Club Troppo

What Martin Wolf thinks of Britain's national debt, I think of our foreign debt . I have no idea whether the government can both get away with this optimism and postpone the moment of truth at least until after the general election. Markets have been forgiving. The difficulty...

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HT Brad Delong: In Adopting Harsh Tactics, No Inquiry Into Their Past Use : The program began with Central Intelligence Agency leaders in the grip of an alluring idea: They could get tough in terrorist interrogations without risking legal trouble by adopting a set of methods u...

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Not if you read fellow second generation Dunera Boy Peter Brent's analysis , it makes you relieved if the prospect of the paranoia of the past gives you the willies as it does me. Brent's analysis is calm and persuasive. I'll reproduce it below the fold. HIS WAS THE WEEK the f...

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Am I mistaken or is this a reasonable description of the last - say - thirty years in cinema. A generation ago, you could do a film about foreigners in a normal English speaking accent. The Sound of Music was done in a mix of fairly unobtrusive (to us) English accents (the adu...

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Here's how you do free association economics? You start writing a piece on the politics of the budget and then you just say pretty much anything that comes into your head. You use the general riffs that are doing the rounds at the moment and just see how it comes out. You make...

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The High Court this morning rejected an appeal by former radio star John Laws' employer Radio 2UE against a defamation verdict for comments he made about fellow shockjock Ray Chesterton. The SMH seems to summarise the judgment accurately as far as I can see from a quick scan r...

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I see PJ O'Rourke is in the country to strut his schtick for the Centre for Independent Studies. He wrote an opinion piece in yesterday's Oz along predictable lines: the keynesian socialists are squandering our money on all these GFC stimulus measures, when the best thing to d...

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The Thomas v Mowbray thread has taken an unexpected but fascinating turn, at least from my viewpoint as a public lawyer. It's kickstarted a productive debate about the form of an Australian bill of rights. As this is only tangentially related to the topic of the post, I've dec...

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There's been a lot written about this subject lately, but this two pager (pdf) from Paul Ormerod seems pretty good to me.

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Alex Sloan at ABC Canberra and I have a chat on air about fortnightly usually corresponding to one of my columns. We had a chat on Adam Smith and the Theory of Moral Sentiments last Thursday and I was in some trepidation that I might become rather incoherent as the ideas are q...

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In 2008 a group of people and organisations coming together under the name of Australia 21 invited both John Quiggin and me to discussions in Sydney to discuss the issue of resilience with them. Resilience, they suggested was something that we should be concerned about general...

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[caption id="" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Steven Hawking"] [/caption] [caption id="" align="alignright" width="246" caption="Richard Pratt"] [/caption] If 'gravely ill' is a euphamism for 'dying' spare a thought for the two souls pictured.

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Well it was a great success - last time I mentioned that I was after a research assistant I got about twelve applications in the space of a couple of days. Most of them were very good. Since then three people have done occasional work for us mostly very well. In the case of ea...

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Occasional visitor "Edward Carson" wrote a somewhat cynical comment on my previous post about asylum seekers : Does this mean that if they fill out the appropriate forms in duplicate, we are then obliged to accept them all into our country? Although I strongly suspect "Edward"...

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Andrew Norton wonders how the term 'neoliberalism' came to Australia . After searching the literature, he thinks it "probably started in Latin America, and came to Australia via US academia". Andrew's probably right. There's some evidence that, during the 1960s, free market su...

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Given the grim circumstances the world faced, I've always been queasy about being too gung ho in criticising the bombing raids of the allies in World War Two (though the allies circumstances were less and less grim, victory more and more inevitable when some of the worst raids...

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A question that seems obvious once it's been asked. Find out the answer in this revealing video. The Colbert Report Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c The Colbert Coalition's Anti-Gay Marriage Ad colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor NASA Name Contest

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"Jihad" Jack Thomas I've been meaning for ages to write about the High Court's 2007 decision in Thomas v Mowbray , in fact ever since it was handed down. Complex constitutional decisions are really difficult to write about in a way that's accessible and interesting to a genera...

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