Club Troppo

This Thursday, behind closed doors in Melbourne, representatives from nine countries including Australia will take up discussions once again on an ambitious, comprehensive trade agreement for the Asia-Pacific region. Negotiators from Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Vietnam, Malaysia...

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We keep reading claims that Tony Abbott is a low-grade politician who would be wiped off the face of Australian politics if the ALP could only get its act together . Since Abbott has already knocked off one of Australia's most popular prime ministers and taken another to withi...

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Alvy Singer : What's with all these awards? They're always giving out awards. Best Fascist Dictator: Adolf Hitler. Annie Hall It was with great excitement that I read my alumni news for ANU this month . Extraordinary things are happening. KPIs are being broken through all over...

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The picture of Kevin Rudd's prime ministership painted over the weekend by former speechwriter Jamie Button ought to be fatal to Rudd's leadership bid. It jibes with a number of other assessments , including some just this week by senior Cabinet ministers like Nicola Roxon . T...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtGSXMuWMR4

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The view from America: "the plot has thickened like barbie sauce and Liberal Party leader Tony Abbott is the happiest man in Australia." Aaron Goldstein, The Spectacle Blog . Gillard government a policy free zone: "Now that the Rudd agenda has mostly been passed or abandoned,...

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Via Mark Thoma Languages di?er widely in the ways they partition time. In this paper I test the hypothesis that languages which grammatically distinguish between present and future events (what linguists call strong- FTR languages) lead their speakers to take fewer future-orie...

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A small plea to Kevin Rudd and everyone else in the country: can we restrict the term "faceless men" to people who are actually unknown? Today I see a reference to "Crean and other faceless men". For pity's sake, Simon Crean has been in public life since 1979 and in Parliament...

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The Anglophone countries often cluster together on various measures of national greatness or depravity - such as household savings (we haven't been doing much of it - until recently). But it's quite dramatic how much worse we're doing on obesity than anyone else. And boy do th...

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For discussion: one of the far right's greatest achievements in the past decade has been to show post-modernists how wrong they were. Let me explain. In a famous 2004 article on the Iraq War, the New York Times journalist Ron Suskind quotes an aide to George W. Bush (possibly...

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Last week I was ready to write off ABC Melbourne interviewer Jon Faine for ill-judged rudeness and inadequate research . Now he's gone and redeemed himself with a Tony Abbott interview . Faine at his best is smartly, aggressively prosecutorial without actually being rude. Abbo...

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJNM0C-7lPk&feature=player_embedded I bought my daughter a very enjoyable book The art of great speeches: and why we remember them by my friend Dennis Glover for Christmas. The book manages the triad of rhetorical tasks very nicely - it delights...

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A tough-talking, motorcycle-riding Texan, sociologist C Wright Mills is about as far from today's stereotype of the latte-sipping left-wing intellectual as you're likely to find. But even though he's been dead for 50 years, you can still see his influence in the intellectual l...

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In 2007 Greece spent 9.9% of GDP on age pensions. This was the fourth highest level of spending on pensions in the OECD (after Austria, Spain and Italy). Australia spent 3.2% of GDP, the fifth lowest level of spending in the OECD (ahead of Iceland, Ireland, Korea and Mexico)....

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We save for the future by building things: "As a society, we save for the future by channeling resources—steel, electricity, human labor power—into the production of things that last a long time rather than things that are more perishable." Matthew Yglesias, Moneybox . Investi...

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And by “internal”, I mean in the same paragraph : “This week, President Obama will release a budget that won’t take any meaningful steps toward solving our entitlement crisis,” Romney said in a statement e-mailed to reporters. “The president has failed to offer a single seriou...

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The bank debate now seems officially out of control. Increasingly foolish notions about banking are being served up day after day. One example: the developing meme that claims the banks have decided they will no longer be bound by official interest rate policy. One morning las...

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James O'Loghlin had me on his Sunday night show which was broadcast on ABC local radio tonight. In fact it would have been, but because of the cricket only went out via live feed on the net. Anyway, it was quite a long interview - went for 20 odd minutes so we got through quit...

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http://youtu.be/-4V40twk63A Screen tests are fun to look at, letting you peek before the actors peak, as it were (or crash). There must be some good philosophy to be written about the uncanny. (Hasn't Susan Sontag written something on this?) [On checking , it turns out that Si...

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As a regular reader of Brad DeLong I was slightly alarmed at a recent post reporting an outbreak of unpleasantness about which OECD country has the most progressive tax system. Brad DeLong linked to an article by Jonathan Chait which rather sharply criticised Veronique de Rugy...

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