Club Troppo

Under John Howard, the Liberal Party embraced a form of big-spending conservative social democracy, says Andrew Norton . The most formidable opponents of limited government are conservatives. In a comment on Andrew's blog , Winton Bates wonders whether this might lead to a rea...

Continue reading →

I can't really blame Australian Young Labor for attempting to clamp its collective lips on the public tit in the wake of the Rudd government's accession to power. I don't even violently object to their proposal that students be allowed to add the cost of textbooks to their HEC...

Continue reading →

A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Andrew Bartlett reports on the Senate Inquiry into housing affordability : The first day of he...

Continue reading →

In a recent post I argued that "Over the very time we were clearing away the detritus of the various collectivist institutions we cobbled together under the name of the Australian Settlement, or ‘protection all round’, while we proceeded with economic reform by deregulating ma...

Continue reading →

It seemed like a reasonable enough idea. Responding to fears of a terrorist attack by ' dirty bomb ' or nuclear weapon , US Customs and Border Protection installed hundreds of radiation portal monitors at seaports, land border ports of entry and crossings across the United Sta...

Continue reading →

Quite a while ago, Kevin Cox approached me with an idea he had called 'energy rewards'. Kevin may wish to chime in on comments with an appropriate link to the best explanation of the idea. In any event it's a method of generating purpose specific permits or certificates which...

Continue reading →

A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, Gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Mark Bahnisch tries to avoid taking an obvious approach to the 2020 summit . Robert Merkel sho...

Continue reading →

A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Petering Time is listening to Kevin and hearing a dog-whistle . Despite the end...

Continue reading →

Paradox one Over the very time we were clearing away the detritus of the various collectivist institutions we cobbled together under the name of the Australian Settlement, or 'protection all round', while we proceeded with economic reform by deregulating markets to try to opti...

Continue reading →

Courtesy of Clive Crook , here's a fascinating chart on skills development across OECD countries. The graph shows the proportion of the labour force with at least a college degree, by age group, for OECD countries. The bigger the span of the vertical lines, the more younger ge...

Continue reading →

Hillary Clinton is a strange female politician. Politicians have to play to their strengths, and some of those are gendered. I argued in this post that it would surely be very difficult for Hillary Clinton to win by being aggressive. I think that's a taboo with women politicia...

Continue reading →

Here's an example, but there's a whole gallery of pretty amazing landscape's here . Not bad for an (excellent) economic journalist.

Continue reading →

They're all off to America and the UK .

Continue reading →

A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Derek Barry is unimpressed by the gimmickry of Earth Hour . Apathetic Sarah was...

Continue reading →

A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Gary Sauer-Thompson is skeptical about whether co-operative federalism will imp...

Continue reading →

A few years ago I sponsored a bunch of Afghani kids on a soccer playing tour of Queensland and NSW. It was a privilege to meet some of the kids. I expected to find kids who'd grown up in a peasant culture, who would not be particularly interested in education. One tends to thi...

Continue reading →

In the furore that has broken out over Chinas crackdown in Tibet, Ive been surprised that so little has been said about President Hu Jintaos previous administration of Tibet as a rising communist party cadre. After all, it was Hus iron fisted handling of the last riot in Tibet...

Continue reading →

For rugby fans who've been watching with increasingly frustrated bemusement Ewen McKenzie's bizarre coaching of the NSW Waratahs to play stereotypical 10 man rugby despite boasting one of the most potent backlines in the Super 14 and despite the fact that the Crusaders and eve...

Continue reading →

A digest of the best of the blogosphere published each weekday and compiled by Ken Parish, James Farrell, Gilmae, Gummo Trotsky, Amanda Rose, Tim Sterne, Stephen Hill and Saint. Politics Australian Lewis Holden relays suggestions of incrementally enacting a Clayton's Republic,...

Continue reading →

For some reason, Saint decided to include an anti-global warming rant in today's Missing Link . It's part of an "interview" between warming denialist Institute of Public Affairs shill/ scientist Jennifer Marohasy and denialist pundit Michael Duffy: Duffy asked Marohasy: Is the...

Continue reading →