Amid Australia's justified concern over male violence against women, it seems worth keeping in mind our achievements. Femicide, in particular, has more than halved in the past three decades. Prologue 1 : Violence against women is a bad thing, and it's still bad even when, as t...
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Here's something I only noticed while writing a short piece for INTHEBLACK magazine : the rise of globalisation is not only slowing down almost to a halt, but in some places (like the Netherlands) may have been slowing down since around the turn of the century. That's well bef...
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The ARR scheme so far has cost taxpayers just over $2.2 million and as of December 2013 has delivered a total of 7,800 royalty payments, to 800 artists (or estates) with a median value of about $105 per payment. The scheme has, in three and a half years, only generated a total...
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Now that Holden is to stop making cars in Australia, we're already hearing about the impending death of Australian manufacturing . Before you descend into gloom, take a look at this manufacturing data from the World Bank . It sets out how manufacturing value-added has been mov...
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One of the popular economic memes of the 2000s has been that Australian needs more infrastructure. It has filled out many a think-tank report . In the form of the National Broadband Network , it helped Labor win government in 2007. It has led to a current crop of serious propo...
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Well the ABC God bless its cotton socks can't quite bring itself to mount videos that can be embedded elsewhere - or I can't see a way to do it, but they did a great story on Kaggle tonight - so I thought I'd post it here. Just click here and all will be revealed. Update: some...
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Several years ago I posted a graphic plotting countrys GDP per head against mean lifetime and drawing attention to the tragic loss of life in southern Africa, mainly due to AIDS. There is a fantastic data visualisation tool called GapMinder that tells this story and other stor...
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A good while back I put up a post on all the ways I liked Platinum Capital . I hope some of you were suitably convinced to have invested. Just as Kier Neilson (the firm's founder) made his name in the 1987 crash, this is how Platinum international fund has performed recently....
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I seem to be the only one, that I have seen anyway, in the Australian blogosphere who is excited about the 37c tax bracket going the way of the dodo in Labor's tax policy announcement. Peter Martin even suggested it might be bad politics . Hopefully this policy becomes 'common...
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The AES has an interesting graph which shows trending on how people consumed political information during elections. Unfortunately the trend ends at 2004, however, the internet was already rivaling talkback radio, newspapers and radio for media consumption patterns. I am sure...
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Via Gary Sauer-Thompson : The Australian Electoral Study's Trends in Australian Political Opinion [PDF] is a goldmine of graphs, polling and trending all thoughtfully gathered into the one document. Especially for graph junkies . It is also interesting to see where the polling...
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My brother and I both tried quite hard not to be economists. And we both failed fairly miserably. He's been busy producing some interesting graphs concerning the two intergenerational reports.
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Bryan Palmer writes : This gives an average of 58.25 for Labor and 41.75 per cent for the Coalition. Plug these numbers into the election calculator and see what you get. A pie chart of the "see what you get" with a uniform national 11% swing (normal caveats etc): The red area...
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The Parliamentary Library released a research paper which divides numerous economic trends up by Governments from Whitlam to Howard . It turns out party hats don't work so well in analysing these trends. This is an interesting graph with a nice trend. Economic policy makers ov...
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With the national government digging its selective anti-federalist paws into the Tasmanian health system it might be a good time to look at the nationalist (as opposed to federalist) structure of government. This usually takes the form of state abolition ; where the states are...
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That graph is from the 2001 census . One of the problems in Australian politics is that everything is viewed from the national level. From Imagining Australia : If our Indigenous people comprised one tenth rather than one fiftieth of the population there would be widespread ou...
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California contributes approximately 14% of of the US GDP. If it were a nation its economy would rank just behind China's and Italy's for size. New South Wales contributes 33.1% of Australian GDP. Victoria is next with 24.2%, Queensland with 18.9% and Western Australia with 12...
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The graph is from the ABS' population statistics from June 2006 . Queensland and Tasmania are the only ones that people are migrating too on a positive basis and Tasmania barely so. The migration to Queensland is mainly Novacumbrians where 289,000 moved to Queensland between 2...
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