Club Troppo

Fresh from her win as Best Australian Personal blog, Gianna proves what her readers knew all along - she can post some damn good politics as well. Her whole post is worth reading, but her point that Ruddy's comment that the ALP is a "God awful shambles" will come back to haunt...

Continue reading →

Julia Gillard made one extremely interesting suggestion in the remarks she made yesterday at an Australia Day function when announcing that she would not contest the ALP leadership . Gillard suggested that Beazley should drop his affiliation with the Right faction as a token t...

Continue reading →

Keks has announced the results of the 2005 Australian Blog Awards . Troppo won in two categories - best Australian Collaborative Blog and Best Northern Territory Blog (this year there was some competition). Congrats to all the other winners and runners up - including Troppo fr...

Continue reading →

I see the results of the Australian Blog Awards have just been published at Keks (Vlado). Troppo Armadillo did quite well, despite the fact that I didn't even know the awards existed and therefore missed the opportunity to engage in surreptitious lobbying or vote-stacking. Tro...

Continue reading →

Any lawyers out there with too much time on your hands? How about setting up an Australian version of " Sue a Spammer ". It is bad enough that we get all the world's spam in our inboxes. Sadly, there doesn't seem to be much we can do about that. But if we can at least put the...

Continue reading →

An argument that Beckers belief Forget about truth . It's an airy-fairy philosophical concept that even the experts can't satisfactorily define. In practice, what most people demand from an idea is that it's useful for something. And like other consumer products, the supply of...

Continue reading →

Probably as a result of their focus on endless dissections of federal Labor's leadership woes, most bloggers seem to have overlooked a potentially very significant centralist gambit by Howard government Health Minister Tony Abbott in today's Oz. The Mad Monk, it seems, is agit...

Continue reading →

As Gilly hits the phones to guage support , the tortured politics of the ALP's attitude towards Gilly's marital status etc. is examined in a feature in The Australian . Among other outrages, apparently her kitchen is too clean. I wish I could say the same about mine. The Oz in...

Continue reading →

Who'd have thought that Eric Hobsbawm's concerns about the difficulties of exporting democracy would be echoed by a Professor at the George H.W.Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University ?

Continue reading →

As if to prove the point I made in my previous post about the current mission of the Sydney Institute to expose all media types as feckless readers of the signs of the times , Hendo can't resist bagging out other journos for getting it all wrong about Latham . Hendo advances t...

Continue reading →

It's about the horse race, stupid! I recently suggested to The Currency Lad that he visit the wonderful Lifeline Bookfest in order to pick up a copy of that classic 1930s Australian novel The Currency Lass . I've been over the weekend (for non Brisvegans, it happens twice a ye...

Continue reading →

Queensland Premier Peter Beattie has echoed NSW Premier Bob Carr: "I think Kevin has enormous ability and I think one day there's a very strong possibility that he will be prime minister of this country," Mr Beattie told reporters. He said what Labor needed most was a healer a...

Continue reading →

Eric Hobsbawm, the world's greatest living historian, has some cautionary words about the conditions for democracy and the limits to power in the Guardian , in response to the aims set out in George W. Bush's inaugural address : This idea is dangerous whistling in the dark. Al...

Continue reading →

Everyone knows that some consumer products go together. Ties go with suits, check shirts and RM Williams boots go with country music, and beer goes with barbecued sausages . As Grant McCracken argues, goods have cultural meanings. The clothes we wear, the food we eat, the subu...

Continue reading →

There's an interesting sidebox in an article on the Labor leadership race in today's Sunday Mail where Julia Gillard discusses her intention not to have children and her single status: Julia Gillard believes she can lead Australia as a single, childless woman. The Opposition h...

Continue reading →

US Deputy Secretary of Defence and leading Neo-con Paul D. Wolfowitz has no need to resign in the face of Abu Ghraib, "the army we have" and so on and on, because as President Bush said, "we had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections" . Nor is he as for...

Continue reading →

Christopher Pearson writing in The Australian has (or thinks he has) the good oil on the social agenda of a third term Howard government: Legislation preventing gay marriage was the Coalition's most significant third-term concession to the more conservative of its supporters....

Continue reading →

Pablo Picasso's Guernica George W. Bush has been inaugurated for a second term, promising to spread freedom "to the darkest corners of the world" . With much discussion of whether the second term will bring a new direction, this is an appropriate time to consider whether the W...

Continue reading →

...comes Chris Sheil at BackPages , with a momentary Friday night return to blogging to endorse Ruddy for leader (and Julia for Rudder if there's a Deputy spill) with the persuasive argument and fine political reasoning that made BackPages the doyen of blogosphere political co...

Continue reading →

Good to hear from the inimitable Laurie Ferguson that Gilly isn't "just a trendy commodity" . "She's actually intelligent, articulate and strong-minded", Ferguson opined. Ferguson also said "I think she'll fire people". The next Labor leader could do worse than fire the distin...

Continue reading →