Contestable reporting of the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission
[Author's note: This post has been altered to remove some unfair and hurtful imputations which appeared in the original version concerning the journalists Gary Hughes and Norrie Ross, who authored the articles criticised in the post. The author apologises to [...]
P. J. O'Rourke she ain't
Apparently all it takes to get our noted conservative keyboardists at certain media outlets gooey enough to celebrate you as a role model for plain speaking is a pretty face, accented English and the word wog. Fame and conservatism just [...]
Copenhagen taking shape
I’ve found it difficult to get information on the likely outcome of the Copenhagen climate change conference scheduled for December this year to plan the post-Kyoto arrangements. Robert has drawn attention to talks between the US and China. Tim Hollo [...]
Power, poverty and democracy
Via Counterpoint last week I heard about the new book by Paul Collier entitled Wars, guns and votes. Collier, an African specialist, is concerned about solutions rather than simply investigating problems. Discussing his ideas about solutions really requires reading the [...]
Inheritance taxes
Mark Crosby makes the case for inheritance taxes over at Core Economics. Frankly, they sound like a no-brainer to me. If you’re going to collect tax, taxing windfall gains that only those who win the rich-ancestor lottery get would seem [...]
Drought over!
Less than two years ago in August 2007 we had 16.75% left in the three larger dams in SE Queensland. Major works on a water grid, a desalination plant and a recycling plant were in progress, as well as longer [...]
Would Dr Henry put his money where his mouth is?
The story that has been all over the MSM yesterday and this morning is Treasury Secretary Ken Henry’s press briefing on the 2009-10 budget and in particular his defence of the optimistic forecasts for the level of economic activity in [...]
China-US deal on emissions a possibility?
The long-term future of our technological civilization depends on China and the USA participating in a serious global deal to cut CO2 emissions. But there’s long been skepticism whether either will be prepared to act. Now, there’s reports that China [...]
Turnbull – where to now?
Turnbull’s presumed pleasure over the Herald/Nielsen poll must have been distressingly short-lived with the Newspoll results showing a 2PP movement from 56/44 compared to 55/45 two weeks ago (see Possum’s post). Possum now has an interesting trend analysis showing a [...]
Has Turnbull found the big lie that works?
In the Weekend AFR Brian Toohey’s article “Fix the budget and forget national debt” pointed out that the budget deficit, with net debt projected to increase to 13.8% of GDP in 2013-14 before falling to 3.6% in 2018-19, was a [...]
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