Club Troppo

As readers will notice from the post immediately below, Mark Bahnisch has joined the ever-growing team of Troppo bloggers. Mark is employed at QUT as a sociologist, has a first class honours degree in Industrial Relations from Griffith and a Graduate Diploma in Industrial Rela...

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Robert Manne is an interesting thinker. His personal trajectory from anti-communist intellectual and ideological conservative to social democrat has been well documented in his own writings and in reports on the controversy over the end of his editorship of Quadrant magazine....

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What do evangelical Christian journalists mean by 'objectivity'? The current issue of the Columbia Journalism review carries a story about the World Journalism Institute - an institution which "seeks to identify aspiring journalists who are Christians and help them become prof...

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Is opposition to fundamentalist Christianity a kind of prejudice? The Democrats in America are increasingly influenced by an educated urban elite who intensely dislike fundamentalist Christians, say two American academics. According to Louis Bolce and Gerald D Maio data from t...

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Religious people have some wacky beliefs. But do they have an obligation to justify them to the rest of us? Philosopher Jamie Whyte is cranky about the way religious people can get away with believing whatever they want. "An interesting change has happened" he said, "It used t...

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Don Arthur's post about Miranda Devine's latest ravings generated some comment box discussion about the extent to which the "yoof" vote might have been part of the reason for the Coalition's strong election showing. Don's post seems tacitly to assume that yoof still tend to vo...

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In the course of one of his repetitive self-pitying anti-babyboomer rants , Paul Watson raises a question that has interested me for some time. That is, the extent to which modern Australian society still involves some reasonably intact version of an extended family structure,...

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Loyal RWDB that he is, Professor Bunyip gleefully reproduces the American blogospherical right's latest attempt to smear Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry over his Vietnam war service, while simultaneously putting an ingeniously innocuous spin on the fact that Presi...

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The most enjoyable thing about a Miranda Devine column is the unintended irony. Devine's latest piece - 'Riding the Conservative Revolution' - starts off by making fun of Daily Telegraph letter writer, Petrina Frost . Silly old Petrina couldn't understand how John Howard could...

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The prospect that the Howard Government might have a Senate majority in its own right has some giddying ramifications, and it has caused some Liberals to become, err, rather ambitious about the sort of reforms that the government can and should make. Obviously, as a old fashio...

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I must have been around 12 years old when my liberal minded parents handed me over the fundamentalist Christians. Every Sunday, and sometimes during school holidays, the youth leaders taught us catchy songs and explained how we could avoid spending eternity in hell. My mum use...

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Tim Dunlop is very very rude about a bloke named Jim Wallace , who is executive chairman of the ominously-titled Australian Christian Lobby. We here at Troppo Armadillo are much more deeply civil, but I must agree Tim has a point. Wallace unsurprisingly claims that " Christian...

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Today is the second anniversary of the terrible tragedy in Bali, where 202 people were killed. I was watching Sky News this morning when I noticed an old familiar face- Damian Squire and his girlfriend have returned to Bali to commemorate those that died. Damian Squire is a st...

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American progressives have spent decades struggling with the moral politics of the right. But for the Australian left a morally motivated opponent is something new. Activists who developed their campaigning skills fighting neoliberalism in the 1980s and 90s risk being out mane...

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To help readers get a bit of perspective and rise above the depression or elation of the election outcome, I thought I'd draw attention to an interesting post by Andrew Leigh of Imagining Australia (the blog rather than the book), where he nominated the three best things Austr...

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A major factor in whether the present Coalition government surmounts the challenge posed by its remarkable electoral success and goes on to achieve Menzies-like longevity, will be whether Howard and the rest of his leadership team are capable of exercising wisdom and restraint...

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If I never hear another Labor "strategist" claim that the ALP lost because of Howard's "great interest rate lie" it will be too soon. As Paul Kelly pointed out on the ABC TV Insiders program this morning, the real reason Labor lost so badly was because most of the polls showed...

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We should have known, really. The election eve flagship polls are just as conflicted as the earlier ones. Morgan has Labor a shade in front at 51-49 2PP; ACNeilsen has the Coalition in front by a country mile at 54-46; and Newspoll has them 50-50. So anyone's guess is as good...

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I was talking on the phone to my brother the other day and, included amongst the trivia that expands our conversations; the state of Dad's health, child pornography, our travel plans (he's going to Europe via the Trans Siberian railway next year, I'm following the Silk Road to...

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Thus spoke the Chief Armadillo : I suspect the reality is that it remains impossible to predict with confidence who's going to win. He's quite right. To me it does seem impossible to have any confidence in an election prediction. But if pressed, I would predict a.... ...fairly...

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