Club Troppo

If next Tuesday's Labor "no confidence" motion against the minority Giles Country Liberal government succeeds in the Northern Territory Legislative Assembly, it will mark the first real test of the 4 year fixed term election arrangements that have become increasingly common in...

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This article was published at UNSW's Gilbert & Tobin Centre for Public Law site Australian Public Law. However they seem to be having some virus/accessibility issues so I am parking the article here for the moment. Statehood for the Northern Territory is on the national politi...

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Many Troppo readers will know of Adele Horin who died just a few days ago. When I went to write a message of condolence on her blog I was surprised not to find a long list of people who'd come before me. After I wrote what I wrote I discovered why. The blog appears to be set t...

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The Twittersphere was abuzz with pointless debate a couple of weeks ago when Annabel Crabb had a televisual meal with Coalition hardman Scott Morrison on her perniciously vacuous program Kitchen Cabinet . My own views about that controversy are well encapsulated by Jennifer "N...

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I've created a categorised featured posts list to highlight the rich diversity of material posted here at Troppo. I intended to have it here on the front page but it takes up too much room. Please check it out over the fold. Politics INTERNATIONAL NATIONAL STATE/TERRITORY Open...

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When my niece Emma first told me the plot of the Hunger Games I was blown away. What a great story to reflect on our contemporary lives. A totalitarian state with media hype and reality TV at its cultural and political epicentre. A couple of kids - a boy and a girl - in the Hu...

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Today marks the end of a 20 year saga that has indelibly scarred my life and those of my daughter Bec and former wife Jenny. I've written partial accounts of it before here at Troppo. I hope you'll forgive another one, it's catharsis. On 27 July 1995 Jenny's mother Rene Chambe...

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I've written a few Northern Territory posts recently. This is another one, but it has some significant national implications (I think). Tuesday's announcement of Asian conglomerate Jemena as the preferred bidder to construct a gas pipeline connecting the Northern Territory to...

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There has been yet another failed political coup in Darwin overnight, with the minority CLP government failing to carry a motion to sack Independent (and erstwhile CLP) Speaker Kezia Purick. Keen watchers of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera known as Territory politics will...

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Could the High Court employ EU/UK/Canadian structured proportionality analysis recently embraced in McCloy v NSW to achieve a viable constitutional resolution of the dilemma posed by the need to protect secret national security information in anti-terrorism matters while at th...

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In an earlier post I argued the case for the 'middleware of democracy' arguing for the inculcation of the (largely social) skills that help constitute collective intelligence. Skills like having some small inkling of how ignorant we all are, listening to those with different o...

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Discretion in Hiring by Mitchell Hoffman, Lisa B. Kahn, Danielle Li - #21709 (LS) Who should make hiring decisions? We propose an empirical test for assessing whether firms should rely on hard metrics such as job test scores or grant managers discretion in making hiring decisi...

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At least according to our sleuthing, there are lots of films, but only six could reasonably be called Troppolicious, if indeed it is reasonable to call anything Troppolicious Festival Website | Films | Schedule Top Picks Dough Nat is an old Jewish baker who reluctantly hires A...

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Who knew that Alfred Marshall published an essay entitled "The Social Possibilities of Economic Chivalry" (1907) (pdf)? I didn't until I came upon it the other day. Having now read it, it's thoroughly Marshallian - very much of a piece with his dissenting meliorism which I dis...

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I examine the post-war economic development of two regions in southern Italy exposed to ma?a activity after the 1970s and apply synthetic control methods to estimate their economic performance in the absence of organised crime. The comparison of actual and counterfactual devel...

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The effective sacking of NT Corrective Services Commissioner Ken Middlebrook is sad but politically inevitable. It came in the wake of the escape and subsequent voluntary surrender of axe murder and rapist Edward Horrell from a Sentenced to a Job work gang near Nhulunbuy. Mini...

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Further to my post on Tuesday , the result in yesterday's High Court decision in NAAJA v NT [2015] HCA 41 will not have made either side completely happy. The Court upheld the validity of the NT government's "paperless arrest" law by a 6:1 majority i.e. the NT government won....

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When we know so little, it's incumbent on us all to show a little applied humility to interpreting the recent and much celebrated and punditised results about rising mortality amongst American whites. But I will at least say this. The results which Angus Deaton and his wife An...

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I understand that the High Court is likely to hand down its decision in North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency v Northern Territory of Australia (‘NAAJA v NT’) within the next week or so tomorrow. So what, you might say? The context – NT “paperless arrest’ law Well, the im...

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Who knows what's driving these graphs, but it's quite a piece of work for the latest Nobel laureate to drop into our consciousness. The paper's here .

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