Club Troppo

Sorry about this, but I managed to get this content up after the event was over. But thought I'd post it for the record as they say. As you were, as they say in the army. Festival Website | Films | Melbourne Schedule Top Picks What's the Time in Your World? Goli makes a snap d...

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There are just over 9 months until the 2016 Territory election next August, unless there’s a successful “no confidence” motion in the Legislative Assembly in the meantime, or next May’s Budget is rejected. Both those possibilities presently look fairly unlikely despite endless...

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Postscript photo of the event Yes folks you read that right. Erwin Fabian who came to Australia on the same prison ship as my Dad is having another exhibition and it's a special one. He's turning 100 and the sculptures are a revelation. The most expansive and expressive I've s...

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Curtesy of reading Susan Johnson's fine and latest novel The Landing and then following her on Twitter, I came to read this review . It's an interesting read, but I was intensely irritated with its preoccupation with the category of 'middlebrow'. It's not a question completely...

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Festival Website | Films | Melbourne Schedule Top Picks Youth (Opening Night) Two old friends vacation at a prestigious hotel in the Swiss Alps. Fred is a suave socialite and retired composer who the British royal family is pestering to play again. Mick is a film director rush...

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Last week I participated in a panel discussion that kicked off Melbourne Knowledge Week. MKW is a Good Thing that has been running for a few years. It was initiated by Melbourne City Council against the background thought that knowledge is becoming progressively more important...

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Better late than never - but this is definitely late - owing to some imaginary mechanical problems with the Troppo chopper Bronnie which was recently recovered from deep within a mine shaft near a golf course in Geelong. Festival Website | Films | Melbourne Schedule Top Picks...

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Sentenced to a Job is a prison-based program in the NT first planned under Labor but implemented and developed under the current Country Liberal government. It seems like a good idea but is it working? Crime and punishment are subjects that have fascinated me ever since I move...

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One of the great truisms of Australian politics is that federal/state relations are unavoidably bedevilled by "vertical fiscal imbalance", a phenomenon whereby the Commonwealth controls the great bulk of revenue-raising powers while the States bear the burden of providing many...

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NT Chief Minister Adam Giles announced yesterday that his government had signed a deal to lease the Darwin Port to the Chinese-owned Landbridge Group for 99 years for $506 million. The deal involves the NTG/Australian interests retaining a 20% interest in the ongoing port busi...

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Statehood for the Northern Territory is in the air again, with COAG having recently voted to support a statehood process (albeit with no assurances as to the outcome). Whether it was any more than a distraction tactic for both then PM Tony Abbott and the equally beleaguered NT...

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It's cute the way interventions in policy to influence people's behaviour is called "using behavioural insights". You could also call it commonsensically influencing people's behaviour based on the idea that they are not instantly, omnisciently optimising robots. Anyway, there...

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Discrimination and Worker Evaluation by Costas Cavounidis, Kevin Lang - #21612 (LS) Abstract: We develop a model of self-sustaining discrimination in wages, coupled with higher unemployment and shorter employment duration among blacks. While white workers are hired and retaine...

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https://youtu.be/4cAHL4LMNlY This observation is hardly a blindingly new insight, but it struck me that the video above is a kind of landmark. Google was the company that was information focused, engineering focused - and pretty good at user experience (UX) and all that stuff...

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Last weekend I flew down to Sydney partly to attend the 50th anniversary party for the Class of '65 from Harbord Primary School on the northern beaches. Many old school photos were exchanged, including the one above showing me (circled in red) at the age of seven. The function...

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I recall when I heard one of Australia's senior economists - a Good Guy IMO - observed that Aboriginal people very rarely drive taxis. It would be easy to portray this as racist. It is racist in the sense that it's making distinctions between people and generalisations about t...

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Education Research and Administrative Data by David N. Figlio, Krzysztof Karbownik, Kjell G. Salvanes Thanks to extraordinary and exponential improvements in data storage and computing capacities, it is now possible to collect, manage, and analyze data in magnitudes and in man...

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The great thing in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy . . . A 'character,' as J.S. Mill says, "is a completely fashioned will". William James, The Laws of Habit "Taste" is a word and an idea that comes from another time. But I think it's...

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The Northern Territory Country Liberals’ early start to election campaigning looks to be just as chaotic as the rest of its term of government. The last month of taxpayer-funded blatantly party political advertising doesn’t seem to have had much of an impact on voters, except...

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