Club Troppo

I was looking through the second book of Leunig cartoons in which this image appears. In preparing my column for Wednesday, I was looking for his cartoon on how Vasco Pajama meets the scapegoat who teaches him the art of 'copping it sweet' - the opposite of self defence. When...

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Magnificent n'est pas? (Though I have to admit that circle in the foreground is a bit of a worry. I wonder what it is?)

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The Dunera News is a photocopied magazine of news and reminiscences of the Dunera boys who were shipped to Australia in World War Two (and who included my father). The latest edition contains a reproduction of an Age story that I missed at the time about Captain Broughton his...

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The Howard Anti-Terrorism Bill (No. 2) 2005 (no. 1 being the one rushed through both Houses yesterday with bipartisan support) is a considerable improvement on the original draft leaked by ACT Chief Minister John Stanhope. But it still has major problems in my view. Sedition p...

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Regulatory Impact Statements are supposed to function as a 'gatekeeping' mechanism for regulation. They are supposed to be rigorous assessments of the economic costs and benefits of various options. The Government is so concerned about regulation that it has just announced a r...

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I've just done a biography of my dear old Dad for Wikipedia. He may or may not be resting in peace, but he's now reposing in Wikipedia. For those readers of this blog knew him they might like to refine the entry and others may find it of some interest. He had a more exciting l...

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Catallaxy is running a bit of November 11 nostalgia , so I thought I'd join in. Here's a reedit of my comment on the thread, and an invitation to others to tell us where they were. I go back as far as JFK. I was about 6 and my dad was trying to listen to a crackling radio and...

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Inflation dodging bullets There's an old story about former Federal Industry Minister John Button. It refers to his (diminutive) size, to his political dexterity and maybe his luck. Several Labor ministers were caught and drenched in a downpour. Having scrambled to cover they...

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In a way this story is reassuring. I don't have any objection to some extra attention being given to someone who fits a profile of a terrorist. But of course the potential helplessness in the face of bureaucracy is thoroughly spooky. In this case nothing too terrible happened....

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I've just got back from a trip to Canberra which allowed me to pick up the family copy of Pride and Prejudice - my Dad's favourite book by his favourite author. I wanted to bring it back for my 11 year old daughter to read as she'd loved the movie. There was quite a few books...

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I sent two unsolicited essays to Black Inc a couple of months ago a longer and a shorter essay on open source software. Neither was successful which was fair enough. Fortunately I hadn't written them for that forum, but was hoping that they might publish them. When I inquired...

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Richard Ackland has a powerful and angry article in this morning's SMH about the Howard government's anti-terrorism bill (a topic about which I've blogged here and here ): The design of the legislation is to conscript the federal judiciary into sprinkling holy water over asses...

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As David Williamson's latest foray demonstrates this idea that we're stealing from our kids is back in fashion. Cruise Ship Australia is in fact living off resources that took billions of years to accumulate. We're eating up our past at a prodigious rate. Our grandchildren won...

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I must be going through a particularly grumpy phase of middle age at the moment. It's not often these days that I find myself so peeved by a TV current affairs story that I can't resist resorting to a cathartic blog post. But that was certainly the effect of an item about the...

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Thanks to Ian for providing the link to this 1994 piece by Noel Pearson , deploring the Labor failure to allocate more money to health care or any other stragegies to address the devastation wrought by alcohol in the outback communities. I just wish that the honorable members...

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The aptly named Chas Savage contributed an opinion piece in The Age the other day about the sedition provisions of the Howard government's proposed new anti-terrorism laws . Savage's article is well written and makes some good points: I openly urge disaffection with the consti...

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Noel Pearson gave a talk this evening, actually yesterday, sponsored by the dreaded rightwing think tank The Centre for Independent Studies. The venue was a rather unlikely location, a bunker under the Sydney Stock Exchange, an interesting place to talk about relieving the con...

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I've been mystefied that so little attention has been given to the idea of imposing an access regime on Microsoft - surgically targeted to 'natural monopoly' bottlenecks in their software. The strongest case for doing something is in the area of the standards that their file p...

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Optimism seems to be a quality in short supply in this current period of Islamo-fascist terrorism and authoritarian responses to it. That's why I was taken by a SMH article a few days ago by Peter Hartcher . The world, he pointed out, was pretty damned good and getting better,...

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Inveterate Troppodillians (that's not invertebrate Troppodillians) will know that I'm pretty interested in how 'open source' things are working out on the internet. Open source software like Linux particularly that under the GPL licence has demonstrated itself as a new and pow...

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