The AFL, the pokies, and viability
According to Jeff Kennett mandatory precommitment technology will threaten the viability of some clubs, and threaten the survival of the code”. Rubbish.
US poverty surge continues
John Quiggin in his Australian Financial Review column last week told us that 1% of the US population now commands 25% of all income in the United States. He also said the many Republicans want to allow the payroll tax [...]
Inequality and social well-being
From Understanding Society authors Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson, income inequalities as such are a source of a variety of social problems in any society. They find that there is a strong negative relationship between income inequalities and social well-being, [...]
CIA’s fake vaccination drive to get bin Laden
The Guardian reports that the CIA set up a fake vaccination drive in Abbottabad, Pakistan to obtain DNA samples from individuals in the bin Laden compound. The CIA organised a fake vaccination programme in the town where it believed Osama [...]
Quick link: Gittins on poverty and social exclusion
Ross Gittins in this recent column starts and ends with the hook of whingers on $150,000 a year. The substantive theme is to address the concepts of poverty, social disadvantage and social exclusion. He looks at this through the work [...]
Starving masses not actually starving?
A provocative piece from Foreign Policy magazine by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo claims that “global hunger” is fundamentally mischaracterized: Are there really more than a billion people going to bed hungry each night? … What we’ve found is that [...]
Rinderpest eradicated
I’d never heard of rinderpest, and I come from cattle country. And, absent human malevolence, the world will never hear of rinderpest again. Absent any cases for a decade, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization will, on June 28th, adopt [...]
The great Julia Gillard Disability Support Pension lie
I write this post as someone with a disability that isn’t going to go away. (A missing leg isn’t gonna grow back). I also write this post as someone who works. And I write this post as someone who would [...]
Lowering unemployment benefits by crook instead of hook
Way back in 1993, John Hewson went to the federal election with a package of radical neo-liberal reforms, Fightback!. It proved unsaleable despite the longevity of the Labor government and the economic troubles facing Paul Keating. In the memory of [...]
Egypt, events and ideology
Like tigtog, I’m not inclined to offer too much substantive commentary on the revolutionary events in Egypt (and across several other countries) as I don’t think that the value of analysis by Australians who aren’t intimately familiar with Egyptian society [...]
The unemployed are financially bankrupt because the ALP is intellectually and morally bankrupt
Here’s the text of a letter I’ve sent to the Fairfax papers in response to a report by Adele Horin on the National Welfare Rights Network’s survey of about 1300 Australians on what they think they would have to curtail [...]
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