Club Troppo

Chris Sheil won't be happy about this Newspoll showing Labor doing badly in the Queensland marginals it must win to form government. And it looks like Latham has leaked significant aspects of his tax policy to George Megalogenis in the Weekend Oz. Two sandwiches and two milksh...

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As readers may have noticed, the "10 most recently-commented posts" sidebar feature is broken (blank). I don't know why. I suspect it's some sort of corruption of Scott's MT installation, because it won't allow me to rebuild the main index template to fix the problem. I've sen...

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In a second important decision handed down yesterday ( Coleman v Power ), the High Court by a 4/3 majority preferred freedom of speech over civility. It ruled that unflattering words about police used by a Townsville hippie protester in a pamphlet ("KISS MY ARSE YOU SLIMY LYIN...

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Yeserday's High Court decision in Electrolux Home Products Pty Ltd v Australian Workers' Union rejected the inclusion in an enterprise bargain of provisions imposing the fees of "bargaining agents" on non-unionists. The report in today's Australian newspaper summarises its eff...

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There is no doubt that the Prime Minister is in some political difficulty and is struggling to gain the initiative in the first week of the campaign. The essential Mumble website suggests that the ALP has a small but constant edge in the opinion polls, and entering the campaig...

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This story a couple of days ago caught my attention: AUSTRALIA is two years behind comparable developed countries in broadband services despite an accelerated uptake that doubled subscribers in the past year. The advent of less expensive entry-level products drove demand, says...

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Labor's "Howard is a lying rodent" campaign has hit a fairly major solid object. Just as many on the right of the blogosphere studiously averted their gaze from earlier stages of the Scrafton affair, so now the left is pretending that yesterday's resumed "children overboard" S...

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There might conceivably be room for debate about the extent to which John Howard is a "lying rodent", but in light of this post by Al Bundy there's no doubt at all that his most recent accuser Russell Galt well and truly deserves that label.

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Labor's promise to implement an independent Speaker of the House of Representatives is, as Christopher Sheil comments, a potentially major reform. It deserves a post of its own, because if implemented it would greatly improve the standard of Parliamentary conduct and debate, a...

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Ken Parish has most graciously allowed me room to opine on politics, without me having to go to the bother of re-establishing a blog of my own. Time pressures mean that posting from this quarter will be erratic at best, but I hope to pop by once in a while to give my own 0.02...

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Christopher Sheil claims today's Newspoll result means that things are "sweet as a nut" for the ALP at this stage of the campaign. He explains his spin this way: [Y]ou don't want to be way ahead at this stage. Given probabilities and margins of error, a big lead increases the...

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It's not likely that I'll ever emulate Gummo Trotsky and base my blogging on cooking recipes. Not that I'm all that bad a cook, mind you. But being in a solo domestic phase, I usually can't be bothered cooking unless my daughter Rebecca is coming around for dinner. Even then,...

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I still can't get motivated to write anything analytical about politics, despite the federal election campaign entering its fair dinkum phase. I tried to generate some political coverage on Troppo by emailing Scott Wickstein to see whether he intended making good on an earlier...

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Yes alright, the election is on 9 October. So?* The big news of the day is that Kerry Armstrong has slagged our Kylie and our Nicole: "I truly believe with acting and singing those two have done more damage than anyone I've ever seen," she said. "I really do believe there is a...

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Maybe I'm a bit strange but it occurs to me that casting a vote purely on the basis of your sexuality is a pretty dumb way to exercise your democratic franchise. I share this insight because there's a campaign underway within the gay community to punish the ALP for supporting...

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He's an evil bastard, that Latham. Now he's suborned a couple more generals to back up that porn-perving prick Scrafton. Lucky the Great Leader's still got some loyal staffers who can corroborate his story. He never told them about Scrafton mentioning anything apart from that...

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Don Arthur has finally solved his home computer problems by investing in a second hand iMac, and has made yet another comeback to blogging. During his previous blogging life, I had classified Don as "centrist" by inclination. I was mistaken. Don is undeniably of the left, and...

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Richard "Justinian" Ackland focuses on defamation law in his column in today's SMH, pointing out that Commonwealth A-G Phillip Ruddock's ambit claim for a uniform national defamation law includes a proposal that would allow the estates of dead people to sue for defamation with...

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One of the things you can do on a blog that you can't necessarily do in the mainstream media is run stories that can't be fully corroborated. This is one of them. Readers will recall that I ran a post the other day about NT Administrator Ted Egan's breach of the conventions go...

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This story won't please Professor Bunyip , whose third greatest pleasure in life (after castigating Phillip Adams for alleged serial plagiarism, and futilely fantasising about fornicating with firm young female flesh) is ridiculing the commercial acumen of Fairfax boss Fred Hi...

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