Ben Eltham
Putting a figure on the Coalition's shadow carbon price
The politics of the Coalition’s climate policy announcement has already been covered by Mark, but the policy also contains some pretty dodgy accounting, as I argued in my piece yesterday for New Matilda. Today I thought I’d take some time [...]
Guy Rundle on parallel import restrictions for books
In Fairfax’s relaunched National Times, Guy Rundle has a perceptive but inconsistent piece on the unsustainability of parallel importation restrictions (often abbreviated to PIR) for Australian books: Though the chief opponents of PIR have been the large book chains and their [...]
Bernard Salt: pop demographer
KPMG consultant and media columnist Bernard Salt has been available for comment on just about any social or demographic topic for some years now. These comments rarely do justice to the hard work of statistical analysis performed by real demographers, [...]
What budget lock-up was like
This year I had the opportunity to attend the Federal budget lock-up in Parliament House in Canberra, for New Matilda. You can read my analysis of the budget over at New Matilda (I called it “a gamble posing as prudence”), but I [...]
The ethics of Australia's corporate elite: the career of James Hardie Industries' Meredith Hellicar
Over at New Matilda, I’ve had a look at the career of Meredith Hellicar, the Chairwoman of James Hardie Industries since 2004 and a Director of the company since 1992. Hellicar’s career tells us a lot about the ethics of Australia’s [...]
The new Facebook and the New New Face
A couple of signposts from the strange new world we live in, both from New York magazine. Vanessa Grigoriadis offers one of the most insightful analysis pieces I’ve seen on Facebook, asking Do You Own Facebook? Or Does It Own You? Chronicling the backlash [...]
The Geithner plan: what is it, and will it work?
Wall Street and and the ASX have rallied hard in approval of US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s bank rescue plan. In this post I am going to examine the Geithner plan, try and describe and explain what it is, and [...]
Cultural policy in NSW, or $1 billion to renovate the Sydney Opera House
Both Marcus Westbury and Nick Pickard lead their blogs with strongly critical posts about recent reports that the NSW government is about to commit to spending $1 billion to renovate Joern Utzon’s iconic Sydney Opera House. As Westbury writes, “this decision is one that is so [...]
The Googlization of Everything
Robert Darnton has written a long and interesting article about the Google books class action at the New York Review of Books, entitled Google and the Future of Books. In the article, Darnton begins by describing a mythologised but historically extant [...]
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