Club Troppo

I've got a bunch of correspondence from charities I give to. I'm not a close observer of these things but I guess their main times of the year are Christmas time and end of tax year time. Anyway, they've been busy with their direct marketing techniques (and I suspect receiving...

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My editor asked me to write about the Robert Gerard scandal, so I did reflecting on some broader governance issues. Readers with an eye for some of the economic debates will detect in the background of the second half of the column the debate on Reserve Bank independence. As t...

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Brian Penton's book The Landtakers is now on line as a part of the Australian Gutenberg ebook project. It came up when I did a google on Jacques Kahane who worked with Penton to translate Mises "Against Socialism". Penton's novel is dedicated to Kahane. Similarly, Olga Penton'...

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From today's Financial Review You can tell when governments get long in the tooth: ministers keep recounting the good old days, when they first came to power. So it was last week when the leader of the government in the Senate, Senator Robert Hill, gave one of the reasons for...

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Congratulations from all right thinking people to Steve Bracks' Government in Victoria. We'll be accompanying our daughter Anna to the Children's Hospital for her to participate in a ballet concert for the entertainment of the kids in the hospital as they battle various ailmen...

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Some Troppodillians might have heard the essay I posted on Troppo a few months back on Oscar Wilde and Ned Kelly boiled down into a five minute talk. 1 For those who are interested, the transcript is below the fold and you can even download an MP3 of the broadcast [4.8 Megs]....

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Sixty percent of a rabbit's meat is in its hind legs. That's why it's so difficult to make one rabbit into a meal for four people. If you need some ideas on how to do it, then Anthony Georgeff's Spiceblog is the place for you. Georgeff's blog has the most amazing food pictures...

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If beer isn't good for you why are they selling it in chemist shops Germans are drinking less beer . Part of the reason is that beer isn't cool anymore but perhaps the major cause is the country's ageing population. Older consumers are becoming more health conscious and are tu...

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'Economic reform' gets blamed for many things. I heard someone complaining about growth at all costs, they then segued into its costs on the environment. Then we had the greenhouse effect and the poor person couldn't help themselves and went on to wonder about the tsunami. Dea...

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That old boy scout joke about the person looking for his shilling where the light was best, rather than where he'd lost it, is so funny (partly) because it's such a good take on human psychology. And any good joke about a the psychological foibles of someone acting alone is li...

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Francis Wheen Francis Wheen was fun to listen to on LNL, though his targets are pretty easy ones. Targets are more fun when shared. I posted on Demos a while back and here is Wheen on one of its most prominent alumni on whose book I also commented. Thin air is solid Charles Le...

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I love my beer. I don't think this is inherently funny. And it doesn't mean I like getting drunk (just the early stages). Though I'm in no great danger of becoming an alco, I would not find it easy to go without my one (and occasionally two) stubbies of Coopers or sometimes mo...

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Brian Penton (1904-1951) would surely have achieved the status of the most memorable journalist and commentator in postwar Australia but he died in his prime and left too many enemies to achieve the reputation that he deserved. This article by his biographher Patrick Buckridge...

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I wonder if I'm just being naive in imagining that there was once a time when newspaper editors, at least on the quality broadsheets, maintained a clear distinction between news and opinion, and attempted as far as possible to report the news in a reasonably straight, unbiased...

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I was swimming around the website of Queensland Education and came across a report with an interesting title "Promoting Positive Gender Relationships: A report of a study into the feasibility of developing and delivering curriculum through Queensland state schools to promote p...

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It is an odd fact that practitioners of the dismal science - or some of us - really are a humorous lot. Robert Solow is probably the funniest - but then he's got a Nobel Prize so he's a clever fellow. I was reminded of this receiving Chris Caton's report on the US economy toda...

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One of the posts that I've had in the back of my mind since I started at Troppo is a ranking of the PMs of my (adult) lifetime. Readers of this column will not be surprised to learn that I think that Hawkie was the only really good PM in my lifetime. In any event as I say in t...

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Some recent converts to blog reading might not yet have stumbled across the delights of Gummo Trotsky's blog "Tugboat Potemkin". Gummo took a long break from blogging not so long ago (a dark blogging night of the soul not unlike my own), but is well and truly back and blogging...

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I pointed to the dilemma Microsoft faced in considering whether or not to open up the specifications of its .DOC, .XLS and .PPT standards here . Well, (courtesy of Slashdot) according to the London Financial Times , Microsoft will be announcing the opening up of these standard...

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Today's AFR column. Losing is sometimes better than winning. That might be the case for the Australian business community which supports the Commonwealth's new wages setting policy. Of course, the Government could eventually lose. Although no government Senator will want to in...

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