Club Troppo

Judith Sloan surprised participants at the government's Tax Forum in October when she suggested Newstart Allowance wasn't adequate. She made the same claim in a piece for the Drum writing: "If we are to expect the unemployed to search for employment with confidence, there is n...

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[caption id="attachment_18145" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Judge Michael Finnane"] [/caption] Justice Michael Finnane of the NSW District Court has long been one of my favourite legal characters. But then I'm not a criminal defence lawyer. If I was I'd almost certa...

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Dennis Glover analyses the PM's party conference speech in a piece for the Weekend Australian . It's an interesting piece but there's one thing about it that's driving me mad. Nobody in the Labor party can open their mouth without mentioning Tony Abbott. And while it would be...

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Sometimes the words I type into Google's search box are the words I want to appear in the results. For years now I've been using the '+' operator to ensure that every result includes a particular term. But recently, without warning, it stopped working . Fortunately Google have...

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Last year French parents were outraged by an advertisement that claimed Santa Claus wasn't real. AdWeek reported : "I have some bad news for you," a father says to his (grown) son right at the beginning of the spot. "Père Noël doesn't really exist." Parents are all upset that...

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I was sent the following analysis of the NZ election yesterday. I was sent it by someone I know, but I can't possibly tell you who it was (or I'd have to kill you). Moreover the person who sent this to me, did not identify the person who sent it to him. I think that's because...

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I read Susan Johnson's memoir - A Better Woman - when it came out a few years ago. I like her writing - clear, insightful and keenly felt. The memoir is about her medical adventures when her body 'let her down' as it were after childbirth. In any event it's out as a audio book...

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Look at this graph of the great tectonic shifts brought about by the GFC. Securitisation collapsed as a form of funding, and those in the official family ran round doling out gold plated assistance like free government guarantees to our banks (and next to nothing for our secur...

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Lending is the right model for ebooks: Joshua Gans asks "If lending is the appropriate mode for books, then how would the business of publishing look if it is built around lending rather than ownership?" Why journalists need Twitter : Often maligned as quick chat for empty hea...

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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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The ABC's Australia Talks program ran a show this week about the troubles of the Australian book industry. Its starting point was that the local bookselling and book publishing industry is in a heap of trouble. Not for the first time, the program did a deal of hand-wringing ab...

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This made me laugh

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White Ribbon Day: "In an afternoon in Montreal on December 6th 1989, a man massacred 14 of his female classmates. From this horrific action, a nation was brought to the forefront of an issue that had been severely underreported for too long." Lip Magazine . "White Ribbon Day p...

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Here's a paragraph I wrote about fifteen years ago. The culture of economic expertise places inadequate weight on integrating insights from multiple perspectives, that it frequently places an unreasonably high 'burden of proof' on heterodox views, and that it has a penchant fo...

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Adelaide's "Festival of Ideas" last month featured a useful discussion of the mining industry's contribution to the economy, since replayed on the ABC program The National Interest . Towards the end there was a brief discussion of how mining damages prime farming land. Asked a...

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The ethics of the second oldest profession - new post by me at CDU Law and Business Online .

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Apparently some US journalism academic named Tanni Haas has written a book called Making it in the Political Blogosphere: The World's Top Political Bloggers Share the Secrets to Success . I'm not interested in the subject per se , because I long ago concluded that the recipe w...

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With the Media Inquiry in full swing and the Greens' Bob Brown complaining loudly about News's lack of fairness and accuracy , now might be a good time to travel back in time 20 years. Let's visit another era when a powerful paper was unashamedly boosting one side of politics...

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New post by me at CDU Law and Business Online .

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Like Paul Krugman part of what originally drew me into Economics was the premise behind Asimov's Foundation books. This premise was a far future where a discipline had managed to formalise and model human society, shed light on what would happen and create preconditions for a...

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