Club Troppo

Probably too late to change their names by deed poll. From wesh on Flickr - nothing to do with this post, but it got your attention! Ever since I started blogging in 2002 I've tended to concentrate almost exclusively on reading and interacting with other Australian blogs. It i...

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Well, last week's inaugural edition of Ask Troppo's Love Gods seemed to go well. I certainly haven't heard from our supplicant reader Gen, so can only assume she was well satisfied with the advice our Love Gods gave her. Unfortunately, one of our putative Love Gods in Nabakov...

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Tony Harris and I were discussing the issue of why the NSW economy has performed so much worse than the Victorian economy. I'm not sure of the answer, though it seems to me that under both the ALP and the Libs Victoria has had better government - better leaders and a better bu...

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A further rise in cash interest rates will cause great pain to many low income families at a time of mounting mortgage stress but the Reserve Bank is only interested in economic arguments so here are three reasons why it should wait a few months. * credit market are still brit...

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Sullivan+Strumpf has a lot of groovy artists on its lists. Their website has some groovy pictures and objects they've run up. I've put them over the fold for those who are interested - and so that those who aren't don't chew up bandwidth.

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Coming out in March 2008 I've just finished reading American Fascists , in which the famous American war correspondent Chris Hedges presents a deeply unpleasant portrait of the Christian Right. Much of the story will be unsurprising to readers who've been paying attention to t...

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As you can see from the video above, there was no love lost between probable chess cheat Veselin Topalov and his nemisis in a recent world championship battle, Vladimir Kramnik. Anyway, though in previous comps Topalov looks like he's managed to pick up the odd surreptitious s...

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Contrarian columnist Michael Duffy has a great column in yesterday's SMH. I wonder when the tipping point will come and people will start to see at least some of the emperor through those new clothes of his. But I was aching for one more dot point, in the article, of at least...

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The Cato Institute strives to be the respectable face of American libertarianism. It's a difficult role to maintain in a movement with more than its fair share of eccentrics, extremists and conspiracy theorists. Earlier this month Dom Armentano , a Cato adjunct scholar, sugges...

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Andrew Norton mourns the passing of the Bulletin : The Bulletin hasn't had a niche for a long time now. While it still occasionally broke stories, on a week-by-week basis it wasn't providing much you could not find more promptly and at lower cost in the newspapers. I haven’t b...

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You'd think that people would have had enough of silly false dichotomies. I look around me and I see it isn't so. I look at columns like this one by Geoffrey Barker. In which he juxtaposes 'government expenditure' (good) with equity and fiscal conservatism (bad) with efficienc...

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Ron Tandberg has done cleverer cartoons. He's done funnier ones. But somehow I've never seen a cartoon that's more Tandberg than this one. The master of the simple idea. And living national treasure.

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Where did all those "extraordinarily, unbelievably, stunningly gorgeous" Russian women come from, asks Anne Applebaum . If you walked into any "well-appointed drawing room, dining room, or restaurant in London" around 1995 there they were, she says. But in the 1970s and 80s, t...

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I've praised the Asus Eee PC before (though not its peculiar marketing name) as the direction I've been hoping portable computing would take for some time. It seems to have been a success and now they're unbundling their way to success it seems. Three new models are on the way...

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The report of the Campbell Committee* on Australias Financial System (1981) paved the way for financial deregulation of credit flows, interest rates and exchange rates. But it also recognized that a financial system could not operate effectively, let alone efficiently, unless...

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Seamus C's post proposing popular elections for Australian of the Year raises the intriguing possibility of a similar mechanism for appointment of a rather more important official Australian role, namely that of Governor-General. There was speculation only a week or so ago tha...

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[ Seamus C, a new Club Troppo contributor whose first piece is published below, is an Australian working overseas, and has interests and expertise in public policy areas - KP ] Would this man have won a popular election for Australian of the Year? Sadly, as Foundation Presiden...

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Australia, Australia, we think of you each day, Australia, Australia, at work and at play, we think of you in the evening and in the morning too, we even wake at midnight so we can think of you. Australia, Australia, we love you from the heart, the liver, the kidneys, the gibl...

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Pretty interesting paper . Abstract: Over time, increases in hours of work per capita have created the intuitively plausible notion that there is less time available to pursue social interactions. The specific question addressed in this paper is the effect of hours of work on...

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