Why did it happen? I think that the combination of four factors (listed below) was close to a sufficient cause. Sufficient at least to make a terrorist attack highly likely . And they are also arguably necessary. I think if you remove any one the first three then Bondi does no...

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The latest figures on intimate partner femicide show much of a recent rise in men killing women has now been reversed, at least temporarily. Prologue : Violence against women is a bad thing, and it’s still bad even when, as the article below points out, it used to be far worse...

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Most credible researchers believe immigration affects house prices. The questions are: how much, and at what cost? This post aims to establish some baseline facts on the basis of which sensible arguments can be made about immigration and housing. Key points: Academic research...

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Advice for homebuyers and citizens: home-deductibility and housing guarantee schemes both deserve your derisive laughter, whoever backs them. Introductory note: Things move fast in the race to sway the aspiring Australian homebuyer. A few minutes after publishing the first ver...

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Donald Trump is still trying to slash his nation's trade deficit. Australians may recognise this task: we tackled it in the late 1980s, failed, and found that it mattered less than we thought. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7st2oG5AwU?si=7N7nfVCxlmkOcf7D] Video: Don...

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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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What if we held an Australian broadband crisis and nobody came? That's pretty much what happened in Australian broadband policy over the decade to 2025. Governments, forecasters and the media can all learn lessons from this episode. Illustration: Fibre optic cable in a Telstra...

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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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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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I recently published this musing in my Substack newsletter. And coming across a further free kick from the policy world — something that would have negative costs and do a lot of good — I thought I'd publish both. Think of this as continuing the series begun over a decade ago...

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Just a decade ago, Australian labour was easy to find and infrastructure projects were often no-brainers. Now our economic times seem to have changed, resources are constantly sucked up – and policymakers may need to adjust to a new set of rules. The world is always changing,...

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https://youtu.be/6uPex480hRU Above is the video of a presentation I made at NESTA in London on 15th November with discussants Claire Mellior and Martin Wolf. I reproduce (AI generated) timestamps in the shownotes of the video below. 00:00 - Introduction and Overview The talk b...

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This post is rather long. If you want a point form summary, scroll down to the bottom. Secondly, this post does not represent the views of anyone else but me. As part of his pre-election platform, the now PM promised to get an aboriginal Voice into the constitution during this...

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https://youtu.be/ftssK9b8WFI Finding a formatting mess when I looked this up on Troppo , I've reposted it here for the record. I'm a bit embarrassed by my wooden speaking style. Here’s the David Solomon Lecture I’ll be giving at the Brisbane Museum of Modern Art in an hour’s t...

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Scott Morrison's "secret powers" are being heralded in much of the media as proof that he was up to no good. The simpler explanation is that on governance issues, he was often just not much good. "No worries, mate; I'm just nominating us both for Australia's official list of b...

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https://twitter.com/abc730/status/1557673265493344259 Peter Dutton is a human being. That’s not a moral point I’m making — I’m just talking about the task of making sense of others — particularly since, if we can’t kill them, we have to live with them. (And trying to kill some...

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I use Troppo to make various notes for file as it were for reference in future. And on wanting to record something I found that I hadn't reproduced this post — which was originally at The Mandarin — here. So here it is, with some notes to file below. Part one. Part two is here...

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This is an edited version of an article that first appeared in Crikey on 3 June 2022. As I see it, the four most pressing challenges for the new Minister for health and ageing concern: 1. promoting health (not just treating disease); 2. addressing the disconnect between care s...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFtN1nIHXSY I really enjoyed this conversation with my friend Peyton Bowman which celebrates the possibility that Australia might be able to show the world how to push back against the Trumpian madness. We tried to turn Peyton's lack of inside k...

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Originally published on The Interpreter . Two federal elections ago, in 2016, the primary vote for the Labor Party and the Liberal-Nationals coalition reached record lows, while the number of voters who put an independent or minor party first on their ballot paper reached new...

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Labor's May 2022 federal election win seems to confirm the approach taken by US political analyst David Shor. The 1 in 20: Paul Fletcher will become the sole remaining Liberal member in the 20 federal seats with the highest number of people holding postgraduate degrees. I don'...

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Frustrating Beijing’s ambitions to create a sphere of influence is overwhelmingly a diplomatic task, not a military one. (Cross posted from The Interpreter at the Lowy Institute) There was barely concealed panic in Australia when news broke that China had struck a security agr...

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I’m a Labor voter and I'll do as I've always done at the upcoming election by voting Labor again. Nonetheless… I think there are at least three Labor Party policy pillars that made sense once upon a time but now need overhauling due to their turning counterproductive to labour...

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Looking at Australian politics right now, one thing stands out: the federal ALP has become a little Shorist. That seems like a good idea. The federal ALP has gone a bit Shorist. I don't know how long it will last, or whether it's even a conscious strategy. But it's definitely...

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Here's a (lightly edited) exchange between me and a friend who, I'm going to assume would prefer to remain nameless. If they want to change this, they will let me know and I will change it. The exchange should be read downwards — with the first email you encounter below being...

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It's here, the booklet I am sure you have all been waiting for. The one which Gigi Foster and Michael Baker slaved over for 10 months . It is also on Kindle . It is dedicated to all the victims of the Panic, in poor countries and rich countries. They include our children, the...

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What do you do as an Australian parliament when a foreign company censors mainstream media content in Australia, undermining free speech ? Do you organise an inquiry to hold those foreign companies to account and to see how you might prevent foreign meddling? Or do you fall in...

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This short post grew out of a response to Paul Frijters on another thread. Naturally enough, those who don't want to lockdown are telling us about our precious liberties. You know those we fought for at Gallipoli, and Iraq and Afghanistan. In any event, I strongly agree with t...

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Dear Troppodillians, lend me your critical eye. I ask you to consider the system of citizen-jury appointments I have in mind, and tell me how the vested interests would try to game it, ie why it would not work and whether the system can be improved. Bear with me as I describe...

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Wellbeing & Policy Making Book Launch Event on 1st July 5-6.30pm London Time. Attending the Launch is Free, the book is not! [blurb from Nancy Hey, director of the WW Centre for Wellbeing]: The What Works Centre for Wellbeing , and our commissioning partners at the ESRC: Econo...

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Pre 2020, I considered Scott Morrison a political enemy of the policies I wanted for Australia, but since then have sympathised with every attempt he has made to get Australia out of its love-affair with covid-mania. Over the fold is my take on what I think Scott Morrison's vi...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6qmdqvItkM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTaw6oQmRdM No folks, that is not a joke. Listening to it on occasion over the years, I've grown fond of the New Zealand National Anthem. The tune is classic national anthem. That is to say it manages...

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Martin Lally is a kiwi economist who late in 2020 decided to calculate for himself what his own country was losing by locking itself away from the world, coming to the conclusion that New Zealand was sacrificing something like 26 life-years in the future to 'save' 1 life-year....

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With a recent publication in Nature that reported lockdowns have no effect on covid-cases or covid-deaths, there are now over 30 studies that fail to find any covid-reducing benefits of lockdowns. Worse, across countries and time, more severe lockdowns are just leading to more...

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Together with Benno Torgler and Katharina Gangl, I published a piece recently on how to tax the powerful and sophisticated. Our substantive argument on what one should do becomes relatively simple once you understand what happened in the world of Western taxation the last 50 y...

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News Corp is telling us what Google should really pay for linking to its sites. It's telling us in code – HTML code. And the answer is ... $0.00. What is an Internet link worth to the linker? For most of the Internet's life, this question has been pointless. On the Internet, l...

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The legislated "bargaining" process between Google and News Corp is unmoored from reality. Its "final offer arbitration" is unsuited to the task. [caption id="attachment_34634" align="alignleft" width="300"] He's loaded the gun. (Photo provided by Eva Rinaldi on Flickr; CC BY-...

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I am all for effective vaccines and have been impressed with how fast vaccines have been developed against covid, but I never expected them to be the wonder weapons some promised them to be. After all, the yearly new vaccines against the flu never eradicated the flu but reduce...

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2020 was certainly a roller coaster for a social scientist, full of surprises. Let me not once again bemoan the increasingly coordinated attack on all sources of vitality in Western civilisation, but look ahead and openly wonder about what 2021 will bring in terms of 7 specifi...

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How will Western historians in 2050 remember 2020? In scenario 1, "The Great Panic, a lost generation", I sketch my best guess. Scenario 2, "A job well done" is the one I imagine many current Western governments hope is told. Scenario 3, "The dark path of the Great Panic", is...

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How are we going to escape the authoritarian nightmare and regain our liberties and zest for life? This long read is written for organisers of new Covistance initiatives, explaining the logic of what others have done and what could further be done. So I am speaking to those of...

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Ramesh Thakur is one of many commentators inside the Covistance who think government public health advisers have committed crimes against humanity . His anger was raised by reports of desperate parents in India selling their children into virtual slavery, including sexual expl...

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Dr. Joffe just posted a new article on the many negative effects of lockdowns in Canada and in the world as a whole. He really has put in a fantastic effort to source the evidence on the negative effects of the covid-related policies, digging up and critically evaluating nearl...

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Published in and edited form in The Conversation . Martin Wolf has a crisp face-to-camera opinion piece in which he points out that populism in government hasn’t lined up neatly against relative success in keeping populations safe from COVID. Thus in the Anglosphere, Donald’s...

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Those who already in March foretold the folly of lockdowns and social distancing did not dream we'd still be in the same place after 7 months. Only slowly has it dawned that the panic would become an enduring business model . For a long time, we believed sanity would soon prev...

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[caption id="attachment_34335" align="alignright" width="378"] Dan Andrews said that his 'Road Map' for easing the lockdown is not a doctoral thesis – a proposition that's hard to argue with. Further propositions will be offered at subsequent press conferences.[/caption] Life...

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[Bottom line: the conflicting forces now being created in the UK and Australia are truly frightening.] The UK government has just announced a nationwide return of one of the most destructive elements of lock downs: mandatory social isolation. Gatherings of more than 6 people a...

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[caption id="attachment_34242" align="aligncenter" width="2304"] I really love this design by Casey Finley, who was kind enough to allow me to publish it here. He has a very distinctive style which is really coming into its own as he works on it. For instance, see here and her...

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[below the exact text (with different font/highlight) as Gigi Foster's submission to the Victorian parliamentary library in mid-August here . To see her health-related notes, including on topics like non-linearities and Sweden, see here , and to see all documents of that inqui...

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Below is a piece I published on the NESTA website in early 2016 which they took down in a web revamp. It's still available on archive.org , but I thought I'd also publish it here for the record. [caption id="attachment_34195" align="alignright" width="404"] Quick Troppo Quiz:...

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Suppose you agree with me that containment and elimination strategies pursued regarding Covid-19 do far more harm than good. Suppose you also believe that having an open economy and a vibrant close-contact social life is vital for the long-run health of the country. You want t...

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The UK Office of National Statistics data on the wellbeing of the British population shows a unprecedented drop of about 10% in average wellbeing in the UK since March 2020. Anxiety levels almost doubled, slowly returning to normal, but wellbeing remains low as people are prev...

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There have long been scientists who were celebrities in their own time. Galileo, Keppler, Goodall, Linneus, Cousteau, Darwin, Smith, Leeuwenhoek, Da Vinci, Ibn Khaldhun, Curie, and many others in the last 800 years were followed and admired. They in many ways performed their s...

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There are 5 aspects of the covid-19 pandemic I really did not see coming, all pointing to a phenomenon that European sociologists of a century ago spent their whole lives describing, coming up with theories about crowds and their behaviour - theories now largely forgotten. Sch...

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Find below the video of a seminar for the Australian Institute for Progress done a few weeks ago detailing the basic cost-benefit view of the current pandemic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6TS2DE-D1TA The slides of this presentation are here: Presentation CBA Covid May 2020...

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The management of the University of Queensland, and in particular Peter Hoj and Peter Varghese, stand condemned today by the international media, by both Labor and Liberal politicians, by both left-wing and right-wing Australians, by its own students, and by the powerful pro-...

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Let’s talk about some of the covid policy options facing Australia in the coming months and years. It seems to me we can either grasp the nettle and accept we will get a wave of highly visible covid-19 deaths before life returns to normal, or we can try and defend ourselves ag...

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Note: This post was original published on 6 July 2015; I've updated it several times because both parties keep revisiting a decentralisation agenda. [getty src="587183652" width="509" height="339"] Once again we're hearing the argument that Australia would be a much better pla...

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[in progress: will add more references, links and latest numbers when I get the time] In this note, I want to deal with three related issues: the main lessons on the corona virus from the reported deaths across countries with different policies; the feasibility of different “e...

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In a week from now, UQ student leader Drew Pavlou will face an internal hearing at the University of Queensland to decide whether or not he will be expelled for having organised rallies against various pro-China organisations on campus and generally being a pain in the *rse of...

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There is one hell of a recession coming for Australia. Economic activity has already reduced by 20% and actual unemployment will probably peak near 20% too , and about a million businesses have already applied for some sort of assistance. The population increase of the last 20...

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Note: Article expanded on 24 April and again on 27 April. The middle now has more meat. So you can read it again! As Paul Frijters has recently said on this site, many countries will soon ease their restrictions on social isolation. As Paul has been pointing out , we pay a hig...

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My first prediction is an easy one: many countries are going to ease their restrictions on social isolation in the coming weeks, including many countries with an ongoing corona problem. They simply have to if they want to have any economy left. You can see this happening to di...

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[caption id="attachment_36337" align="alignleft" width="939"] Creating and managing a high-performance knowledge-sharing network: the Toyota case [/caption] I recently reposted my old column on blogging the 2008 crisis and there's been some great blogging of this crisis. What...

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This post is a direct response and rebuttal to the recent ‘Has the coronavirus panic cost us at least 10 million lives already? ’ by Paul Fritjers. Paul’s post takes the current covid-19 crisis, and uses some haphazard multiplication to create an alarming narrative, muddying t...

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The number of people worldwide who have died from the coronavirus stands at 8,000 at the moment, equivalent to the death toll of two days of the world's traffic accidents. The fear is of course that millions more will follow. The panic over what the virus might do has now lead...

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They got him! It cost millions of dollars in legal fees, and involved multiple trials, settlements, and dismissal of the worst charges, but they convicted Harvey Weinstein. A bit like a buck who is taken down by a pack of wolves might receive the killing bite from a different...

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[off the cuff research idea memo] There is an uncanny analogy between China in the 19th century and the US this very moment: in both cases a large part of the general population could not be persuaded away from drugs by morality or prison. Opium in China then, opioids in the U...

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Universalists dream of a world empire in which a world government works to solve global problems, enforcing the same law all over the world. There are many different ideologies that envision a world government, ranging from international socialism, to the brotherhood of Islam,...

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Something very odd happens when people get told a story of how other people with some shared characteristic have behaved in the past: they take it personal and see themselves in those ‘ancestors’, even if they share no actual family relationship to those people and even though...

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There is a widespread consensus in Australian policy circles that Australia should follow the US in almost any foreign adventure, though preferably on the cheap. The shining example of this was John Howard’s decision to publicly support the US in its war in Iraq in 2003, and y...

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Values are observed in actions and choices, and rather less so in words. Competition policy has been applied with great relish to the labour market – at least at the bottom end. (Subject to our relatively generous basic and award wage arrangements). So restrictive practices of...

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This is a guest post by Brian Schmidt. Actually it isn't, I've cut and pasted. I hope he doesn't mind. Important stuff. HT: John Walker Everyone in my office grew sick last week of my continual complaints about the state of the political polls. Not because of any insights into...

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I worked for the early Hawke government in 1983 and 1984 when I worked for Senator John Button. Hawke barely knew me then or later, but in 2003, I attended a dinner at Moonee Valley Racecourse in honour of the 20th anniversary of his election. Anyway, I happened to be at his t...

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Peter Dempster asked me to post this follow-up post to an earlier one of his . Nicholas A novel voting strategy for centrists Vote 1 for your preferred party but then do something very unusual – Vote 2 for the opposing party, symbolically joining the major parties on your ball...

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In 1900, the modern nation states of Europe faced many challenges in terms of how they were run, with poverty and disease still prevalent. The largest problems were more or less successfully addressed by 2000. The road involved world wars and civil wars, but the essential reci...

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The probability of a massive nuclear war the next 10 years between any of the 8 current nuclear powers (US, UK, France, Russia, India, Pakistan, NK, Israel) seems low. The bluster of the leaders is supposed to make the threat look a bit bigger than it is in order to get negoti...

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We seem to have a Brexit deal today, which has two important components: free-movement between the UK and the EU ends (no single market) whilst on all matters of trade, the UK indefinitely follows the EU until a new deal is reached (a customs union). The nitty gritty has to be...

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As I predicted a few months ago , the US security apparatus is going after China relentlessly, mainly in order to have something to do. As I predicted in 2012, Australia is firmly behind the US and the wider Western alliance that will eventually form a block against China. The...

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The Donald is visiting the UK and has had me in stitches a whole day. He's clearly been having a chat with Nigel Farage about how to handle the Conservatives and has shown them up in spectacular fashion. Theresa May, bless her, was of course in an impossible position. She undo...

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[caption id="attachment_32263" align="aligncenter" width="638"] This image was picked from a bunch of images on Google Image. This post is not about Canada. If you're interested in Canada, it's unlikely you'll get ANYTHING out of this post. Canada is just incidental to this po...

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[caption id="attachment_32251" align="aligncenter" width="1280"] Who is that man in the corner, and why is he watching you?[/caption] Well folks, as you know, Club Troppo is the only website east of the whole damn Murray Darling system that has the reputation to attract the ki...

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There's been a great thinning out of our political culture. Once built up from the life-world with hundreds of thousands determining party policy feeding up from branches to politicians – though leaders obviously had quite a lot of power, particularly in the conservative parti...

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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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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 Financial Services Royal Commission is in theory a general inquiry into the financial system. In practice, however, something else is on trial: Australian regulatory systems. As I set out in my latest column for The CEO Magazine , many of our regulators, including ASIC, AU...

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[caption id="attachment_31852" align="alignleft" width="800"] Actual picture of the Universal Basic Income idea[/caption] In my latest column for The CEO Magazine I take aim at the idea of universal basic income (UBI). The column uses the insights of the always terrific Peter...

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Humanity is at a high point. What our ancestors dreamed of is slowly becoming a reality: a world without hunger in which the vast majority of mankind live peaceful and long lives. We are not there yet, but in Europe, East Asia, Latin America, and even in Africa (our cradle), m...

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In the engine room of nation states, ie the tax departments, the coming battle with platform providers is taking shape. Uber, airbnb, facebook, linkedin, ebay, jobseek, and a myriad of specialised platform providers facilitate micro-trades that are largely untaxed by the autho...

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Anglo-Saxon countries are often heaped together as having a single culture. When it comes to migration, attitudes to sex, teenage-pregnancy, inequality, language, and bellicosity, that seems about right. At least, the UK, the US, and Australia are pretty close on those scores....

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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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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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National history is the story that binds ‘us who make up the nation’ into a single entity with a collective memory . It has a purpose and as such we can choose what historical events and realities to put into that story, whilst forgetting the rest. Of the four main current con...

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[expanded from the post on JohnMenadue] When Bitcoin went public in 2009 it introduced to the world of finance and economics the technology of blockchain. Even the many who thought Bitcoin would never make it as a major currency were intrigued by the BlockChain technology and...

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Sometimes, it feels like 1910 all over again. Then, a confident Germany was the up-and-coming industrial power house, fearing an even more up-and-coming Russia, with the UK and France desperately holding on to their colonial empires. Now, a confident China is the up-and-coming...

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Various people like Margaret Court are stroppy that private companies like Qantas are supporting same sex marriage. I'm not too sure I can see a problem. This is largely self-interested behaviour from our corporates and the pursuit of that self-interest – sociopathic or otherw...

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[caption id="attachment_31407" align="aligncenter" width="1035"] It's pretty obvious why this picture came up forth in a Google Image Search of the expression "competitive neutrality" but if you can't figure it out for yourself frankly the Troppo collective are disgusted. We'r...

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[caption id="attachment_31109" align="alignleft" width="708"] Hat tip: Richard Halcomb[/caption] Barnaby Joyce is in the news a bit right now . Coincidentally, I wrote an assessment of his abilities in a column for The CEO Magazine way back on 31 July, before the section 44 sc...

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My latest column at The CEO Magazine asks whether Australia's 3.3 per cent minimum wage increase will cause any job losses . It focuses on a few pieces of research, including a new study of Seattle's minimum wage hike, older work by ALP frontbencher Andrew Leigh, and one of ec...

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In the comments section of my earlier post about hatred of the banks , John Walker (no relation) asked: If the big four did pass on the tax to their customers, do you think the ‘non big four’ banks, building societies etc would grab the chance to be more competitive or grab th...

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Below is a spirited exchange between me and Barry Jones on deliberative democracy which I reproduce with his permission. He won't be participating in any online debate because as he puts it I … confess to being a total abstainer where social media is concerned. I don’t want to...

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An essay prompted by a friend recommending James' essay I think largely for its defence of Menzies as worthy of more respect he's been given by the left - which is a fair point. Cross posted from The Mandarin , which, to my surprise was interested in picking it up. In my view...

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[getty src="579024746" width="509" height="339"] My latest column for The CEO Magazine looks at Malcolm Turnbull's recent Snowy announcement and asks: isn't there a better way to make infrastructure decisions? The particular process I'd like to see around the Snowy announcemen...

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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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[caption id="attachment_30174" align="alignleft" width="600"] Melbourne from the Yarra[/caption] My latest column for The CEO Magazine extends my updated Troppo post on decentralisation . As I dug further into the issue for this column, I was startled by the extent to which go...

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Can a democracy attract competent leaders, while attaining broad representation? Economic models suggest that free-riding incentives and lower opportunity costs give the less competent a comparative advantage at entering political life. Moreover, if elites have more human capi...

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Minister Dutton says that 2/3 of people recently charged with terrorism in Australia have Lebanese Muslim backgrounds. However, the first rule when considering dramatic statistics should be to think “compared to what”. In this case, where else might we expect Islamic extremist...

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In part 1, I looked at whether it made sense to have random individuals inserted into parliament, or to let policies be decided by juries full of randomly chosen individuals. Both were argued to be unworkable and likely to lead to more corruption, rather than less: policies th...

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWci3a0-EKM Pilate said unto him, What is truth? And when he had said this, he went out again unto the Jews, and said unto them, I find in him no fault at all. The Gospel according to John 18:38 Picasso once famously opined on art and truth-tell...

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I haven't read any columns on the gay marriage imbroglio so maybe people have already said all this but … it seems to me that the circumstances now provide the left of centre parties with an opportunity to humiliate their opponents. There's no bigger kill in politics than to b...

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A friend of mine Ian Marsh sent me this op ed which one of the papers said it would publish last week. Personally, I'm not surprised that they didn't. They're waiting for it to be validated by being put through its paces here at the Troppo Grinder first. No change there. Over...

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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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In the last post ,Paul Frijters dismissed my proposal that deliberative democracy mechanisms should have had some role in the Brexit decision. I don’t think sortition makes any sense in the case of something like Brexit. The notion that a jury of randomly chosen citizens would...

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I fantasise about the day when the people who fancy themselves the champions of liberal capitalist democracy - you know the Business Class set - will realise that they are munching through the landscape and, as Schumpeter argued - following Marx - that they were undermining th...

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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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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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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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Political parties and institutions in Australia and the US are increasingly dominated by interest groups representing the few, leading to a large policy-induced increase in inequality in recent decades and a long raft of new policies favouring the few by giving them the tax re...

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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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Though wildly tendentious, this piece by Monbiot is an excellent spray against neoliberalism, a subject with which your correspondent has a vexed relation. I used to describe myself as a neoliberal, but now I'm afraid due to a mixture of distaste at its excesses and the extent...

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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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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nDZadLhTMoc I recall when working as a staffer for the Hawke/Keating government, how Labor staffers wore their disdain - bordering on contempt - for the Democrats with the same kind of pride that economic rationalists had for their own disdain f...

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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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As I've argued elsewhere, most public debates on policy - and I suspect on pretty much everything else - tend to take place as culture wars. In a culture war the 'sides' are well defined - usually mapping pretty well onto 'left' and 'right' terrain. The identities of the vario...

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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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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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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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I think I am in favour of gay marriage, on balance, with some reservations. I would not wave placards in the street, or even change my vote on this issue. Yet it seems that this moderate position is not considered ethical. There is almost zero tolerance among some people for a...

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[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="620"] Intriguingly there are two substantial permanent monuments to Magna Carta at Runnymede. Both are American. This one was erected by the US Bar Association in 1957.[/caption] I was recently asked to participate in a panel discussion...

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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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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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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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Domestic violence is constantly in the news these days which can lead to the impression that the problem is increasing. To the extent that scrutiny and public discussion shines light in dark places, we might have expected the real underlying rates to be tapering. So I was more...

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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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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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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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http://youtu.be/0B5xPYUNGeA Scribe publishing occasionally sends me a catalogue of books it's publishing asking if I'd like to have one to review. Looking through their long list I picked my friend Tim Colebatch's biography of Rupert Hamer on which he's been working for a good...

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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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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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Following David's excellent post on the NBN, a somewhat related aside. Malcolm Turnbull was interviewed on AM yesterday about the NBN review, followed by a brief minuet around some current political dramas. What a contrast. By comparison, his colleagues still seem be strugglin...

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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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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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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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Australia's Artists Resale Royalty (ARR ) scheme has so far cost taxpayers $2.2 million in direct support. And over many years the publicly funded lobbyists for this scheme, headed up by the National Association for the Visual Arts Ltd, have additionally spent a lot of public...

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Much of the time, the public can make up its own mind on public events once it get a decent helping of facts; the theatre commentary from the parliamentary press gallery – a little of which I used to write – is more entertainment than vital input. But on the running of the par...

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Is there any area of public policy in Australia that gets weaker treatment than agriculture these days? Whether it's milk prices or agricultural investment , the normal Australian tough-mindedness about policy gets shunted aside in favour of emotive puffery. Not too many peopl...

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In the last 5 years, I have made a point of giving clear predictions on complex socio-economic issues. I give predictions partially to improve my own understanding of humanity: nothing sharpens the thoughts as much as having to actually predict something. Another reason is as...

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Last Monday I posted 4 questions to see who thought like a classic utilitarian and who adhered to a wider notion of ethics, suspecting that in the end we all subscribe to ‘more’ than classical utilitarianism. There are hence no 'right' answers, merely classic utilitarian ones...

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Abstract: We estimate habit formation in voting--the effect of past on current turnout--by exploiting transitory voting cost shocks. Using county-level data on U.S. presidential elections from 1952-2012, we find that precipitation on current and past election days reduces vote...

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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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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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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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[caption id="attachment_24901" align="alignright" width="584"] In the grain fields near Horsham[/caption] Joe Hockey has just announced he is blocking the foreign takeover of Graincorp by Illinois-based Archer Daniels Midland. It's a lousy decision. But it at least has the vir...

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The most interesting aspect of the reaction to the governor-general's last Boyer lecture , with its last-sentence support for abolishing the monarchy, is the thinness of the opposition from the left to her expression of her political views. As the events of the past few days h...

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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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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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Schumpeter's two chapters on democracy in his great book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy provide the best framework I know of articulating the things that trouble me about the current state of democracy. The chapters assert the following propositions: Rousseau's idea of th...

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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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The following quote is from an article published in London's Financial Times on October 4. The article is further confirmation that the previous Labor government's gratuitous interference in the art market has had a devastating effect on sales and its legacy is continuing to p...

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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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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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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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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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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ihi0MnK0Q4 The Liberal Democrats look set to take a Senate seat in NSW after the party scored the best spot on the ballot paper . A libertarian party, the LDP's website describes it as a "a serious, progressive, small-government alternative." Th...

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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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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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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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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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On Thursday 8th august the Australian ran this article by Nicolas Rothwell about the toxic debacle that is the reality of the governments Artists Resale Royalty scheme. The article concluded with an examination of the circular nature of the government funded lobbyists for ARR:...

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Don’t worry, I’m not after a date or anything. I won’t be stalking you round the hills of New England. It’s more the sort of crush I had on James Stewart after I saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, or Yves Montand whenever he played a resistance fighter. It’s a political kin...

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Like many, I was puzzled by the transformation in Gillard's public persona post-2010. The warmth, humour and sparkle she'd often displayed in parliament and elsewhere vanished. What remained was wooden, distant, usually dull and often irritating. Judith Brett recently made som...

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There are parallel conversations going on in social policy, says Matt Cowgill , "Values on one level, data another". How values and data interact is an interesting question. A decade ago, I was researching the debate over poverty. In 2003 the Senate Standing Committee on Commu...

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“ they exert every variety of talent on a lower ground…and may be said to live and act in a submind”...... VS Naipaul “The Air Conditioned Bubble" Writing in 1984 about the republican convention of 1984 (the triumphant beginning of Ronald Regans second term), V S Naipaul wrote...

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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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Jon Altman is a Professor at the ANU Center for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research. His submission to the review is long and deeply grounded in long-term, first-hand knowledge of the indigenous art sector and remote area indigenous affairs more generally. It is a must read ....

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That Government bureaucracies at times create 'phantom employees' to publicly argue the 'public' interest-need for.... more bureaucrats, is a well known historical truth. What follows is what Paul Frijters called: A classic case of what Niskanen spoke about. The review has fin...

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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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Hugh White on Rudd and foreign policy : All this should make Rudd overwhelmingly the better choice as Prime Minister as far as foreign policy is concerned. But with Rudd nothing is ever that simple. Back in 2007 he came to office with lots of fresh ideas about how to position...

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The adoption of ARR as policy for governments (in about 2002) was driven by a small cluster of publicly funded, 'arts societies' management representatives, that were/are closely linked to a global network of copyright collection societies managements. The real aim of these lo...

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Behind the contrived fluoro-jacketed appearances at workplaces, behind the simplistic sloganeering, is someone with a far more considered view of the world than his critics suppose. Abbott is comprehensible, but only on his own terms. You don’t have to like those terms, but it...

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Iwrote a report, much as set out in Part 1 , and sent it to the WA Equal Opportunity Commission and other people at the end of January, 1990. The Human Rights Commission in Sydney phoned in February to say they were very concerned and would be interested to see what the WA EO...

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OK, well that heading was a little extreme but one thing that's been increasingly giving me the hebes is the extent to which those organising 'think' sessions focus on profile. I recently attended one such roundtable attended by all sorts of worthies, but it was pretty hard to...

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As Troppodillians may know, I don't follow the daily political chit chat unless I somehow get inveigled into it which I usually do at election time and also when debates seem to carry electric cultural significance about something that I have some particular interest in. I was...

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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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After decades of listening to jingles, slogans, and scare campaigns, it's odd to hear a political campaign strategist complain about short attention spans. But in Monday's Financial Review Mark Textor grumbled that the "the collective attention deficit disorder of those online...

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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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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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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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Nick Cater is sensitive about accusations of racism. In his book The Lucky Culture he writes: To judge someone as prejudiced is character assessment; to call them racist or, even worse, a racist, is character assassination. One can be a little bit prejudiced or a little bit ig...

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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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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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(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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Australia needs intellectuals, says Nick Cater. In his new book The Lucky Culture he writes: A nation is entitled to look to its intellectuals to articulate its common purpose, to pull together loose strands and write a narrative that says where it has come from and where it i...

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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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It's always been hard to pin down who 'the elites' are why we are supposed reject them as un-Australian. A new book review by Tony Abbott offers some clues. It also hints at why attacks on 'the elites' are likely to backfire for conservatives. In the Spectator Australia , Abbo...

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(Cross-posted at shorewalker.com ) I like trains. For a while when I was a kid, I spent Saturdays clambering around Adelaide's Mile End Railway Museum and most of my pocket money buying items for an elaborate train set. Which may explain how I found myself today reading KPMG's...

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It takes a lot for a seasoned partisan pro like Dennis to react like this. It means he's not 'in the tent' and that's not much fun, especially if you still work for these guys on a freelance basis - though Dennis has plenty of other clients for his writing business. In any eve...

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As opposition leader Mark Latham vowed to wage war on poverty . It's an idea he revives for his latest Quarterly Essay, Not Dead Yet: Labor's Post-Left Future . According to Latham, poverty isn't about a lack of money. The dole is generous enough to cover people's basic needs,...

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Here's Dennis Glover's go at articulating his dismay at the kinds of things I expressed dismay about here . I've always been amazed at the extent of antagonism that Labor holds towards the Greens. It seems so obvious that the right relationship between them is as occasionally...

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https://twitter.com/NGruen1/status/1529689205420720129 Herewith today's column in the Age and SMH . George Orwell was a stickler for plain and simple English in public discourse. He argued that one could escape some of “the worst follies of orthodoxy” by simplifying one’s lang...

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Facts are no match for a compelling narrative, says Jonathan Green . Despite the efforts of left leaning bloggers, conservatives are winning arguments and elections because they have better stories. Voters see themselves as struggling with an ever rising cost of living, the fe...

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Nobody knows exactly how much it costs to administer Income Management. But government estimates suggest that it could be as high as $150 a week per person in remote areas. According a recent report from the Australian National Audit Office : ... departments were aware that pr...

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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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Mosman is failing the nation, says Miranda Devine . The residents of Australia's richest suburb might be honest, hard working and committed to their families but they're failing to demand the same behaviour from the lower classes. As a result, social norms are collapsing in lo...

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The very sharp Waleed Aly has joined the debate over whether Catholic child abuse justifies a legal requirement for priests to break the confessional seal . Aly's take: it's an argument with almost no practical consequences, because most priests see excommunication as a far wo...

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To my astonishment, Catholic Archbishop of Sydney George Pell spent part of a press conference today claiming that the news media are exaggerating the scandal of Catholic Church child abuse in Australia . There was "a persistent press campaign against the Catholic Church's ade...

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I've just finished listening to the ABC's Waleed Aly interviewing Jock Laurie, president of the National Farmers' Federation, on the newly-announced register of foreign investment in agricultural land. (You can listen to it too, here .) Laurie's position was effectively: "We k...

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[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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It was around four in morning when I pulled the car over to the side of the road and switched off the engine. I was a hundred or so kilometres out of Perth and when I killed the lights everything went black. When I stepped out of the car I was afraid I might not find my way ba...

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One of the most puzzling features of the world in the aftermath of the financial crisis is that so far, populism has taken primarily a right-wing form, not a left- wing one. In the United States, for example, although the Tea Party is anti-elitist in its rhetoric, its members...

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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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Debates over income support are never ending. And part of the reason is that people have different ideas about what they want the income support system to achieve. When it comes to income support payments for people below retirement age who are capable of paid work, there are...

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

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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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As Ken Parish's post below shows, there is now a widespread view that Gina Rinehart will win control of Fairfax , publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and then seek to move their editorial stances well to the right. From people who believe that, you hear both wa...

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[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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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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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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[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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I offered this comment in a LinkedIn discussion, and thought I might 'put it out there' as my daughter says. In the process I edited and played around with it a little. One of the things that the last few years have shown I think is that rank cynicism plays much worse for the...

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Herewith the text of my talk on Ockham's Razor this morning . It is from a longer essay which you can find here , boiled down so that it could be read in the 12 minutes or so one gets on Ockham's Razor. I. Shortly after Barack Obama became the first US president to build his c...

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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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I just came across this MPI speech by Andrew Leigh. Damn fine job. Straightforward, informed, powerful. In a world in which people somehow get divided into subject wonks and sliver-tongues, it's amazing how much actually knowing stuff and having a perspective on things gives y...

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If you discovered that you had cancer would you (a) find a doctor who is an expert in treating your disease and follow their advice, or (b) attempt to devise your own treatment by reading about cancer on the internet? According to some sources, Apple founder Steve Jobs may hav...

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Even Andrew Bolt is shocked . On Tuesday mining magnate Clive Palmer fronted the media and announced that the US Central Intelligence Agency is using the Rockefeller Foundation to fund a campaign to undermine Australia's coal industry. Palmer appeared in front of the cameras b...

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A few months ago, Sam Roggeveen from the Lowy Institute asked me to talk at a function the Institute was holding on secrecy. I said I wasn't particularly well qualified to talk directly on secrecy regarding national security and foreign affairs, but I was happy to speak about...

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We keep reading claims that Tony Abbott is a low-grade politician who would be wiped off the face of Australian politics if the ALP could only get its act together . Since Abbott has already knocked off one of Australia's most popular prime ministers and taken another to withi...

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The picture of Kevin Rudd's prime ministership painted over the weekend by former speechwriter Jamie Button ought to be fatal to Rudd's leadership bid. It jibes with a number of other assessments , including some just this week by senior Cabinet ministers like Nicola Roxon . T...

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Last week I was ready to write off ABC Melbourne interviewer Jon Faine for ill-judged rudeness and inadequate research . Now he's gone and redeemed himself with a Tony Abbott interview . Faine at his best is smartly, aggressively prosecutorial without actually being rude. Abbo...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJNM0C-7lPk&feature=player_embedded I bought my daughter a very enjoyable book The art of great speeches: and why we remember them by my friend Dennis Glover for Christmas. The book manages the triad of rhetorical tasks very nicely - it delights...

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At the Economist's Democracy in America blog, Erica Grieder suspects that "the biggest untapped constituency is people who are fiscally conservative and socially moderate or liberal." Grieder links to a post by former Cato research fellow Will Wilkinson where he explains why h...

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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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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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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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New post by me at CDU Law and Business Online .

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"Public debate in Australia has been shaped in a profound way by astroturfing", says advertising strategist Ravi Prasad . "If you look at the debate around the carbon tax, the debate around mining supertax, and the public debate around asylum seekers, the public debates in the...

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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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Just in case you didn't notice it, there's been a crevice that's opened up on Tony Abbott's long road to the Lodge. A crevice that in just a few days has opened up to bloody great yawning credibility gap. It was just last week, in the wake of the Qantas fiasco, and the critisi...

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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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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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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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By calling it the greatest moral challenge of our generation , Kevin Rudd framed climate change as a moral issue. Now as Prime Minister Julia Gillard is putting a price on carbon. So why isn't she getting credit from people who care passionately about the issue? The reason is...

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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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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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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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The ABC has made a documentary about David Hicks and screened it in an double episode of Australian Story. It's still on iView and I suggest you go check it out if you've not seen it. It went to some lengths to be 'balanced' but somehow the balance seems to me to tilt too far...

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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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Women are "working fewer hours, in lower-paid industries and in lower-status jobs" than men, writes Jessica Irvine . Despite decades of feminism, women are still doing most of the unpaid cooking, cleaning and caring for children. They are still struggling to break into senior,...

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Why "shouldn’t we look forward to a freer, more egalitarian world of tomorrow in which people are allowed to live where they want?" asks Matt Yglesias . If neoliberalism is about removing all barriers to market transactions then removing restrictions to migration should be top...

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I ran into this excerpt from Q&A a day or so ago and it struck me. I'm actually not sympathetic to the general wailing and gnashing of teeth from the left about how right wing terrorists come out of intemperate language on the right. On the other hand Alan Jones did actually i...

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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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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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I knew Rob Chalmers who worked in the press gallery for over 60 years and has just died after what they call in the media "a battle with cancer". Cancer won as it so often does. Peter Martin does the honours here including reproducing a fine letter to Rob from PM Julia Gillard...

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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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"There was a time when Labor’s aim for the poor and disadvantaged was to end poverty and disadvantage", writes John Quiggin . "Now the best they can hope for is ' extending opportunity '." Under John Curtin and Ben Chifley , Labor was the party of work and welfare. The party s...

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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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As an admirer of most of the positions Paul Krugman takes, I was caught on the fence when he supported public sector union outrage over what the (I think newly elected) Republican Governor in Wisconsin proposed to do to public sector conditions. From memory the basic political...

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Below is my column today from Crikey. This gives me as much of a sense of satisfaction as my involvement in the Button Plan with the recipe for success following much the same formula. Get a small possie as an 'insider', get some bearings on where policy should be heading and...

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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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Traditional Culture and the Wellbeing of Indigenous Australians: An analysis of the 2008 NATSISS (pdf) Dr A.M. Dockery Centre for Labour Market Research, Curtin University Research based on data from the 2002 National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Survey found e...

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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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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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In the Sydney Morning Herald of 1 June, Julie Novak of the Institute of Public Affairs criticised an article by Gavin Mooney and Alex Wodak, writing in the previous day’s Herald, which argued for higher taxes , in part based on arguments developed by Richard Wilkinson and Kate...

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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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Everyone's talking about evidence-based policy. And since gathering evidence is their job, you might think this would give academic researchers a more important role in the policy process. But as Peter Shergold writes in the Australian Literary Review , academics have little i...

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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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It's funny. I think academia is too theoretical, and politics isn't theoretical enough. In this post I'll defend the second proposition on politics, and if I manage it, a subsequent post will defend the first. I'm also thinking particularly about the ALP. In a sense my proposi...

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Of all the right wing shock jocks, I find Andrew Bolt by far the best read. If you ignore the coat trailing and name calling - like calling 'Liberty Victoria' 'far left' (declaration of interest - I'm not sure if I'm a full paying member right now but I join it when asked) and...

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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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Herewith my column for Today's Fin on the Government's proposed new R&D Tax Credit. The paper on which it is based is on the Lateral Economics Website . The politics of compromise can work to solve problems by taking everyone’s needs into account. But sometimes we just get cau...

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Having just watched Q&A on the republic (looking for my daughter who'd got herself into the audience!), I was intrigued by the post I've replicated below. I am the most luke warm republican around and have almost certainly put Chris Dillow's first argument below somewhere on T...

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Niall Ferguson, MA, D.Phil., is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University and William Ziegler Professor at Harvard Business School. Niall F's website doesn't just tell uswhat a dashing fellow he is. It shows us. There he is - hair pinned back by the onru...

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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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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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Ian Verrender in the Sydney Morning Herald recently wrote of Victoria's two oldest power stations that they were bought by their owners "when the issue of climate change was well known". Though he made that remark in the middle of a longer article focused on different issues,...

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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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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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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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Three things emerged from qanda last night . The first was that Malcolm Turnbull is out of control, and thinks he can undermine Tony Abbott at will. So there's some fun in store. The other two are closely related. One is that, whatever Bill Shorten learned in his MBA at the Me...

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In one episode of Yes Minister Hacker says something like "It seems the civil service just prevents governments from implementing the sovereign promises the government has made to the people" to which Bernard says "Well somebody has to". I'm a bit of a promises guy - I think i...

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I admire SA independent senator Nick Xenophon hugely. He's a rare combination of brains, enterprise and principle. I knew him at Adelaide University; he had all those qualities then, and he seems to have kept them intact over the quarter-century since. But I have wondered for...

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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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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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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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As I sometimes do I was tapping away on a blog post and then thought I'd like to give it greater exposure. So I didn't press 'publish' and then pitched it to the Age who liked the idea. So I worked away to convert the post into a column - they're fairly different things (for m...

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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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What Australia needs is a "genuine grassroots free market advocacy organisaiton [sic]", writes Tim Andrews . And he's convinced he's the man to make it happen. Andrews is currently in the US equipping himself with the training and experience he'll need to create an Australian...

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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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From Troppo's guest blogger Neal Lawson (OK I nicked his post and reproduced it here). It is so depressingly inevitable. Obama, like Clinton, Blair and Brown before him, like in Rudd in Australia, like the Swedish social democrats, like every example of centre-left government...

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Previously on this blog I've outlined a couple of themes of mine about Government 2.0. In a comment on a draft APS Social Manifesto I elaborated on both things and so I thought I'd reproduce them here. I think what you’re trying to do is worthwhile. However culture change is a...

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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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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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Tony Harris's AFR column from a few weeks ago. (posted by Nicholas G on Tony's account.) The Australian National Audit Office last week reported on the government’s abandoned ceiling insulation stimulus program. It found that the environment department should have given earlie...

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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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Thank you Nicholas for a generous introduction, not to mention the gift of an opportunity to pontificate. And hello Troppodillarians. Formally. Nicholas's "formidably well read" comment in his intro was a bit OTT, replies to blog posts being an opportunity to make a great deal...

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This is a guest post from Julia Thornton an occasional commenter on Troppo. Nicholas Gruen’s Government 2.0 taskforce left us a treasure trove of a report, but when the nerds, hackers and policy wonks had gone home, in amongst the half eaten pizza and empty Coke bottles there...

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This is a belated report on a debate on Islam versus Atheism at my campus. It was part of Islamic Awareness Week , orgainsed by the Muslim Students' Association. The official question for debate was 'Should God have a place in the 21st Century?', and the format was pretty stan...

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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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Saturday 11 to Wed 15, 10 am to 5 in the Great Hall . My treasures: all in practically "as new" condition. Peter Medawar, Pluto's Republic (not a missprint). $3. Review . The editor of the Age Monthly Review would not let me write that the cover photo depicted Medwar demonstra...

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According to the logic of my last post on the political situation, when Andrew Wilkie declared his intention to support Labor, the other three independents should have followed suit after a dignified interval. I think the analysis was mostly right, except that, as Ken predicte...

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Nicholas Nassim Taleb of Black Swans fame calls it the narrative fallacy. In narrating the way something happens, one convinces oneself that it was inevitable, that it happened for good reasons. A nice illustration of it is the way in which Tom Peters' In search of excellence...

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The world's most inscrutable man? I'm probably completely wrong about this, so please help me improve on the analysis. 1. Windsor, Oakeshott and Katter do not want another election. They mean to enjoy the leverage the election outcome has given them. 2. They have consistently...

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Here's my article from last week's Fin which it placed below the headline "ALP sold itself short instead of selling its strengths". I've also done an interview with Michael Duffy on Counterpoint which was recorded last Thursday, but went to air last night. How did it come to t...

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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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In The New Republic this week Richard Just shines the spotlight on Barack Obama's hopelessly contradictory position on gay marriage. He compares it to Woodrow Wilson's pathetic attempts to dodge the issue of women's suffrage by claiming it was an issue for the states. The issu...

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I recall having lunch with the late great John Patterson about fifteen years ago and amongst the things he said was if you get to choose where you work, always base your choice on the quality of the people you'll be working with. Which brings me to Andrew Leigh who has just be...

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Readers of this blog will know that I share Paul Krugman's view that the US Republicans are a crazy, scary bunch. And during the Howard years there were lots of people who argued that Howard was the same. Which is ridiculous. He was sympathetic to the Crazy Party of the United...

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When the boss wins the Christmas raffle it's customary to draw again, and I wish I could think of an excuse to offer the prize in the election tipping contest to someone else. But you have to hand it to Nicholas for getting the House of Representatives result spot on . Even if...

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From today's Fin: “He [Tony Abbott] has undermined and potentially destroyed a first-term Labor government.” This eulogy to Abbott from former prime minister, John Howard, captures all that is bad about the coalition’s approach to opposition. Oppositions do not have to be dest...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roIeVEf5alk In politics you need a narrative about what you stand for, but you also need one – an ugly one – about the perfidy of your political opponents. As we can now see, the Coalition’s narrative of perfidy is in very good shape. In fact it’...

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