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Nicholas Gruen mentioned many moons ago an idea for a useful feature for Club Troppo. Apparently Crikey used to run an occasional roundup of interesting publications from thinktanks and other more academic sources, but subsequently discontinued it. Probably not enough market demand.
Fortunately we here at Club Troppo don’t give a rat’s about market demand. Moreover I’m having a quiet day today after the trauma of a birthday party last night where the house was invaded by twenty or so 13 year old girls, so I might as well have a go at implementing Nicholas’s idea. I’ll attempt to repeat the exercise every month or so.
Let’s start with the Australian Parliamentary Library, not usually a place you visit for light reading, but a great repository of research material on political and polcy-related issues. Its recent publications include a paper by Nicholas Horne titled Northern Territory statehood: major constitutional issues and background notes and links on Indigenous socioeconomic indicators, which should be a useful resource for bloggers interested in injecting some actual factual material into posts about the Stolen Generations and other current controversies.
Australian Policy Online links a new ALRC report titled Privilege in perspective: client legal privilege in federal investigations. It concludes that there was “general support for maintaining privilege as a fundamental right of clients, which only should be abrogated or modified in exceptional circumstances”, which may come as a surprise to the SMH’s legal columnist Richard Ackland who seems to think it’s just a greedy lawyers’ rort. APO also has a shorter op-ed piece by Marko Beljac titled Pakistan and the prospects for nuclear terrorism.
Australian Institute of Criminology has just published resource materials on technology-enabled crime and a report with the catchy title Law enforcement responses to trafficking in persons : challenges and emerging good practice by Fiona David.
The Centre for Independent Studies publishes a paper by Peter Saunders called What Are Low Ability Workers To Do When Unskilled Jobs Disappear? Part 2: Expanding Low-skilled Employment and then answers his own question with a fairly standard CIS recipe: cut the minimum wage and go into prostitution or some other personal services job. CIS has also just published Five Out of Ten: A Performance Report on the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) by Gaurav Sodhi.
Evatt Foundation publishes a chapter written by one Kevin Rudd from the book Globalisation: Australian Impacts and titled Inserting a New Dialectic: Governance.
Melbourne Institute has an op-ed piece by Stephen Sedgwick (republished from the AFR of 22 January) titled Five fundamentals for effective reform.
NATSEM has a paper called Superannuation – the right balance? by Thomas Morrison and Simon Kelly (I wonder if they mention Nicholas Gruen’s “tax cut as extra default super” idea?).
ANU’s Strategic and Defence Studies Centre publishes History as Policy – Framing the debate on the future of Australias defence policy edited by Ron Huisken and Meredith Thatcher.
Well that’s about it for the moment. I think I’ll need a few weeks to prepare myself for the next effort. Feedback on the usefulness or otherwise of this feature would be welcome.
Very neat idea, Ken.
One suggestion – though it would be time consuming – would be to cruise a lot of research centre sites located in universities and see how many have rss feeds.
I’m a little surprised no one has thought to do this.
And in breaking news just in another ex NT politician publicly admits in internet chat room sleaze post to:
I’ve got the yellow highlighter out on the just out General practice activity in Australia 2006-07 From the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.
It reports the results of the ninth year of the BEACH program, April 2006 to March 2007. Data reported by 930 general practitioners on 93,000 GPpatient encounters are used to describe aspects of general practice in Australia: the general practitioners and their patients; the problems managed and the treatments provided.
Swinging into it’s 10th year or so it is the only real guide to what GPs actually do and see in their practices.
comment: Strange as it might seem in this day and age GPs, the gatekeepers of the australian health system, do not actually keep any data (clinical or otherwise) that is able to be aggregated in any form.
Guys,
APO and the OzParlLib DO have feeds. I also have a shared-items feed/page that has my picks from around the traps, which I flag in Google Reader rather than merely aggregate. Perhaps you guys can do the same?
Here are some Feed URLs similar to your picks above.
http://www.apo.org.au/webboard.rss
APO Comment and Analysis
http://www.apo.org.au/linkboard.rss
APO Reports
http://www.abs.gov.au/websitedbs/d3310114.nsf/Home/rss/$file/abs_rss.xml
ABS
http://cpd.org.au/taxonomy/term/135/0/feed
Centre for Policy Development Updates
http://www.aph.gov.au/Library/rssmesi_feed.xml
Parliament National Month/Soc indicators
http://www.aph.gov.au/library/rsspubs_feed.xml
Parl Library Publications
http://www.aph.gov.au/senate/rss/new_inquiries.xml
Oz Fed Parl Inquiries
(To see what the GoogleReaderSharedItems look like, here is my list as a web page. And if you go to the second page, you’ll see N.Gruen’s PPP club troppo piece there)
Thanks Dave. I’ve already got all those feed URLs (except CDP) and they certainly speed up the review process for compiling a feature like this. I don’t think they’re a substitute for at least some element of human selection and editing though, because there are some items that are very very boring indeed to most tastes.
Moroever, and peculiarly, AFAIK none of the thinktanks have feeds, and very few university research centres do either.
Thanks Ken.
I for one am glad that human trafficking is enough of a priority to merit some research. Another moral argument in favour of more liberal immigration, or at least partly.
I presume that you folks realise that APO has a weekly newsletter, where they will email you out a list and brief summary of all of the interesting government and other research reports? I haven’t re-subscribed since I’ve moved job (and email address), but I used to find it required reading (particularly to see if they’d picked up any of my publications!).
Not that an occasionally blog summary isn’t a bad idea, (I don’t know whether APO have everything they have in their email newsletter in their feed, for example, and for some people RSS might be more convenient than email) but it’s what the APO folk have been doing for a while.
This is great Ken. Thank you. I get a million updates from research centres etc into my inbox, but rarely have the time to actually read through them.
Ken
You said: “I dont think theyre a substitute for at least some element of human selection and editing though”
That’s exactly why I’m saying the Google Reader “share items” (rather than a mere aggregate of all posts from feeds of interest) works well. THATs why the clubtroppo PPP article is in my “shared items page/feed”, but the rest of clubtroppos before or since aren’t. As an aside, it’s possible to have TWO selective sets of items – one “shared”, and one “starred”, although you’ll have to mark starred items as public. (In GoogleReader go “Settings”->”Tags” to manipulate this).
This is NOT to be confused with putting a feed into a category and making the category public – that acts merely as an aggregator.
You can also “subscribe” to a feed, flag a particular item, then unsubscribe – and the item you’ve flagged remains in your shared items for all to see.
Also note that the order in the “shared items” page/feed reflects the order you flagged them rather than the order they were originally posted.
If you guys create such a feed of flagged items, I’d love to have it, although it will match only a single google user, so if you want to manage the list collectively among troppodilians, you’ll have to create a shared email address and all know the password.
Thanks again Dave. However, I’m more interested in finding out exatly what APO does than in following your Google Reader suggestion. We use Google Reader for Missing Link and it’s a great system. However, very few university research centres and no thinktanks (AFAIK) actually have RSS or similar feeds at all. God knows why, you’d think it would be a logical step. Thus, of the 12 papers linked in the primary post above, only 4 are available by RSS feeds. Moreover, that disparity will get greater if I’m able to implement Mark B’s suggestion of monitoring a wider range of uni research centres (as I intend).
It would be great if they all had RSS feeds, because then your idea (or one like it) would be by far the best and easiest way of doing things. In the meantime, however, I’ll keep giving this concept a try at least for a couple more editions and see how it goes (unless it turns out that APO is doing something as extensive or more so).
I’m still waiting on feedback on how the AUSFTA is bearing up. We got feedback after the first year of its operation and haven’t heard a peep about it since.
I am enjoying the Defence Study read though.