Club Troppo

The left-leaning twitterverse went into predictable convulsions of outrage yesterday when it emerged that (equally predictably) the four Coalition States had declined to pony up dollars for the 4 year trial phase of the proposed national disability insurance scheme. However th...

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[caption id="attachment_21086" align="alignright" width="300"] Debt was a very popular theme with Malcolm as well ...[/caption] Like Tony Abbott at a federal level, NT Country Liberals leader Terry Mills has been trying to fan the flames of a shock-horror theme on government d...

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Rules are thought to persist to the extent that the direct benefits of having them (e.g. reduced transactions costs) exceed the costs of enforcement and of occasional misapplications. We argue that a second crucial role of rules is as screening mechanisms for identifying coope...

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I've been reading Graham Freudenberg's Churchill and Australia which is a fine read, with a certain grandeur in the prose. In any event I came upon Chapter 10 which documents the crisis over Turkey pulling the plug on the post World War One settlement - a kind of between wars...

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[caption id="attachment_21050" align="alignright" width="300"] Gerry Wood[/caption] On the surface at least, nothing much has changed since my first two reports on the forthcoming Northern Territory election. The mainstream media campaign is very quiet indeed, even though it's...

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From the Journal of Economic Perspectives Why is the rate of teen childbearing is so unusually high in the United States as a whole, and in some U.S. states in particular? U.S. teens are two and a half times as likely to give birth as compared to teens in Canada, around four t...

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Troppo author and prominent academic economist Paul Frijters has been banging away for years about how current climate change policies (including carbon pricing) are doomed to failure. The sincere (and entirely well founded) concerns of scientists and environmentalists about t...

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My son came home from last night's and this morning's hockey matches with a rainbow coloured band round his wrist with which he was playing on which were printed the words "Fair go, sport!" This is a pilot campaign launched last year by Sports Minister Mark Arbib and it's some...

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I've written before on the cancer of vox pop democracy , where all matters of policy must run the gauntlet of the vox pop test - which is to say that it must instantly appeal to a majority of shoppers at Fountain Gate who have a microphone shoved into their face and asked some...

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A conservative conspiracy to make government bigger, bury retailers in red tape and tell people how to live their lives, or just another example of populist grandstanding? The young man wanted a pack of cigarettes but when he pulled out his welfare card to pay, 65 year old cas...

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I've been thinking about writing something in the wake of Don Arthur's Nanny and the Libertarians post, but until now I haven't had the heart. Discussion threads on posts dealing with such issues always seem instantly to degenerate into a slanging match between, on the one han...

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Incentivizing Calculated Risk-Taking: Evidence from an Experiment with Commercial Bank Loan Officers By: Shawn Cole (Harvard Business School, Finance Unit), Martin Kanz (World Bank) and Leora Klapper (World Bank) URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hbs:wpaper:13-002&r=exp This p...

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Here's my column from today's SMH, Age and Brisbane Times. WHAT are Australia's strategic interests when negotiating with other countries on the extent of intellectual property (IP) rights - for instance, the duration and strength of patents and copyright? It's no Mickey Mouse...

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[gallery columns="1"] (Click on image to enlarge)

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Flash mob Barcelona style Annie I'm not your Daddy ,will put a spring in your day

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Almost everyone is in favour of equality of opportunity; even free market activists from the Institute of Public Affairs . But whenever a large number of people agree on a form of words, it's a safe bet they interpret those words differently. How else could party members agree...

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http://youtu.be/PUSdjfh2YjM

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[caption id="attachment_20927" align="alignright" width="300"] Father Frank Flynn (left)[/caption] I was deeply disturbed by Monday's Four Corners program on child sexual abuse by Catholic clergy, not because it's any news as such but because very little seems to have changed...

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(Mike Pepperday has an edited version of the very interesting essay below in the AFR today. But Troppodillians expect only the unexpurgated, and so, in keeping with Troppo's tag line "What do we want - the unexpurgated. When do we want it - Now!" here it is. . Nicholas.) Austr...

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"In 2008-09, DEWHA was assessed as non-compliant for the Resale Royalty Right for Visual Artists Act 2009 and a post-implementation review is required to commence within one to two years of implementation."¹ The reason why the Artist Resale Royalty Act was assessed as non-comp...

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