Club Troppo

Someone in the ABC recommended the Foreign Correspondent of a couple of weeks ago which can be seen on iView - amazing scenes of the Japanese tsunami. Watch it if you can - pretty spellbinding I'd say. And I've been listening to ' First Person ' on weekday mornings, which is a...

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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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Quadrant magazine kicked off in 1956-57 as a pocket-sized quarterly. James McAuley edited the first 20 issues and these have now become collectors items. I am scanning those 20 issues and the task is half done but work will have to stop while I go fishing in WA, off Carnarvon....

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Mr Denmore is unhappy about my recent post ' The blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur ' where I suggest that blogging isn't about to replace professional journalism. Mr Denmore agrees but thinks I'm attacking a straw man: ... just who is saying that blogging is intended to repl...

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Are bloggers writing better commentary and opinion than journalists? According to Troppo commenter Alex White the best blog commentary is more valuable than the best commentary in the mainstream media. In a response to my post on the blogosphere’s delusions of grandeur , he wr...

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In which the queen is sacrificed and all the remaining pieces are involved in the resulting mate. Here.

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A popular writer at leading Australian political blog The Political Sword has hit back at "pedantic" criticism of her work. Responding to a series of posts at Club Troppo (an obscure political blog frequented by boring middle-aged men) Feral Skeleton writes : Some stuffed shir...

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Remember when bloggers uncovered evidence that Reserve Bank of Australia subsidiary Securency was using money-laundering techniques to channel suspected bribe money to a company in the Seychelles? Me neither. Journalists at the Age and the ABC broke that story . Investigative...

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Does poverty deplete willpower? At This Field is Required, Pamela Stubbart muses over a recent article in the New Republic . When money isn't enough. At Larvatus Prodeo, Brian links to a recent column by Ross Gittins and starts a discussion about poverty and social exclusion....

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In a very recent post I commented on the absence of the one signal in the public market for expertise that might really improve the market for expertise - from the perspective of the public and private interest in efficiency - and that was some surveillance of the extent to wh...

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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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According to this article , Apple is aiming at converting computer users to using Apple's servers to store their files instead of their own computer's hard drive. It would certainly simplify mobile computing and eliminate problems with syncing between hardware platforms so you...

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ALAN JONES: Look, it's a harsh thing to say on these matters of carbon tax and global warming and carbon dioxide that your national government is telling you lies. But The Australian newspaper leads today with a story that no major coal-producing country currently imposes a di...

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The survey on economic opinions run by the Economic Society Australia is running to a close. It is your chance to register your opinions on the ERA journal rankings, the status of economists, carbon taxation, etc. The response rate so far has been surprisingly high – with abou...

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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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A lot of research confirms one's priors. Sometimes it refutes them - or at least undermines them. Guessing what the outcome would be before I read the abstract, I would have guessed the opposite of what they found. But - hindsight being the powerful tool that it is - I can cer...

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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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