Club Troppo

(did Marx appreciate that his capitalist nightmare of complete separation of labor and capital would actually come to fruition in local government?)

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Who wrote this? ... we will have true reconciliation when millions of Australians speak our Australian languages from coast to coast. It is then that we will have the keys to our landscape, our history, our art, our stories. The Australian languages, and the literatures and cu...

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Certainly Korea has. The US, not so much! As usual, Canada does very well - they do well on lots of measures of good public policy. [caption id="attachment_15822" align="alignleft" width="609" caption="Source: OECD"] [/caption]

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Christopher Joye rebukes John Quiggin for this post where he violates the territory of these guys . Quiggin criticises Central Bank Independence (in its strong from from the 1990s) and raises the possibility of higher inflation target to get more desired outcomes. Although fro...

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Judith Sloan vs the environment. If you're trying to reach Judith Sloan and she won't pick up the phone it's probably because she's still in the shower . Blue Milk writes : "Last week I had to compose an embarrassing email to the library explaining that I had lost their copy o...

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TONY JONES: The obvious takeaway, political takeaway in Australia, is that you don't believe your leader, Tony Abbott, your party, your conservative party, has vision. MALCOLM TURNBULL: Oh, no, I think there is a lot of vision. It's just a question of whether you agree with it...

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In case you care, here's the podcast of the column of the paper . Here's the iTunes version.

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Of all the right wing shock jocks, I find Andrew Bolt by far the best read. If you ignore the coat trailing and name calling - like calling 'Liberty Victoria' 'far left' (declaration of interest - I'm not sure if I'm a full paying member right now but I join it when asked) and...

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In January this year a Toronto police officer suggested that women could avoid sexual assault by not dressing like 'sluts'. Made during a safety information session at York University, the officer's remark provoked a storm of protest . By May the protests had spread as far as...

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I wanted to comment on Nicholas Gruen's recent post titled the future of tertiary education , but I didn't have time and there was too much I wanted to say. Hence this post. I agree with most of Nicholas's points (some with qualifications) but there's much more that needs sayi...

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Originally posted at APO (Australian Policy Online) Last week's Budget Speech by the Treasurer announced a package of reforms designed to help people receiving a Disability Support Pension to get into work. The package includes a range of measures : • New participation require...

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Broadband Internet: An Information Superhighway to Sex Crime? Date: 2011-04 By: Bhuller, Manudeep (Statistics Norway) Havnes, Tarjei (University of Oslo) Leuven, Edwin (CREST (ENSAE)) Mogstad, Magne (Statistics Norway) Does internet use trigger sex crime? We use unique Norwegi...

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As the graph below shows, the proportion of men in full-time work has fallen over time. Every recession the proportion falls sharply and in each recovery it fails to bounce back to its pre-recession level. When I show people this graph they often offer explanations -- it's pop...

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Freedom of expression in Australia is arguably freer than it has ever been, both legally and practically. Oppressive censorship of art and literature is largely a dim memory from the distant past (leaving aside infrequent moral panics like the Henson naked kiddie pic affair)....

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In this week's Missing Link Friday bloggers discuss slutwalking, teenage pregnancy, the demise of the book, typical Australian incomes and the problem of men who don't work. Sex, lies and slutwalking . Slutwalking is what happens when "when the political passions of the second...

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Slutwalks are coming soon all over Australia . The Brisbane variant is in 2 weeks time and the Sydney one in 3 weeks. The craze has reached us from America where the first one was held in Toronto on April 3 in protest of a local police officer who is said to have told 10 colle...

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Here's one of the three pieces I contributed to Crikey as a correspondent from the lockup. I'd not done the lockup for over a decade - and it's very like sitting an exam, including the relief and relaxation when it's finished after a hard slog and you can catch up with people...

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It's hard to deny that the Gillard government's emerging new asylum seeker policy represents a thinly disguised reversion to Howard's Pacific Solution, although both Gillard and Stephen Smith are giving denial a good shot. The thing is that I suspect most "punters" will neithe...

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A warning, this is pretty much a shaggy dog story. A while ago I had an idle thought about migrant settlement patterns. If there was a slight tendency amongst Chinese Australians to settle in ways that reflected subnational cultures from China (I was prompted by the Sydney sub...

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Now I realise I'm courting extreme feminist abuse by this post, but so be it. Australian popular culture always seems to follow North American examples no matter how silly e.g. "gangsta rap". So I suppose it was inevitable that the phenomenon of the " slutwalk " would rapidly...

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