The Weekend Australian devoted its opinion section on the weekend to a special on China. On Line Opinion asked “Is this the Chinese Century” back in November, 2003, showing just how responsive online media is to issues…or have I got that in reverse? Whatever, it’s clear that […] Continue Reading…
April 18, 2005 | Jeff Wall
The Honourable De Anne Kelly – our most hopeless minister????
WHEN you have observed politics for as long as I have – and participated in it – you get into the habit of comparing politicians, governments, and political eras.
Some weeks ago I offered the view that the Honourable De Anne Kelly, Federal Minister of State for Veterans Affairs and […] Continue Reading…
April 18, 2005 | Graham
Nuclear a green fuel?
I ask this question because I went to a lecture by Greg Bourne, CEO of WWF, at the Brisbane Institute. The same one Jennifer Marohasy went to. Bourne gave a very impressive presentation – lots of graphs. One of those graphs purported to show how we could […] Continue Reading…
April 14, 2005 | Graham
Balanced reporting of the Michael Jackson trial
It’s fashionable to complain about bias in media coverage. John Howard does it. David Flint does it. Paul Keating does it. Media Watch does it. I do it. You can probably even do a university major in it. But often what we complain about […] Continue Reading…
April 13, 2005 | Graham
Sadr does Ghandi
I reckon most analysis of Iraqi politics is off-beam because it analyses the actions of the players in terms of their presumed principals rather than their actual pragmatism. In an earlier post I branded Moqtada al-Sadr a warmonger because he was fairly obviously waging insurrection so as to […] Continue Reading…
April 12, 2005 | Graham
On Line Opinion more powerful than Steve Price and Chris Smith combined?
Last night’s Media Watch explored a campaign by radio shock jocks Steve Price on 2UE and Chris Smith on 2GB to give the ABC a touch-up for their coverage of the burial of the Nias helicopter crash victims. What I found most interesting about the story was not […] Continue Reading…
April 10, 2005 | Graham
Papal funeral shows it’s Catholics, not fundamentalists, who are the “conspiracy”.
Marion Maddox’s silly book God under Howard is so driven by her own personal demons and shibboleths that it misses the most obvious and successful religious “conspiracy” in Australia today – the Catholic ascendancy.
Forget about evangelical, born-again protestants conspiring to conflate church and state, Catholics are in dominant […] Continue Reading…
April 09, 2005 | Graham
Rational markets
I first came across the “efficient markets” thesis which says that stock prices always embody and fairly price all the information known about the stock , in the ’80s, but never paid much attention to it. Stock markets are an efficient way of resolving the arguments between investors as […] Continue Reading…
April 08, 2005 | Graham
I really couldn’t care about Voluntary Student Unionism so why write about it?
Like most current and former students, I don’t spend a lot of my time worrying about the minor extortion represented by student union fees, yet here I am doing a second blog post on them. Why? Probably because the issue is encouraging some of the most fanciful claims […] Continue Reading…
April 06, 2005 | Graham
RBA makes right decision
Two of my best friends (Henry Thorntonand Nicholas Gruen) don’t agree with me but the RBA made the right decision in leaving the cash rate target alone.
They might be market economists, but they don’t have faith that the market alone can get it right. I’m a little […] Continue Reading…