Schools funding: beyond the dog’s breakfast?
The funding of schools has for over forty years been a source of strident debate and sectarian conflict in Australia, the subject of a seemingly inexorable blame-game fought between the Federal and State Governments, and a fight for resources waged [...]
Weekly Whimsy
This week’s whimsy is brought to you by corgis playing tetherball.
A carbon tax may not be the answer
That was the title of an article by David Bassanese in the Australian Financial Review last week. Drawing from the Garnaut Report he notes that we are high emitters, the highest in the OECD at 28.3 tonnes per person of [...]
International Women’s Day and debates about privilege
Happy International Women’s Day! It’s the hundredth anniversary, and from where I sit, it’s a bit of a pity that most of the public debate has been dominated by people like Gail Kelly and Quentin Bryce talking about the urgent [...]
Labor falls to lowest ever primary in Newspoll
The latest Newspoll has the ALP’s primary vote on 30% (down from 36 last time), with The Greens on 15% (+2) and the Coalition up 4 to 45%. Julia Gillard’s ratings have also gone into free fall. The Prime Minister’s [...]
Guy Rundle on Libya, the West and ideology
Reproduced from today’s Crikey by kind permission; previous related discussion at LP can be found here and here. The 10th anniversary year of 9/11 is proving a signal one in many respects. The Arab uprising began against rulers whose tenure [...]
Climate opinion surveys – a cautionary tale
University of Michigan psychologist Jonathon Schuldt led a study which asked this question: “You may have heard about the idea that the world’s temperature may have been going up over the past 100 years, a phenomenon sometimes called ‘global warming.’ [...]
Spotlight the Spin
Our weekly (mostly) look at media spin tactics: let’s dissect the PR and propaganda that aims to blow one’s own horn, bury one’s errors, resurrect the shambling zombie corpses of well-flogged deceased equines, and ooh look! A Big Distracting Thing!
Territories same sex marriage imbroglio about nothing
The weekend News Limited papers have been tub thumping on their perennial theme of “Bob Brown is driving the government’s agenda”. Presumably, as Tony Windsor and the aforesaid Bob Brown have pointed out, had the Coalition formed minority government, they [...]
Were you online in ’95-ish?
If you, like I was back then, were using a Windows 3 box, then you almost certainly used the Trumpet Winsock program to access the internet via your modem, probably via a giveaway from either a PC magazine or your brand new ISP. Sadly, the unsung programmer who created Trumpet Winsock, Tasmanian Peter Tattam, didn’t get paid for most of those copies; millions of free give-aways that saw hardly a brass razoo come back to him.
Lazy Sunday!
Since we don’t live by politics alone (I sincerely hope), what did people get up to this weekend? Join in, share some tales, regulars and lurkers all!
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