a long-time Darwin resident and media/IT professional. Ken discussed his ideas not only with Darwin "storm chaser" enthusiasts but with Darwin residents who went through Cyclone Tracy. It's a keen amateur perspective on a frightening w...

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Christopher Pearson writes in the Weekend Australian about a current situation involving Club Troppo and other prominent oz political blogs: GRAHAM Young is the founding editor of a well-regarded e-journal called On Line Opinion, and is a regular contributor to The Australian....

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In Part I of this post I explored factors that might account for the massive proliferation in the volume of legislation and subordinate regulation in Australia over the last 30 years or so. The post was prompted by an article by the IPA's Chris Berg. In the previous part I sug...

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Salma Hayek, who is apparently unrelated to Friedrich and may well be totally uninterested in either rule of law or regulatory reform ... That isn't gratuitous , is it? Chris Berg of the conservative thinktank Institute of Public Affairs takes aim at the proliferation of regul...

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I wonder why oz theatre icon David Williamson reacted with complacent high dudgeon to a bitchy review on Crikey of his latest turgid thespian offering Don Parties On ? After all, the Murdoch and Fairfax reviews were almost as negative, and redoubtable blogging theatre critic A...

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Links to follow developments : BOM map and updates ; Yasi Twitter feed compiled by ABC The frightening power of even a modest cyclone has to be experienced to really understand just how big a threat such a weather event poses. Having been through a couple of small-ish cyclones...

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Not so long ago I published a post titled: The future of journalism and blogging – chapter 957 . Essentially I argued that, despite all the despairing navel-gazing and prognostications of doom for MSM news and political journalism posed by free content on the Internet, especia...

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Recent NT News discussion on the perennial topic of crime and punishment seems to have generated more heat than light. Chief Justice Trevor Riley wrote an excellent piece pointing out basic facts about the NT criminal justice system, not least the fact that NT judges and magis...

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Being in holiday mode, my brain is deeply immersed in trivial thoughts, not least who the Australian selectors could sensibly pick to begin the process of rebuilding a competitive cricket team. However an even more burning question is this: why are there so many cooking progra...

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ABC The Drum/Unleashed editor Jonathan Green a couple of days ago: Waiting until just after 3.30 this afternoon before fronting the media and addressing today's asylum seeker tragedy made Opposition spokesman Scott Morrison look the model of restraint. "A day of sadness as wor...

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For five years now (ages in blogosphere terms) Club Troppo and On Line Opinion have sponsored a showcase of Australian independent blogging, which we call Best Blog Posts of <year>’. With Christmas fast approaching, the time has come to launch ‘Best Blog Posts of 2010?. On Lin...

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Last of the year. We're going into recess until after New Year. BTW We'll be doing Best Blog Posts again in conjunction with Online Opinion. I'll post a more detailed notice later today. Sinclair Davidson on Oakeshott's peddling "rumour" that govt colluded in sinking Xmas Isla...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mF0USo9vaGw I've decided to start posting the Missing Link Daily Twitter production here as a daily digest. Note that I cover "alternative media" (non-MSM fairly loosely defined) as well as blogs. Feedback welcome. Anyway I'll be suspending it fo...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiuQDyGrp-g Apparently thirty or more asylum seekers drowned as SIEV sinks under Christmas Island cliffs. It's bound to have huge domestic political ramifications. Andrew Bolt is already fulminating and demanding Gillard's resignation. He's an od...

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Not so long ago economist Paul Frijters mused about drug legalisation here at Troppo. It seems that Paul is an international trendsetter. Now economist elder statesman Gary Becker and the world's most prolific judge/legal academic Richard Posner are musing on the same topic at...

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Nicholas Gruen posted on the weekend about a South Australian defamation matter called Manock v Channel Seven Adelaide Pty Ltd which has been going for almost 7 years and still hasn't even reached trial. Nicholas quite rightly cited the case as a good example of the deplorable...

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Fatuous Sydney 2UE radio reporter Latika M Bourke not only won the 2010 Walkley Young Australian Journalist of the Year award but has now been employed by the ABC as its Social Media Reporter . I've unwillingly been inflicted with Ms Bourke's vacuous style of "journalism" whil...

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In a piece of news some will regard as predictably disappointing, the Cancun Climate Conference has reached an agreement , but its targets are both non-binding and fairly modest (reputedly a [combined] reduction in emissions of 13-16% by 2020), and include both developed and d...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8y-_vaf6iY&feature=player_embedded Current developments in e-books and e-readers may end up having dramatic effects on the mainstream newspaper industry, about whose future I've been musing in recent days . A significant part of the problems bei...

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Anyone looking for a link between my post earlier today on the future of Fairfax and Paul Frijter's two posts on the Wikileaks saga need go no further than a story just published on both Fairfax sites: Rudd's revenge on US Kevin Rudd retaliates after diplomatic revelations abo...

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Crikey boss and former Fairfax editor Eric Beecher published a scathing opinion piece about his former employer in yesterday's newsletter, in the wake of the sudden departure of Fairfax CEO Brian McCarthy . Of course, as a direct Fairfax competitor, we should take Beecher's op...

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There are some common elements between my recent post , which suggested a new asylum seeker assessment regime to take the place of universal mandatory detention during assessment, and proposals outlined last week by the Coalition Immigration spokesperson Scott Morrison in an a...

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Some readers may have noticed from the "sticky" permanent post at the top of Troppo's front page that we've revived the old Missing Link feature in two separate forms: a weekly themed digest by Don Arthur; a daily Twitter-based service compiled mostly by me and delivered via N...

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An article by David Mallard at New Matilda reflects on some observations (canards?) by the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Judge (!!) about the allegedly malign influence of the Internet generally and social media in particular on the integrity of jury deliberati...

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Peter Timmins reviews the progress through the Senate (or rather lack of same) of a proposed limited "shield" law to protect the confidentiality of journalists' sources. As Peter noted, I gave evidence and made a submission to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee on t...

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Letter to the Editor NT News: I don’t hold any brief for the CLP, or Labor for that matter (although I did a long time ago). However I have strong moral objections when I see someone’s reputation trashed unfairly. That especially includes politicians, a human sub-species about...

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I couldn't agree more with FOI expert Peter Timmins about the latest Wikileaks "disclosures". I have no idea whether Assange is a rapist or not, but he's certainly succeeded in setting the cause of public sector whistleblowing back by a decade or more. The documents so far dis...

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The publication of an edited version of my Troppo post about abolition of mandatory universal detention of asylum seekers at the ABC Unleashed site has certainly been an interesting experience. Fairly predictably it attracted the sort of polarised "howling into the darkness" c...

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I'm looking for a good web designer who can integrate a web presence with Facebook and Twitter and who also has a working familiarity with higher education learning management systems and in particular Blackboard. Can someone point me towards a suitable candidate?

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Journalists love nothing better than to navel gaze about the future of newspapers and the mainstream media in the Age of Social Media. Some journalists even see social media as threatening their long-term career prospects. It's probably inevitable given the struggle newspapers...

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This NT story might bear watching for its possible national implications: The Northern Territory's attorney-general is seeking an investigation into claims Federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott and his NT counterpart tried to bribe a candidate not to run in the 2010 federal el...

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The release in federal Parliament yesterday of the report into last year's Montara oil spill off Australia's north-west coast is just the latest chapter in a saga of NT government incompetence: "Industry, government and regulators must be absolutely committed to a culture of h...

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(Hat-tip Dale from Faith in Honest Doubt ) Although I intensely dislike the rabid intolerant atheism of people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, it's certainly no worse than the propaganda of some of the more cretinous American God-botherers: http://www.youtube.co...

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At last count eight people had been seriously injured and seven arrested after an extended family group returned to the Central Australian remote Indigenous community of Yuendumu, having earlier fled to Adelaide to escape "payback violence" after a stabbing murder in Alice Spr...

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It always seems to be two steps forward and then two back with Australia's asylum seeker policy. In the wake of the High Court's M61/M69 decision, DIAC has apparently begun offering all offshore asylum seeker s who have been refused refugee status a renewed assessment and pres...

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I can finally see the point of Twitter. It lets you inflict isolated thoughts on people that are too trivial or even self-indulgent to merit a full blog post but that you need to share. The Librarians is the best Australian TV sit-com. Ever. Discuss. My ideal final episode: Oi...

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Troppo co-host Nicholas Gruen made an impressively well-groomed appearance on Alan Kohler's Inside Business program on ABC TV this morning. Nicholas canvassed a really interesting idea I don't immediately recall his having yet ventilated here at Troppo. It's the concept of por...

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Around here at Troppo we've been musing for a while about how Labor in general and Julia Gillard in particular need to connect the government's derailed policy agenda to some overarching vision or set of values likely to inspire commitment and enthusiasm from the erstwhile sup...

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Apart from the issues canvassed in my previous post about yesterday's High Court judgment on the validity of aspects of the Commonwealth's offshore "boat people" asylum seeker processes, the sixty four million dollar question now is whether it will affect any attempt by the Gi...

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Like David Marr , I've been waiting for a while for the High Court's decision in the M61 and M69 case. The applicant's arguments challenge on various constitutional and statutory interpretation grounds the legal validity of the current asylum seeker processing regime, and in p...

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High profile constitutional law academic George Williams argues in today's SMH that the federal laws prohibiting self-governing Commonwealth territories (NT, ACT and Norfolk Island) from legalising voluntary euthanasia should be repealed. As a Territorian and public law academ...

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Australia's pro- and anti-population growth advocates seem to be competing with each other to see who can produce the most glib, fact-free piece of propaganda. Dick Smith's entertaining anti-growth advocacy-doco Dick Smith's Population Puzzle , screened in the lead-up to the r...

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In a fairly desultory post , Helen 'Skepticlawyer' Dale presents the right wing de rigueur view that the United Nations is a waste of space dominated by corrupt third world regimes and should be abolished. Her pretext is the imminent establishment of a new UN agency for women'...

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As I've mentioned previously, I usually participate on a Friday morning panel show on ABC Local Radio here in Darwin. It's called 3 Big Questions but it really includes 2 serious ones and a rather silly one to keep things entertaining. Today's silly question was a compound one...

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Prompted by University of Queensland's Graeme Turner , Mark Bahnisch has a pair of posts over at Larvatus Prodeo asking rhetorically whether the Humanities at Australian universities are dying. As Turner puts it: ONCE, the humanities were fundamental to the idea of the univers...

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Bob Durnan is an old ALP colleague who has worked in Indigenous communities in central Australia for the best part of 30 years. Like me, he has witnessed the tragic deterioration of living conditions in many if not most remote communities and town camps in the Northern Territo...

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Unlike most of my fellow Troppo bloggers, my knowledge of economics could easily be encapsulated on the back of a small postcard. Perhaps that's why this post by Steve Kates on Catallaxy puzzled me: This article from The New York Times on the end of Keynesian economics in Euro...

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The current impasse between large mining companies and the Gillard government over its proposed resource rent tax looks like yet another example of inept public relations if not worse: JULIA Gillard says it is "obvious common sense" that higher state mining royalties would not...

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See sidebar at right for links to Missing Link "best blog/alt media" reading recommendations. If you see an excellent post in your blog ramblings please link it here with a brief explanation/review so we can consider including it.

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Click here if you have 7 spare minutes or so to listen to an excerpt from an ABC Local Radio panel show I usually do on Friday mornings. Update - Roger from Values Australia has also milked the McKillop cow (though rather less light-heartedly than yours truly) as has Adele Hor...

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Gummo Trotsky, the Methuselah of erudite commentary, now has his very own blog . And he's "come out" under his real name, what's more. He calls the blog Sardonic Detachment Therapy. Gummo can be sardonic, but detached? I think I'll keep calling him Gummo anyway. I'm a creature...

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I made a comment here a couple of days ago which I believe expresses the frustrations of many about the chronic failure of the Labor government, both under Rudd and Gillard, to effectively prosecute the case for reform in just about every area: The puzzle here, as in contempor...

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NSW Premier Kristina Keneally has continued her stoush with Prime Minister Julia Gillard, described being forced to choose between signing up to uniform national workplace laws and $144 million in federal grants as a "Sophie's choice". I wonder whether the photogenic but seemi...

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Julia Gillard's tactic of targetting Tony Abbott's refusal of an offer to join her trip to Afghanistan was certainly a bit tacky , but it pales into insignificance beside the cynical efforts of Abbott and his team to extract maximum partisan advantage from the Afghan engagemen...

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I'm seriously conflicted by the debate over Labor's National Broadband Network. On one hand, the future of CDU's online Bachelor of Laws programs, whose creation and development I oversee, is heavily dependent on the availability of almost universal truly fast broadband within...

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Judging by this afternoon's headlines , PM Gillard may be taking seriously Independent Rob Oakeshott's bid to be appointed Speaker of the House of Representatives. I tend to agree with Dolly Downer's observation that Oakeshott just doesn't have the maturity or parliamentary ex...

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It won't get published because it's too long, but worth saying just the same: Dear Sir, Peter Murphy's always entertaining pro-CLP spin doctoring column sometimes obscures issues that really warrant more serious reflection. This week's column (12 September) blaming Warren Snow...

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As part of my duties as CDU's designated political analyst/commentator for NT electoral purposes, I've been delving into the interstices of the booth by booth results in the NT seats of Solomon and Lingiari . The results are quite fascinating, especially in Lingiari. Starting...

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What if the Greens make amending the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 to provide for at least some measure of proportional representation in the House of Representatives? Should Bob Brown do so? Should either major party agree? The Greens would have to be tempted to use this po...

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Dated but you get the picture ... Given that the most likely state of play in the House of Reps after distribution of postal and prepoll votes is 73 Coalition and 72 ALP or vice versa, we might yet witness a Labor minority government . The Greens' Adam Bandt and independent/Gr...

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I'm quite puzzled by the negative, disillusioned tone of much of the blogosphere and MSM commentariat coverage of the federal election campaign. I've actually been quite heartened, almost inspired, by it. The advent of 21st century versions of old-fashioned "town hall" partici...

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Dear editor I wonder how many of the 84% of NT News respondents who think NT courts are too soft on criminals are aware of any of the following indisputable facts: NT judges and magistrates are tougher on crime than other states and territories. The NT has an imprisonment rate...

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The centrist and left-leaning commentariat have unanimously condemned Julia Gillard's (non) stance on climate change policy, an exercise in groupthink that would be stunning if it wasn't so predictable. Ben Cubby , Peter Hartcher , Lenore Taylor and Shaun Carne y all think Gil...

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Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey must be hoping that very few voters have any understanding of the basic principles of statutory interpretation. Any who did would instantly realise that the Coalition's promise to amend the Electoral Act to force unions to repay the Australian Electo...

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Grossly unfair but wickedly funny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PE_vr0t3FA

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It's been raining on and off just about every day in Darwin for more than two weeks. Who cares you might ask? Well, it's the dry season. You get the occasional shower in the dry season but not rain for weeks on end. It's certainly never happened before in the 27 years I've liv...

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I have long viewed sporadically gifted journalist Christopher Hitchens as a caricatured bullying buffoon, but until quite recently I admired Richard Dawkins . Years ago I read The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker with fascination, along with the works of fellow biological...

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Sri Lankan asylum seekers in detention on Nauru in 2007 I was asked an interesting question this morning (well, interesting to me anyway) by a local media person about whether the seemingly imminent transfer of Christmas Island asylum seeker detainees to Darwin would mean an u...

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ABC political analyst Antony Green is predicting that Kevin Rudd will seek a double dissolution election in July-August. A double dissolution election can't be held after 10 August because Constitution s57 forbids a double dissolution within 6 months of the expiry of the House...

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I'm a bit conflicted about Rudd's health plan. On the one hand, it's fairly clear that the States engage in a degree of cost-shifting and even cynical pork-barrelling over health. I'm sure it isn't a coincidence that the two NSW hospitals most often in the news for their decre...

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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 A...

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I'm occasionally asked by local ABC Morning Show host Leon Compton to be a panellist on a Friday segment titled "3 Big Questions". It involves three local media or superannuated political luminaries musing about political and sometimes more general issues of the day. I was on...

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I always suspected that Tony Abbott was a sheep in wolf's clothing, a bit of a wimp when it came to the crunch. Now it's been confirmed. Abbott reckons that Peter Garrett should be charged with industrial manslaughter over the ceiling insulation debacle. But the truth is far m...

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In addition to Chris Lloyd's contribution below, several other bloggers have already published posts on last week's Federal Court decision ( Larrikin Music Publishing Pty Ltd v EMI Songs Australia Pty Limited ) about copyright breach in Men at Work's iconic pop anthem "Down Un...

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The global warming debate has morphed into Mondo Bizzaro. Rudd is capable of mounting a succinct and persuasive explanation of his emissions trading scheme but chooses not to do so, preferring to shift the electoral focus to subjects the pollsters tell him are more unequivocal...

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Remember me? That grumpy old bloke who once obsessively spewed forth half-baked opinions here at Troppo? After being AWOL for some time a comeback of sorts seems imminent. I'm experiencing fitful urges to post, usually on very silly topics like whether Jen may have committed r...

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For four years now (ages in blogosphere terms) Club Troppo and On Line Opinion have sponsored a showcase of Australian independent blogging, which we call Best Blog Posts of <year>'. With Christmas fast approaching, the time has come to launch 'Best Blog Posts of 09'. On Line...

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It now looks as if Malcolm Turnbull is gone for all money as federal Liberal leader (a shame from my viewpoint). Meanwhile, Rudd Labor is ramping up the rhetoric hinting at a double dissolution election. But is that really likely? There are a couple of major factors suggesting...

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The chances of the forthcoming UN Climate Change Conference actually reaching a workable global agreement to reduce greenhouse emissions sufficiently to make a major impact on warming are remote. In an article at Online Opinion , three academics from the Centre for Global Stud...

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With Rudd Labor's sudden slump in opinion polls this morning, I can't help saying "I told you so" (in my recent post about asylum seeker policy ): Indonesia is doing all that it can to stem the flow, but with partial success at best. It is unlikely that action by Indonesia alo...

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It's becoming increasingly clear that the only likely outcome of the current manoeuvrings over the Rudd government's Emissions Trading Scheme is that it will either be rejected by the Senate or so drastically watered down as to be almost entirely useless. If (like me) you acce...

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The decision to grant protection visas to all 42 Afghan asylum seekers from the SIEV36, the boat that exploded off Ashmore Reef on 16 April killing 5 people, may prove to be one of the biggest political and policy mistakes the Rudd government has made. Presumably they were all...

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My family is staunchly lower class English on my dad's side (his mother emigrated from England as a lady's maid and then started a chicken farm in Greenacre in Sydney's western suburbs) and bog Irish/Scottish Catholic on my mum's side. However, not much is known about my mater...

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Independent MLA and "kingmaker" Gerry Wood has just about made up his mind how he'll vote on Friday's Legislative Assembly no confidence motion, and is delivering tantalising cryptic hints: Mr Wood says he has almost made up his mind and will tell the leaders of his decision b...

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Friday's NT Legislative Assembly debate will probably be more peaceful than proceedings in Taiwan's parliament, but you never know ... This Friday 14 August will witness the NT Legislative Assembly debating a "no confidence" motion in the current Henderson Labor government (se...

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As Charles Darwin University's designated "expert" political commentator, I've been doing lots of media interviews in the last week or so for both national and local media. As many Troppo readers will have noticed, the Henderson Labor government seems to be in the process of s...

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Last days in the sanctuary of a loving family Body still and quiet now the great loving generous funny-if-infuriating spirit has left it behind ... When the doctor telling Dave he was about to die started crying, he placed his hand gently on her shoulder saying "Don't worry Do...

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About 10 days ago all State and Territory Attorneys-General agreed to enact uniform anti-bikie gang laws . The new uniform national regime will be modelled on the Victorian regime which is broader than three very similar laws recently enacted in South Australia and New South W...

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Sydney Morning Herald 29 May 2009 An abattoir worker has been jailed for eight years for raping his 14-year-old stepdaughter and then blaming his crime on her wearing short skirts around the house. The man, who cannot be named as it would identify his young victim, tried to se...

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David, Cate and Andrew in happier (very recent) times - from SMH It's always sad when heroic high achievers begin to lose their powers, still more when they fail to age gracefully and succumb instead to bitterness and envy. But so it seems to be with David Williamson, once sai...

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Ken: G'day Tab. Tab: G'day Ken. What are ya doin'? Ken: Just sitting here reading the Sunday paper and eating these squid satays ... Tab: Mind if I join you? Ken: Not at all. Pull up a chair ... Tab: What are you doing these days? (I represented him at one stage in one of his...

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It's quite tricky to teach undergraduate law students about the Whitlam Dismissal. You have to cover it because it's the only example of exercise of vice-regal reserve powers of dismissal of an elected government since federation (at least at federal level; there's also Sir Ph...

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Australia's economy may be officially in recession, but Lateral Economics at least is doing its bit to reduce the effects. In addition to the research assistant Nicholas advertised for earlier this week, we also need someone with some web design and Wordpress backend experienc...

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The High Court this morning rejected an appeal by former radio star John Laws' employer Radio 2UE against a defamation verdict for comments he made about fellow shockjock Ray Chesterton. The SMH seems to summarise the judgment accurately as far as I can see from a quick scan r...

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I see PJ O'Rourke is in the country to strut his schtick for the Centre for Independent Studies. He wrote an opinion piece in yesterday's Oz along predictable lines: the keynesian socialists are squandering our money on all these GFC stimulus measures, when the best thing to d...

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The Thomas v Mowbray thread has taken an unexpected but fascinating turn, at least from my viewpoint as a public lawyer. It's kickstarted a productive debate about the form of an Australian bill of rights. As this is only tangentially related to the topic of the post, I've dec...

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Occasional visitor "Edward Carson" wrote a somewhat cynical comment on my previous post about asylum seekers : Does this mean that if they fill out the appropriate forms in duplicate, we are then obliged to accept them all into our country? Although I strongly suspect "Edward"...

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"Jihad" Jack Thomas I've been meaning for ages to write about the High Court's 2007 decision in Thomas v Mowbray , in fact ever since it was handed down. Complex constitutional decisions are really difficult to write about in a way that's accessible and interesting to a genera...

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Yesterday's "boat people" explosion near Ashmore Reef west of Darwin, in which 3 people were apparently killed outright and many more seriously injured, has eerie if obvious parallels with the "children overboard" saga of 2001 which helped John Howard to his third successive e...

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President Iloilo [ Cross-posted from the blog I run for CDU public law students ] There doesn't seem to be anything especially remarkable about the current (2009) Fiji coup whereby Fiji's ageing and ailing President Josefa Iloilo sacked the Fiji Court of Appeal which only last...

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Not so long ago Nicholas Gruen published a post lamenting the extraordinary cost and complexity of civil litigation in Australia and common law countries generally. He ascribed it partly to the adversarial system and canvassed the possible advantages of a more European-style i...

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(*This was posted elsewhere for my CDU Intro to Public Law students, so it might be a bit dry and technical for some. Nevertheless others might find it worth reading) The Rudd government's proposed reforms to the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Cth) ("FOI Act" ), sponsored by...

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East Point beach, pretty much where the channel and lock would go through for "Arafura Harbour" according to the concept plan. I suspect this aspect of the plan will change to force the channel to emerge on the north side of East Point, which would make a lot more sense. I've...

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Richard Ackland has an enjoyable rant this week about an upcoming UN talkfest in Geneva known as Durban II. It's organised by the UN Human Rights Council, which in a delightful (but typical of the UN) irony is chaired by Libya. As Ackland points out: The Human Rights Council i...

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Fiji's president takes charge (SMH) Fiji is in a state of political flux after President President Ratu Josefa Iloilo announced he had repealed the country's constitution, appointed himself head of state and set a 2014 election deadline. He said on Friday he had also sacked al...

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Internet company to be sold by 2022 (SMH) THE Rudd Government will next month try to lock Parliament in to approving the sale of its new broadband company by 2022 in a bid to avoid a repeat of the bitter Senate debates over the privatisation of Telstra. In an interview with th...

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Here's a piece of blatant and unashamed recycling. I run a discussion board for my Intro to Public Law students where they're welcome to post and discuss news items with a public law angle. Over the weekend one of them posted a link to the current stoush between Defence Minist...

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A couple of weeks ago recently retired High Court Justice Michael McHugh entered the public debate on whether Australia should have a legislated bill of rights. The debate (such as it is) was one of the "outcomes" of the Rudd government's 2020 Summit, and more recently led to...

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All subjects are linked to crocodiles. Just ask the NT News ( via Flickr ) High Court challenge jeopardises $900 bonus - Sydney Morning Herald (19 March) - THE High Court has agreed to hear a challenge to the legality of the Federal Government's proposed $900 tax bonus to 8.7...

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From Sydney Morning Herald (I'm sure they won't mind) The strict political neutrality of Australia's Governor-General is a crucially important democratic principle, but one whose mention usually elicits a combination of boredom and baffled incomprehension from most people. It'...

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News that South Australian Premier Mike Rann is contemplating a High Court challenge to the federal Murray-Darling water deal is good news for constitutional lawyers, because it would result in the resolution of a question raised before Federation but never litigated. Such a c...

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Like Australians generally, bloggers are donating generously to the Victorian bushfires relief appeal, over at John Quiggin's place and LP . And this morning news here in Darwin praised the old diggers at Darwin RSL for raising $20,000 over the weekend, while earlier news reve...

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After uncomplainingly sitting through two episodes of Brideshead Revisited earlier this evening (even, I confess, with a degree of appreciation I didn't feel on first viewing 25 years ago), the prospect of backing up for Mansfield Park was a bridge too far, despite the lusciou...

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Gary Linnell in today's Daily Telegraph asserts that debate about capital punishment is taboo in Australia, a claim which is rather negated by the fact that his own death penalty advocacy is carried not only in the Tele but on Australia's mostly widely read online news site an...

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We've always had a pretty laissez faire attitude towards commenting at Club Troppo. Contrary to the impressions of some, we have only ever banned two or three persistent trolls, and only ever delete comments that are persistently abusive or defamatory. However, there have been...

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[ republished from today's Northern Territory News ] The political wash-up from the recent coronial inquest into the death of Margaret Winter at Royal Darwin Hospital in December 2006 is proving messy indeed. Claims this week by Health Minister Chris Burns that he was lied to...

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I suppose it isn't surprising that sentiment among media professionals about the future of newspapers is so negative. Fairfax's recent culling of several hundred journos in the face of a collapsing revenue bottom line has brought the whole issue into sharp focus, as have simil...

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Labor-leaning Sunday Territorian columnist Scott Stirling wrote last week about the challenges facing the CLP Opposition. However, they pale by comparison with the situation faced by the Henderson government. Some are purely political problems in the wake of Labors recent clos...

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The recent resignation of former Labor MLA John Bailey and two other members from the Darwin Harbour Advisory Committee raises some important issues. The previous CLP government always had a gung ho attitude towards Darwin development, along with a seeming disregard for indepe...

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Matthew Bonson and the long-tongued Len Kiely in happier times on elevation to the Ministry in November last year The day before Saturdays unexpectedly knife-edge NT election, Chief Minister Paul Henderson gave a politically prudent and factually correct assessment of Labors c...

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