Club Troppo

Someone labours to fit a set of events into a 'theory' which is a restatement of the bleeding obvious: regulators and the regulated talk and this influences the evolution of regulation. Amazing really. Further there is "a circular and interactive relationship between the regul...

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Wonderful publish. Severely, you’ve got received some excellent subject material right here and I hope to acquire again quickly to study some additional.

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In the UK, the coalition government is taking an axe to spending but it hasn't abandoned a commitment to fairness. At least that's what Nick Clegg and Iain Duncan Smith argue in a recent opinion piece for The Telegraph : Our welfare reforms are intended to help people get on,...

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Author and Fairfax columnist John Birmingham posts a truly delightful splenetic prescription for appropriate responses to the odious Andrew Bolt, in the context of current racial vilification proceedings against him by a polyglot assortment of prominent Aboriginal activists: T...

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Murdered toddler Evelyn Greenup Last night's Four Corners on the Bowraville murders of three Aboriginal children some 20 years ago in northern New South Wales made rivetting TV. It painted a picture of a dysfunctional Aboriginal community riddled with alcohol and substance abu...

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Ian Verrender in the Sydney Morning Herald recently wrote of Victoria's two oldest power stations that they were bought by their owners "when the issue of climate change was well known". Though he made that remark in the middle of a longer article focused on different issues,...

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Christopher Hitchens loves writing paragraphs like this. And it's fun when you come across them . How dispiriting to see, once again, the footage of theocratic rage in Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif. The same old dreary formula: self-righteous frenzy married to a neurotic need to...

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The Hatfield clan circa 1897 I had a long chat recently with an old mate from my politics days who I hadn't seen for some time. The conversation turned to Aboriginal affairs issues, as it does when you've both worked with and for Indigenous groups for the best part of thirty y...

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I've posted before on New Zealand's Regulatory Responsibility Bill which has become the Regulatory Standards Bill on its passage from advisory taskforce into the Parliament (and it's often referred to in this post as the Regulatory Responsibility Bill or RRB). In the spirit of...

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There's a certain macabre fascination to watching the NSW ALP's post-election recriminations , a bit like watching the aftermath of an horrific train smash. However, it's an essentially pointless exercise given that the size of the Coalition's majority means that there isn't a...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blB_X38YSxQ Feel free to share stories of good April Fools jokes in comments.

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I recently posted about the Christchurch earthquake and the way in which Crisis Commons was able to help. Here's an email exchange from someone in the crisis centre working on the government side with Tim McNamara who was doing a lot of the organising on the Crisis Commons sid...

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Two pieces of news. Best Australian Essays has published a 'best of the decade' book, and it pissed me off how closely they stuck to recognised 'names' in essay writing. I have a conflict of interest having had an essay in one of the annual collections. So take it as sour grap...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DxeCK5Ne_Q I nearly posted on this when the event occurred, though before the denouement. Australian Health Economist and bureaucrat Stephen Duckett was CEO of Alberta Health Services and, in some situation of crisis or at least heightened media...

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We examine how multitasking affects performance and check whether women are indeed better at multitasking. Subjects in our experiment perform two different tasks according to three treatments: one where they perform the tasks sequentially, one where they are forced to multitas...

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Paul Krugman looks again at the relationship between deficit reduction, wages and employment in the USA. h ttp://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/27/wages-and-employment-yet-again/ Yglesais says that a decline in deficit could lead to further employment expansion if it led to...

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In the conference I attended in Wellington NZ I saw a presentation by Tim McNamara a Wellington developer who spearheaded what seemed like a very successful volunteer web 2.0 effort that arose in the wake of the Christchurch earthquake. Using Ushahidi an open source package in...

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I love newspapers and read lots of them. But I don't love any one newspaper so much that I'd pay hundreds of dollars a year to read it online. The kind of package I could be persuaded to pay for would be a subscription to a bundle of my favourite newspapers and magazines. But...

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As you may know, the Dunera brought a bunch of people out to Australia who settled in very nicely and added to the place. A coach of olympic runners, numerous professors, some rich entrepreneurs. I don't know if Fred Lowen and Ernst Roedeck got rich but they founded FLER and w...

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