Club Troppo

It's a wonderful day for a constitutional law academic. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! The High Court hands down two parallel decisions dealing with a plethora of subtle and interesting constitutional questions: the nature of judicial power and Chapter III of the Constitutio...

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Sometimes the generally sensible SMH legal affairs pundit Richard "Justinian" Ackland has a brain spasm. Today's column is an example. He argues that it's unfair for the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions to use relatively new statutory powers to seize or freeze "chequebook j...

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Yesterday I mentioned Tim Dunlop's post on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme aspects of the Free Trade Agreement as telling us everything we need to know on the subject. But Chris Sheil's post is even better. What's more, most of the meaty detail and analysis of the pros and...

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Still procrastinating before the 5pm e-tutorial rush, so I'll whip around the newspapers as well: How long will it take Tim Blair to start slagging Bruce "The Boss" Springsteen following the announcement of a series of anti-Bush concerts with other noteworthies like Pearl Jam,...

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Needing a break from endless administrative and student support tasks generated by CDU's embarrassingly successful external law degree program, but lacking the energy to write anything original. Here's a mini-race-around of the blogs: Tim Dunlop has a long post setting out jus...

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Since I'm making insomniac posts that technically breach my resolution to have a holiday from blogging while finding and re-inserting my dummy, I thought it might be a good idea to explain the origin of the blog title "Troppo Armadillo" to readers. The "Troppo" bit is easy eno...

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A change is as good as a holiday, they say. But a change and a holiday as well is even better. Non-abusive feedback on the new style is welcome.

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The ALP has played an interesting card in the FTA debate. Yesterday the Labor caucus voted overwhelmingly to support the FTA. The FTA is of course a deal or no deal affair. Either it's accepted or it's not. Having done that, Labor then introduced two amendments to the enabling...

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My mum always used to say: " If you can't say anything nice about someone, don't say anything at all ." Mind you, that was usually after she'd made a decent hole in the cooking sherry, verbally knifed just about every neighbour and relative she had, and was looking for a way t...

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A brief update on my previous brief post about Christopher Hitchens' demolition of the increasingly self-parodying Phillip Adams. Professor Bunyip has skillfully dispatched Adams' ridiculous reply to the Hitchens article over the square leg boundary. A welcome return to top form.

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When I read in the Oz over the weekend that the Full Federal Court had allowed an appeal by the wife of disgraced bankrupt former Sydney QC John Cummins, I thought it must surely be a badly flawed, hometown decision. The case concerned whether assets Cummins had transferred to...

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Yes, I know the "triple bypass" label refers to the number of times Howard rose as Liberal leader, rather than his number of election victories. But it's still a good headline for a post about the latest Newspoll . Chris Sheil won't be happy, but he'll probably bear up under t...

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Given the extensive debate generated by my previous post about the ABC , it's worth highlighting an opinion piece in this morning's Oz by the egregious former Communications Minister Richard Alston's former adviser Andre Stein. Stein advocates a standard neoliberal, total dere...

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Paul Watson has noted , stylishly, that a feature story in yesterday's Oz looks, on the surface of it, to be a strange fit with the brief of the nation's daily newspaper. That thought had also occurred to me. The gist of the story is pretty unremarkable on the face of it, thou...

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This review of Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 by Darlene on Ambit Gambit is well worth reading. I haven't seen the movie yet, but I suspect my reaction is likely to be similar.

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The Peter Principle holds that employees in any organisation are promoted up to their level of incompetence, and then cling relentlessly to a job they're incapable of performing. It's a phenomenon especially evident in the Northern Territory. Much of the population is so mobil...

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'Fisking' (defined here and here ) was an often irritating aspect of the blogging genre, that seems to have fallen out of favour over the last year or so. Probably that was for a very good reason: too often bloggers resorted to 'fisking' mostly because they were too lazy or in...

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This morning's SMH carries a special investigation into alleged large-scale multi-million dollar fraud and mismanagement in various NSW Aboriginal land councils. The scams mostly seem to involve deals and kickbacks with dodgy developers over valuable coastal development sites...

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Now this is how you forensically carve up wankers like Phillip Adams .

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Richard Ackland's column in this morning's SMH provides a succinct summary of the state of play in the Jackson commission of enquiry into James Hardie Industries' manoeuvrings to effectively avoid legal liability for the mountain of asbestos exposure-related claims, to which i...

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