Club Troppo

The regulation requiring medicines to be sold with consumer product information guides is a good idea in principle. But in the attempt to find out a little more about an over-the-counter pill I sometimes take to get to sleep - Restavit - I found myself reading one. It's got so...

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From today's Fin: “He [Tony Abbott] has undermined and potentially destroyed a first-term Labor government.” This eulogy to Abbott from former prime minister, John Howard, captures all that is bad about the coalition’s approach to opposition. Oppositions do not have to be dest...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roIeVEf5alk In politics you need a narrative about what you stand for, but you also need one – an ugly one – about the perfidy of your political opponents. As we can now see, the Coalition’s narrative of perfidy is in very good shape. In fact it’...

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There's been a great deal in this election that has been unprecedented, and some of the precedents it sets are good, and some less desirable. What I think is not particularly unprecedented is the swing. Quite a few commentators, have gone from the observation that first term g...

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Based on a good thread over at LP, I watched the Kerry O'Brien interview with Tony Windsor, Rob Oakeshott and Bob Katter. Remarkable. I can't remember the last time I so enjoyed watching politicians. Perhaps never. Intelligence, humour, apparent integrity and, more than anythi...

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What if the Greens make amending the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 to provide for at least some measure of proportional representation in the House of Representatives? Should Bob Brown do so? Should either major party agree? The Greens would have to be tempted to use this po...

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Dated but you get the picture ... Given that the most likely state of play in the House of Reps after distribution of postal and prepoll votes is 73 Coalition and 72 ALP or vice versa, we might yet witness a Labor minority government . The Greens' Adam Bandt and independent/Gr...

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Extraordinary: just extraordinary. Courtesy of the AEC , these are the seats in Australia with the most informal votes. I had no idea the informal vote could be so high. All from NSW. Division State Formal Informal Total Informal % Informal Swing % Blaxland NSW 61,996 10,276 7...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTl3U6aSd2w&feature=player_embedded

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Here's Annabel Crabb reporting on negative campaigning. Fear Is The Winner Of the 30 TV ads commissioned and aired by the Coalition, 29 attack Labor, and only 6 offer any positive reason to vote Liberal (thanks to Gruen Nation's hardworking research bunnies Xtreme Info, for th...

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One of the drivers of our modern world is the way in which public and private interest are being reconfigured. In many ways it's analogous to the rise of science. As Paul David’s history of the emergence of open science argues, the precondition for ‘take-off’ in modern science...

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The Australian fiscal stimulus package has been controversial, with some Australian economists and visiting UK historian Niall Ferguson arguing that it was unnecessarily large or wasteful, and other Australian economists and visiting US economist Joseph Stiglitz arguing that i...

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I'm quite puzzled by the negative, disillusioned tone of much of the blogosphere and MSM commentariat coverage of the federal election campaign. I've actually been quite heartened, almost inspired, by it. The advent of 21st century versions of old-fashioned "town hall" partici...

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A media release that's just been put out. Over a quarter of the debt from the fiscal stimulus will be repaid from the taxes of those who would otherwise have been unemployed. As our economy turned down in late 2008, Australians’ spending kept other Australians in work. And tho...

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I only recently became aware of the leasehold system on residential property in the Australian Capital Territory. This was an interesting attempt to create a city in which rent seekers and speculators would not prosper by allowing the increased value of land to accrue to the g...

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Immigration: America's nineteenth century "law and order problem"? by Howard Bodenhorn, Carolyn M. Moehling, Anne Morrison Piehl Abstract: Past studies of the empirical relationship between immigration and crime during the first major wave of immigration have focused on violen...

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As you've never seen them seriously - here .

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I thought I saw the fallacy of the excluded middle. I did. I did see the fallacy of the excluded middle, or perhaps I should say the fallacy of pre-prepared thinking iSnack processed food for thought 2.0. In a story on Mark Latham's call for us all to vote informal , we have t...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM_dOoUXgLE&feature=related

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Some great graphics from Tom Scott. I think the warning signs make most impact on their own, but Tom has annotated them on his site . Below, your opportunity to win the coveted Troppo Mercedes Sports and dinner with Nelson Mandela Warnings I'd like to see include: Warning: no...

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