Club Troppo

As you may know over the last few years I have been arguing for a reduction in the price of common generic medications in Australia. Due to policy shortcomings, Australia currently pays some of the highest prices in the world for many of its generic medications. For example, a...

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Make of it what you will. HT: Deloitte Access Economics' David Rumbens . And yet aggregate consumer sentiment is not much affected by a change of government: Typically the data hasn’t shown big changes in sentiment in the lead up to an election. Instead, a switch in who is hap...

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With the next Australian election only a few weeks away, now is a good time to say which economic micro and macro policies you think a next government can/should implement. Around and in between past elections I gave you my list of things to do and things not to do (see here a...

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Paul Fritjers is lamenting the loss of intellectual freedom and freedom of expression produced by an odd rule of social interaction: the person in pain gets to own the truth and those without pain adjust. So for example, people with undesired traits such as low intelligence or...

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For some people, other human beings are only ever a means to an end. The source of their self-esteem is their ability to realise their own personal vision. They see themselves as powerful creators and believe ideas like empathy, altruism and justice are just tricks the weak us...

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Adam Smith's theory of the market was a theory of human connection - which I tried to bring out in this essay. Anyway, it's not surprising that with the passage of over a quarter of a millennium, that connection is becoming closer or at least developing new facets. Or perhaps...

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Troppo readers who have followed my meanderings about asylum seeker policy over the years will realise that I have some fairly basic differences with the Greens on that issue ((although not on the fundamental fact that many if not most of them need our compassion and support –...

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Much as I prefer to ignore the current session of our great national game of Politics, the Rigmarole I haven't managed to shut out all of the media kibbitzing. One little item of gaming news that slipped past my mental guard was the fact that Tony Abbott has picked up an exten...

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Kevin Rudd's announcement yesterday of a Special Economic Zone in the Northern Territory surely comes very close to the silliest election promise of the last decade, matched only by Tony Abbott's almost identical promise a couple of months ago. The only positive aspect of eith...

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All the kings horses and all the kings men were still trying to put Humpty together again.

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One of the more odd rules of social interaction is that the person in pain gets to own the truth and those without pain adjust. Think for instance about the words used to describe undesired traits that some people have to bear their whole life, such as low intelligence or high...

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In Part I of this article I outlined the major shortcomings of the Refugees Convention and traced the ways it was contributing to the current influx of boat-borne asylum seekers to Australia and the ongoing political controversy that has engendered. ((I am not suggesting that...

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On Friday 9th August Nicolas Rothwell published this article in The Australian on the state of indigenous art in Australia. Nicolas's article details how, over the past 6 years, the old free market indigenous art sector has largely been replaced by a state backed official Indi...

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I have a dataset of about 20,000 Chinese adults, a random sample of the population in 2008-2010 from all over China. Guess how many per 1000 adult women in that dataset say they have had children without being married? If you posed the question in Australia or the US, you shou...

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On Thursday 8th august the Australian ran this article by Nicolas Rothwell about the toxic debacle that is the reality of the governments Artists Resale Royalty scheme. The article concluded with an examination of the circular nature of the government funded lobbyists for ARR:...

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Liberal Catholic priest and legal academic Father Frank Brennan thinks Australia's current asylum seeker policies, which are effectively bipartisan despite the electorally-driven sound and fury, exhibit a disturbing "race to the bottom" tendency. Sydney Morning Herald columnis...

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That power must reside elsewhere, with the best and brightest, with those who have surveyed the perils of the world and know what it takes to meet them. Those deep within the security apparatus, within the charmed circle, must therefore make the decision, on America's behalf,...

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Remarkable letter written from, and about, Germany by DH Lawrence in 1928. For all the beauty of his descriptions, it feels like divination rather than reportage. Immediately you are over the Rhine, the spirit of place has changed. There is no more attempt at the bluff of geni...

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George H W Bush (father of George W, who had one less initial and a lot fewer functioning cortical neurons) divided US public opinion with this famous declaration in March 1990: I do not like broccoli and I haven’t liked it since I was a little kid and my mother made me eat it...

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