Club Troppo

Tim Soutphommasane has written a defence, or more accurately, a vigourous promotion of Australian Multiculturalism. I have opinions, which, with effort, are forced into the alliterative framework in the title. Of course, by way of disclaimer, I am absurdly fond of multicultura...

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Troppo readers may have noticed a Christmas "silly season" debate about an ill-advised assertion by Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs Jenny Macklin to the effect that she could live on Newstart Allowance (aka "the dole") if she had to. T...

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Jacqueline Maley has an article in today's Fairfax media musing about who might succeed Julia Gillard as Labor leader after an election loss later this year. It seems a tad premature in the circumstances, though only slightly more so than the subject of this post, which addres...

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No more singing unless you are as good as this. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44wDwMQVqCc&w=560&h=315] Happy new year

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Australia is one of the most prosperous and best-governed nations on earth. Our politicians, at least at national level, are mostly competent, honest and hard-working. And yet our mainstream media conveys an almost opposite impression, and the blogosphere and twitterverse proj...

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Authors: Dawes, Christopher T. (Department of Politics) Johannesson, Magnus (Stockholm School of Economics), Lindqvist, Erik (Research Institute of Industrial Economics (IFN)), Loewen, Peter (Department of Political Science), Östling, Robert (Institute for International Econom...

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Dumbing down budget policy As a temporary member of the press gallery I had my ‘gotcha’ question ready for Wayne Swan, but alas didn’t join the shouting match to get my question in. But I can share it with you gentle reader – a little esprit de l'escalier a few hours later. Tr...

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Here is a question to put to you over Xmas time, the season of joy and hope: what has been the best news for you this year in the sense of the most uplifting development in Australia or the world? For me, it has been the continued economic growth in India, China, and much of L...

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When a tennis player decides if and when to use their rights to 'video review' of points they are trying to solve cognitive and tactical problems. When a cricket captain decides to review an umpire's decision there's an additional problem. Challenges have been rationed by desi...

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In part I and part II the question was posed what the source of the demand for apocalyptic stories was in our societies. The discussion made it plausible that there is in fact a strong cultural diversity in terms of Doomsday stories: they are prevalent in the West, where their...

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More here if you're interested.

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Last Friday, I asked the readers w hat they thought the source of the demand for apocalyptic stories was in our societies, and particularly whether there was anything new about the prevalence of apocalyptic stories. As Michael Stanley and Ian pointed out, apocalyptic stories g...

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There has now been quite a bit of discussion about this week's dismissal of James Ashby's sexual harassment proceedings against former Speaker of the House of Representatives Peter Slipper for abuse of process (although nowhere near as much as the salacious coverage when Ashby...

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This post is a very slightly scrubbed up comment on Paul Frijters' comment on my recent column on regulation review and DIY super. I have no silver bullets, but I think the whole area is dominated by a kind of category mistake. It has been assumed - by the reg review crowd and...

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Ever since the middle ages, apocalyptic visions have been a staple of Western thought. With every minor or major upheaval that came along, whether it would be the plague, Communism, or climate change, there was a large constituency receptive to the idea that the end of times w...

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Here's this Wednesday's Age and SMH column . [caption id="attachment_36877" align="aligncenter" width="620"] Illustration: John Spooner[/caption] In the last fortnight the Government has ticked one of its boxes for next year’s election, launching policies to tackle over-regula...

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In a previous post , I raised the question how best to measure ‘Nature’, arguing the benefits of an overall Index including biodiversity, habitat diversity, human usage value and sheer volume of living organisms, biomass. Here a look is taken at whether biomass has been increa...

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I think my mother once told me that there was a Jewish proverb that when a child dies before it's parent, even God weeps. (She isn't Jewish by the way). Anyway, here's the data . (pdf) The death of a child is one of the most traumatic experiences that a parent can experience....

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My post on the Territory's recent mini-budget has resulted in an interesting comment box discussion about Darwin property prices. At first blush general Troppo readers might not find it all that absorbing, but in fact the dynamics of Darwin's property market provide an instruc...

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Last Friday, I posed the question under what definitions of Nature one can say that it is doing badly, and whether there were other ones under which it was doing fine. I was explicitly interested in how Nature is doing now relative to decades or longer periods past, though of...

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