Club Troppo

Mitt Romney takes a tough line on welfare. In 2008 Republicans cheered when he said that America's culture was threatened by welfare payments to poor people . Asked how tax reform plan would help Americans on low incomes he said his plan was "primarily based on trying to creat...

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The missing liberals: Why is there no liberal party? Because there are so few people who support both economic and social liberal causes, says Andrew Norton . Andrew cites data from the 2010 Australian Election Survey. Dr Watson vs Dr Ludd: With access to huge databases, exper...

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Herewith - somewhat late owing to my being out of the country - is my second column for the Age and the SMH in Ross Gittins' place while he goes on hols. It seems there is further news - that we're disgorging some more money to the mendicant car companies. I am not close enoug...

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It is, of course, the season for holiday fun times making worthless definitions. Last week my wife and I were making a rare trip into Namba, a popular entertainment and shopping district in Osaka. We happened to see a restaurant named " Blue Billabong ( Japanese )". It purport...

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Treasury's mission is broad -- to improve the wellbeing of the Australian people. And according to Peter Martin its wellbeing framework empowers it "to fight homelessness just as much as it empowers it to fight inflation". As Martin explained back in 2008 the framework goes we...

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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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Beyond soundbites: "There’s so much potential for political parties, who are more and more thought to be hollow, soulless things, to allow their MPs to show what they actually believe in and engage with people. Soundbites were useful when someone else controlled how much time...

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Of the many policy debates in Federal Parliament in 2011, one which gathered support from both major parties was the proposal to lift the superannuation guarantee employer contribution from 9 to 12 per cent. Not surprisingly, this was wholeheartedly endorsed by the superannuat...

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Judith Sloan wants the term banned , the editors of the Australian think it's bureaucratic gibberish and even the new minister for social inclusion seems unsure about what it means. So what is social inclusion? For the New Labour politicians who popularised the term social exc...

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Ross Gittins asked me if I'd fill in for him during his summer break, which gives me a chance to get a few things off my chest. So here's the first of four weekly columns. In 2009, I chaired the federal government's Government 2.0 Taskforce. We sketched out how government migh...

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About 8 months ago, I had a look at what was then happening in the Arab world and made predictions about what was going to happen next. Time to see what really happened and update the forecast. A minor prediction I was making was that Libya would again succumb to the resource...

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George Monbiot bells the "libertarian" cat: Freedom: who could object? Yet this word is now used to justify a thousand forms of exploitation. Throughout the rightwing press and blogosphere, among thinktanks and governments, the word excuses every assault on the lives of the po...

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The Effects of Home Computers on Educational Outcomes. Evidence from a Field Experiment with Schoolchildren Date: 2011-09 By: Robert Fairlie (Department of Economics, University of California, Santa Cruz) Jonathan Robinson (Department of Economics, University of California, Sa...

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Looks like they work . . . Inducement Prizes and Innovation. Date: 2011-12-15 By: Brunt, Liam (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration) Lerner, Josh (Harvard Business School) Nicholas, Tom (Harvard Business School) http://d.repec.org/n?u=R...

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Herewith a paper about my encounter with design, on taking up the Chairmanship of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation and encountering the Family by Family program. The site where it's been published has no comments facility, so I'm opening up discussion here should an...

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Last month, I talked about the route that Mario Monti should take with Italy if he truly wanted to get it back to a higher-growth path. My advice was to take on the rent-seekers in blitz-reforms, whilst keeping the population in a state of great anxiety about the economy in or...

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[caption id="attachment_18324" align="alignleft" width="865" caption="A cool graphic curtesy of McKinsey"] [/caption] Hard to believe we have a share of the global film industry revenue which is about a fifth of the revenue of the US industry. Anyway, it's a cute graphic.

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What is the road of least resistance scenario, and thereby the most likely scenario, for the Eurozone financial crisis? To solve this conundrum, we need to map the major elements of high resistance around which the road must navigate and the areas of low-resistance towards whi...

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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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Just that - it's a windfall. Here's Henry Ergas's well considered response to the latest depredations of managerialism. Nice to be able to agree for once with someone for whose breadth of learning I have such a high regard! The bargain that matters is the lifetime return to ta...

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