Club Troppo

Howard's End? Matthew Talbot Hostel for Homeless Politicians, as imagined by Aussie Bob at Road to Surfdom There hasn't really been any clearly dominant issue in the political blogosphere over the last couple of days. I suppose it reflects the onset of the Christmas silly seas...

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The collected papers from the 2002 Popper conference in Vienna are now available at the cost of an arm and part of a leg. See if anyone here can manage some more intelligent comment than the parade of puns at Catallaxy .

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[photopress:OneWay.jpg,full,centered] At Larvatus Prodeo Mark Bahnisch argues that Team Rudd is blurring the differences between Labor and the Coalition and driving left-leaning voters back towards the Greens, Democrats and independents: So much for product differentiation, Ru...

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Palm Island residents riot over 'Mulrunji's' death in November 2004. Photo: ABC Chloe Hooper's The Tall Man really is one of the most powerful essays in The Best Australian Essays 2006 , which I reviewed earlier this week . It tells the story of the inquest into the death of '...

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I'm writing an op ed which argues that there's more to politics than policy. Well that's not news particularly in this age of 'values based' politics. But I want to develop an argument I began in this this essay in these terms. We are taught that there are three arms of govern...

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As Andrew Landeryou reported at 4:11am (and The Age at 8:13am), last night's Victorian Legislative Council recount in several seats resulted in the DLP indeed losing the last seat in Northern Metropolitan to the ALP, apparently as a result of 6000 Green preferences which had p...

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Looking at some consulting work on regulation I hunted down something I'd seen before - the Business Costs Calculator . This seems like a sensible initiative which is designed to provide a template through which those engaged in 'regulation review' activities can be taken thro...

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Warm relationship between Beattie and Gillard - a particularly disturbing photo from Landeryou's blog I'm generally very wary of linking to Andrew Landeryou's blog because it's so full of material that appears to be seriously defematory. However, he's currently running a story...

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Balancing Work and Family , the recent report from the House of Reps Standing Committee on Family and Human Services contains a version of one of my favourite pictures. (I've posted my own version below the fold.) The figure shows how labour force participation has changed for...

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The [US] National Venture Capital Association released a study titled: American Made. The impact of immigrant entrepreneurs and professional on US Competitiveness [PDF] . The report studied venture capital backed public and private businesses consequently it does not cover imm...

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Victorian fires - Photo: Cameron Quinten, an Age reader The death of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, Howard's citizenship test, the DLP winning two seats in Victorian's Upper House courtesy of ALP preferences(!!!), the latest Newspoll and the Victorian bushfires are...

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I've known that George Bernard Shaw had a thing or two to say about conflicts of interest in the medical profession, about how doctors have a direct pecuniary interest in providing you with services (for which they charge a fee) rather than in keeping you well (in which case t...

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A Beautiful Mind? If you've never taken much of a look at Andrew Bolt's columns in the Herald Sun, you may wonder which category of columnist he falls into. Is his the anger of a sharp mind frequently impatient with the foolishness of those around him - Melbourne's own Tom Wol...

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There's been a bit of discussion both here and at Lava Rodeo about the possibility of compiling a Best Australian Blog Essays 2006 anthology. Efforts in that regard are afoot. But what about best comments? This one from Nabakov over at LP (about Howard's Oz culture citizenship...

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These are detainees held in Santiago's National Studium after the coup, awaiting an uncertain, and in some cases hideous, fate. Thinking about them, should we be sorry that Pinochet managed in the end to evade a trial and sentence? Or should we rejoice that at least he lived l...

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When Nicholas Gruen asked me to review The Best Australian Essays 2006 published by Black Inc (in which his essay on Adam Smith - workshopped right here at Club Troppo earlier this year - features), the first question I asked myself was a really basic one. What is an essay? No...

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Smoke over Victoria as at Friday - I guess it was much worse by yesterday - image via David Tiley Touring around the blogs this morning reveals that there are quite a few who have stowed away the keyboard early for the Christmas break. Fortunately there are still lots who cont...

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I think Ken will shortly be posting a review of Best Australian Essays published by Black Inc , but as I'll be leaving Melbourne towards the end of next week I thought I'd post this here now. As a contributor I've got rights to copies at $12 a pop, so if any Troppodillians wan...

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� Mr Rudd by Colin Wicking The media is inevitably full of predictions about the Rudd/Gillard Labour leadership. What follows is the case for flipping straight to the sports pages. Because none of the punditocracy have much of a record of accurate judgment in the week after...

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Would you vote for this woman? Or read her column? Don Arthur did (the latter anyway) ... I wonder why Miranda hasn't lectured Julia Gillard on her hairstyle yet? Why bother with scholarly research when you have television? In a recent study , Amy King and Andrew Leigh found t...

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