Club Troppo

Astude readers of Club Troppo will have noticed quotes running at the top of the page. Quotes that Ken, I and others occasionally have half hearted debates about whether they're appropriate for Troppo. Well I found another one the other day and it's below. Readers might like t...

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Can someone please, please, please tell me why there are always stories in the press about our glorious tax office going on compliance rampages and 'discovering' whole heaps of people who haven't put in a tax return? Crikey reports as follows: Data matching has become a favour...

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The Dark Lord chats to the Parrot The engine room of Australian economic reform has always been the quality of our bureaucrats. Now John Howard is trotting out the logic that has driven Australia's welfare system to be the most economically efficient in the world. Where target...

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Professor Richard Lynn, guru of modern eugenics, race and IQ Like a bad penny, former Macquarie University legal academic Andrew Fraser keeps turning up. Michael Duffy wrote an opinion piece in Saturday's SMH resurrecting Fraser's pet issue of race and IQ: [Last] Wednesday, Th...

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No time for dances: A memoir of my sister I had a fine old time over Easter having a read of various things. I read Gillian Bouras's No time for dances and thought it was wonderful. I didn't expect to because my wife had been rather scornful of Bouras's earlier work about (I g...

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I've been reading literary and movie blogs recently. Not that I'm denying that Iraq and AWB are important or anything, it's just that there's only so many times you can say the same thing before outrage fatigue begins to set in. Chekhov's Mistress is a tasty US literary blog b...

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Easter cartoon via The Art Life . There's no formatting to get buggered. And a rather more serious (not to say disgraceful and depressing) story from David Tiley . Anyone care to revisit their opinion about Tony Blair and his leadership qualities?

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(via Chekhov's Mistress ) A story from RGJ.com : Jacob Behymer-Smith, a ninth-grader at Coral Academy of Science in Reno, has excelled in classroom, school and county poetry competitions, reciting a W.H. Auden poem that contains the words " hell " and " damn ." Coral Academy o...

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The Larrakia native title claim on Darwin and surrounds was dismissed in a judgment handed down today in the Federal Court. Justice Mansfield said: The evidence shows that a combination of circumstances has, in various ways, interrupted or disturbed the presence of the Larraki...

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There is more than a faint whiff of hypocrisy about Kim Beazley and federal Labor's opposition to the just-announced Howard government plan to have all illegal arrival asylum seekers, even those who make it to the mainland, processed offshore and assessed by UNHCR rather than...

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[photopress:cross.jpg,full,pp_empty] Feel free to be offended by the above. I could use the publicity. Have a top Easter everyone.

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The three most talented politicians in the last couple of decades that I know of have all been left of centre pollies though really vigorous centrists - Clinton, Hawke and Blair. Other politicians like Reagan and Thatcher achieved as much or more, but these guys seemed to have...

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I'll be posting some reflections on the recent report on regulation shortly. In the meantime, here's an article that I wrote about a year ago and couldn't get placed in the media's op ed pages. The reason is instructive of the dilemma of regulation review more generally. Who w...

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Today's column from the Financial Review. About twenty years ago, a boatload of Indonesians arrived on Australia's coastline and claimed refuge. That request threatened relations with Indonesia and alarmed federal ministers. Cabinet secretly decided - without any interviews -...

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I was thinking of this rather bad pun as a headline for a story on Mick Gatto (not that I was writing a story on him, it just occured to me as my wife was talking about Mick Gatto - a Melbourne underworld figure who I guess I figured might be called Mick Gateaux). Anyway, I fi...

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[photopress:tnycartoon_060409.jpg,full,alignleft] Around Christmas time I downloaded and listened to a podcast of a lecture at the Adelaide festival of ideas by Kathy Laster called " The Dark Side of Kath and Kim ". I really disliked the lecture which argued that Kath and Kim...

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Hiptomus hoptimus Jupiter Optimus Came to the earth in the Form of a swan Leda pretended to Parthenogenesis Heaven she said had been Egging her on Thus was I introduced to a marvelous comic poetic form about thirty years ago when I read the New Statesman's wonderfully erudite...

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Social Darwinism is undeniably obnoxious. But it's hard to feel sorry for some victims of Internet fraudsters. I certainly wouldn't be wasting any sympathy, for example, on the greedy but moronic victims of the good old Nigerian email scam. They're people who are perfectly hap...

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