Club Troppo

Just returned from an evening at the central tallyroom in Darwin. I confess that I failed to disguise a quietly malicious joy at the crestfallen pain of all the old CLP apparatchiks who used to gloat without restraint during Labor's many dark nights of the soul through the 198...

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I was reading a Financial Times article by Robert Skidelsky the great biographer of the great Keynes (Lord Skidelsky's bio of Lord Keynes!). It offered the following observation about the increase of party solidarity, and the resulting threat of tyranny of the executive and/or...

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John Quiggin and Andrew Leigh have posted a couple of reviews of a big one day conference in Canberra held on Thursday in honour of Bob Gregory's turning 65. It was a very enjoyable event, with a remarkable number of recognised faces in attendance. Bruce Chapman was the main o...

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Over the fold you'll find my latest (and possibly last before Saturday's election) obervations on the NT election. I've been lazy (because I'm swamped with exam marking), and have just copied my notes provided to CDU's media people as part of my job as one of the University's...

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We'll be hearing a lot more about this topic in the next month or so. I'm pretty excited about it I must say. Tim Colebatch's column captures my own feelings pretty much. There may be bugs on what's flying around at present, but there are real achievements occuring. And if any...

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Bestsellers are often disappointments. They promise a great deal fascination, revolutions in our thinking, entertainment. But they almost invariably under-deliver. When skimming through the pages of Thomas Friedman's tome the Lexus and the Olive Tree he's got a new one out whi...

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Ted Barlow has a great post over at Crooked Timber . One of the things about ideological warfare is its relentlessness. Tactics and attitudes that emerge to respond to bad situations build up a kind of second nature in their adherents which continues to roll on even where many...

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John Quiggin has undertaken a more detailed analysis of NT CLP Opposition Leader Denis Burke's bizarre election campaign promise/proposal to build a power line from southern Queensland to Darwin. I discussed the proposal here . JQ's analysis was published in today's Australian...

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Troppodillians have seen some of this week's Courier Mail column coming in an earlier post . This week's column is about the strange way in which Great Britain snapped out of the 'low dishonest decade' of appeasement. It seems to me that there is something remarkable about the...

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This blog isn't called Troppo Armadillo for nothing. There's something about living in Australia's Deep North that generates frequent bouts of bizarre behaviour, not least in our politicians. The phenomenon was strongly underlined in the first days of the current NT election c...

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It seems that members of the Schapelle cheersquad aren't quite as numerous as one would have imagined from reading the hysterical outpourings in our mainstream media. Fifty one percent of Australians think she's innocent, but almost as many think she's guilty or don't know (th...

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Here's a short essay I've written. The magazine of the Aurora tower in Sydney (would you believe?) approached me to write something for them. They're even paying me! Readers of my piece on open source software (pdf) that I discussed on Troppo a month or so back (now published...

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The New Zealand film "In my father's den" has been available on DVD for a few months now. I first saw this film in the cinema and saw it without any expectations other than some good reviews. I thought it was a magnificent movie, one of the best I've ever seen and raved about...

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Nicholas Gruen posted an excellent piece about asylum seekers the other day, and Andrew Bartlett has another one today that's also well worth reading. Andrew's post exposes the mealy-mouthed hypocrisy of John Howard's utterances on the issue, especially in relation to the dete...

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A number of readers have emailed urging me to say something about the bloody Schapelle Corby case. God knows why they'd want to read yet another pundit whittering on about it; surely Schapelle has already consumed enough column centimetres for even the most hardened legal soap...

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Jason Soon has an interesting post drawing attention to research suggesting a link between psychopathic and sociopathic personalities and abnormal brain development. The research suggests that 'unsuccessful' criminal psychopaths (i.e. those who get caught) tend to exhibit spec...

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This is my second column in a row on superannuation as super choice looms. Super has been an area that Australia's politicians have not excelled themselves. The ALP deserves considerable credit for moving on super and extending it to the hoi polloi. Focusing on the long term i...

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NT Chief Minister Clare Martin has just announced a Territory election for 18 June, a pleasingly brief campaign of just under 3 weeks. Even this jaded political observer should manage to avoid terminal boredom for that period. Bryan Palmer of Ozpolitics has started posting on...

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It looks like French bloggers are really blazing a trail as far as the latest blogging craze is concerned--pictologs, or BD blogs as they're also called, which are like a kind of blend of webcomics and traditional (!!) blogging. France is of course right up there in the graphi...

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There's been an awful lot of discussion about the Howard government's proposed IR reforms from various , left - leaning bloggers and at Catallaxy from a more right of centre viewpoint. I deplore the stripping away of basic employment terms and conditions too, and as a passiona...

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