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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I always say that political economy is the best (or least worst) lens through which to examine how health systems work. This goes for Medicare, which is far more than a service delivery model and has massive institutional and political import. The recently established 'Strengt...
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I wrote a couple of pieces for apolitical a few years ago, but didn’t persevere. I then got an invitation to discuss my experience with the inevitable internal review and had a good discussion. Saying that apolitical seemed very optimised to its audience, which of course is it...
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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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Like me, Leslie Cannold is deeply grateful for Liz Chaney right now — you know, the way she’s speaking truth to fruitcakery. Liz Cheney is my hero. On positions of policy, I disagree with her almost 100% of the time, but I see her as one of the first moral heroes of this mille...
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As part of my recent fascination with competitive and ‘de-competitive’ merit selection, I’ve been looking at the origins of both parliamentary and presidential elections. Intriguingly though we now associate elections with competition between candidates, in both the British pa...
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[caption id="attachment_36333" align="alignleft" width="1024"] Austro-Hungarian Economists[/caption] Below is Ross Garnaut's lecture in honour of my Dad. Economic Ideas and Policy Outcomes: Applications to Climate and Energy Fred Gruen signed up as Professor of Economics in th...
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https://youtu.be/gYKPWkvTRIg I What is it with James Burnham? I associate him — via Curtis Yarvin — with the alt-right. And Burnham is the founding text of what I call the Alt-centre (of which I am the founder and which I'm hoping to parlay into world domination if only I can...
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[caption id="attachment_36299" align="aligncenter" width="1912"] I got this list from Google Images. It's a good checklist though some may quibble with some of it.[/caption] Michael Haines, who has previously posted on Troppo , is campaigning for universal income funded from t...
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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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If we want politicians to actually represent their constituents, we need to free them from the pressure of toeing the party line. A week or so ago someone tweeted this to me. It was a response to my Crikey! article of February last year. I had forgotten I'd written such a conc...
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This is a piece I did for Crikey I'd forgotten I'd written and hadn't put it up here. So now I have. The article was spotted by someone who has been exposing just how much damage opening up Congressional committee deliberations to the public has done. It's a very interesting t...
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n43vCEju5Ck In this discussion, Peyton Bowman and I discuss my term ‘fast-foodification’. I coined the word trying to describe modern politics. The techniques used by politicians and their professional enablers are optimised to attract votes in...
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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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As some of you may know, I am now publishing a weekly substack of articles I've found interesting on the net and in some cases offering some summary commentary. In an unprecedented move, the kind of once in a 1,000 year event that could never have been predicted, I'm now publi...
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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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The Sydney Book Review is my kind of book review. It's online and free. Ever since I joined the blogging revolution in 2005 it's seemed crazy to me (not to mention precious) that so many of our literary publications are locked up and sold (usually at a loss) in tiny subscripti...
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