Terms of Reference Phase 1 Report (the one that’s caused most of the uproar). Submissions from Organisations and Business Submissions from Individuals The humane alternative
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French economist Thomas Piketty has been picking up a lot of attention in the rest of the English speaking world – well mainly the US – thanks to the publication of an English translation of his recent book Capital in the 21 st Century . Never heard of him? Don't fret about it...
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Lamest April Fools' Day joke so far today . There must be better efforts out there. Just post 'em as you find 'em. Please. I could use a bit of ROFLMAO today. Update (9:41 EDST) : I wish I'd taken a screen shot. The current version of the linked post seems to me to have had so...
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In my last post on Troppo I raised this question: ...who’s actually running [Australia’s] foreign policy these days? Is it Julie Bishop, as Minister for Foreign Affairs, is it Scott Morrison as Minister for Immigration or is it some other bugger? The answer, it turns out, is ‘...
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Scott Morrison was on RN Breakfast on Monday 25 November , hosing down the idea that the diplomatic row with Indonesia over past spying on the Indonesian President and his wife might impede Operation Sovereign Borders. That was the day before we embarked on the whole ‘Gonski i...
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Some memories fade too slowly. I was reminded of one such memory by the TV advertisement being aired in the lead up to White Ribbon Day tomorrow (Monday 25 November). It was late morning on Friday, 20 September and I was at the local Magistrate’s Court on a court visit for the...
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Posted in Life, Society, Law
To defend free speech does not mean you cannot criticise how others exercise it. The very opposite, if anything. With weaker legal restrictions on, say, racist insults there should be stronger social sanctions - criticism, debate, counter-arguments. It’s called manners, and wh...
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The Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer came back into the news on Monday (11 November), with reports [i] on a paper published in Nature Geoscience which finds that reductions in chlorinated fluorocarbon (CFC) emissions achieved under the Montreal Prot...
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Tabloid TV – it’s one of modern life’s little irritations but, thankfully, one that’s easily avoided – unlike Melbourne’s Myki system, the rococo convolutions of bus routes in Melbourn's outer suburbs and numb-nuts who conduct loud conversations on their mobile phones while yo...
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Brands, brands, brands! Teams, Teams, teams! They infest Australian political commentary these days the way gondolas infest Venice . Right now, for example, the challenge for ALP members is to get in behind Bill Shorten and rebuild the Labor brand while Tony Abbott’s ascension...
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It was quite a few years ago – last century in fact – that through Martin Gardner’s ‘Mathematical Recreations’ column in Scientific American that I first learnt of Raymond Smullyan. It was in a review of either The Lady or the Tiger or What is the Name of this Book , two of Sm...
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Seems Tony Abbott finally headed off to Indonesia today to have some talks. Not about the boats – he wants the focus to be on building a constructive relationship and of course building trade opportunities. Well good luck with that one mate. For the past three years you’ve spe...
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According to Mike Seccombe, at the Global Mail , under the Abbott government, Australia will be open not just for business, but open to costly multi-national law-suits: On the eve of the election, the Coalition released its trade policy , which includes a commitment to “remain...
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It was around six thirty on a cold wet Melbourne Day. A long day for me, including a mid-morning appointment with a new psychologist. First appointments are all about background – what your condition is, personal and family history and all that other stuff that they need to kn...
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I learnt something interesting today, while I was writing up notes on legal history: Australia didn't formally achieve complete judicial and legislative independence from Old Blighty until 5.00am, Greenwich Mean Time on March 31 st 3 rd 1986. That's the precise time that the A...
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According to the ABC's Senate Election calculator , these are the seven 'others' who will be joining the Greens and Senator John Madigan of the DLP on the Senate cross-benches in the new parliament . Party Candidate & State 1st Preferences (%) Quotas i Counts ii Australian Mot...
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This TED talk from 2008 was recommended to me by my piano teacher. If you haven't already seen it it's well worth taking a look. If you have seen it, a second look wouldn't be wasted. [ted id=286] After watching it I realised I had a considerable challenge in front of me - to...
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Paul Fritjers is lamenting the loss of intellectual freedom and freedom of expression produced by an odd rule of social interaction: the person in pain gets to own the truth and those without pain adjust. So for example, people with undesired traits such as low intelligence or...
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Much as I prefer to ignore the current session of our great national game of Politics, the Rigmarole I haven't managed to shut out all of the media kibbitzing. One little item of gaming news that slipped past my mental guard was the fact that Tony Abbott has picked up an exten...
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George H W Bush (father of George W, who had one less initial and a lot fewer functioning cortical neurons) divided US public opinion with this famous declaration in March 1990: I do not like broccoli and I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it...
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One type of news item I notice often – because it confirms a belief that I like to maintain – reports that a recent psychological study has found that the most effective way to give yourself a quick happiness fix is to do someone else a favour. The most recent I remember repor...
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Today was a pleasant day, right up until I came home and caught the news on ABC 24: Kevin Rudd has come up with the penultimate solution to the asylum seeker problem : Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says asylum seekers who arrive by boat will have no chance of being settled in Aust...
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For 20 years some Australian school systems have been world leaders in giving schools more autonomy, and in trying to increase competition among them. Many countries are following suit, in the hope that policies to increase school competition will improve student performance....
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Two major changes happened in my life on Thursday, one pleasant the other not so. The pleasant change was the arrival of my Yamaha P35 Digital Piano in the house. The other change was the departure of RB, one of my fellow boarders here in my present sanctuary and sacred place...
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Long after Ken Parish published his post You Can Survive on Newstart But You Can't Live On It on January 6th it's still attracting a steady daily trickle of readers. It also attracts the occasional comment describing survival on Newstart, most recently this one from Brenton: B...
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Prelude: Lento It's after midnight and the other members of the household are either asleep or pursuing their own consolations in the silence of their own rooms. So, much as I might desire the consolation of recorded orchestral music played at concert hall volume, it just woul...
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Interlude: Ruminations on 'the costs of speech', monkeys and Dexter In The 2013 PEN Free Voices lecture, reproduced on the ABC's Religion and Ethics web site , Waleed Aly makes the following observations on Freedom of Speech: … let us grind this out, beginning with a trite obs...
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Simply Delightful : Conservative billionaire Gina Rinehart called for the sterilization of the poor today, arguing that the only way to alleviate poverty is to stop the "underclasses" from multiplying. In a video uploaded to her official YouTube account, the Australian mining...
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A Peculiarly Australian Cause Celebre In one of the less nebulous sections of the Liberals' curiously fisk-resistant manifesto i , you'll find this special promise for Andrew Bolt and his fans and supporters: Protecting freedom of speech – supporting an open media We will prot...
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Jeff Sparrow on 'the Imbecilic Andrew Bolt' and Unseen Academicals : ...“My problem is not,” [writes Alecia Simmonds], "that our public sphere harbours ill-educated members (like the imbecilic Andrew Bolt who never made it past first-year uni)." Sorry? Anyone who doesn’t posse...
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Thanks to commenter Sancho for alerting me to the following post, by Sarah Kliff, at the Washington Post's Wonkblog (via Reading is for Snobs ). It had me chuckling all the way to the bottle-o and back on this dreary, rainy Melbourne morning: Readers ask, we answer! What happe...
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(You can catch up with Part I here .) One thing that's become obvious as I've read through the CIS's corporatist manifesto is that their TARGET30 campaign is very much a moral crusade with two goals. First, to reduce the burden (of taxation) on future generations. Second, to e...
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A Spectre is Haunting Australia: the spectre of Corporatism. Since March this year the Centre for Independent Studies has been promoting its new manifesto ' TARGET30 - towards smaller government and future prosperity '. TARGET30's stated goal is to get Australia's total govern...
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