Opinion on politics and social policy
from
across the board
Various news outlets are reporting that Bowman MHR, Dr Andrew Laming has backed down from comments he made about obesity after a storm on social media. I hope not, because Laming was right on the money.
He was commenting on a photo on the a Newscorp site of Melanie Ward […] Continue Reading…
It seems that plain packaging hasn’t reduced Australian smoking rates so far, according to this report from London Economics, so you might think that it fails to meet its policy targets. And that might be the case if you accept that the previous government’s only aim with this policy […] Continue Reading…
The UK government has reversed its position and now apparently intends to introduce plain packaging for cigarettes. At the same time one of the Labor taxes the Abbott government is apparently not going to give us relief from is the increase in the Tobacco Tax, according to LDP Senator-elect, […] Continue Reading…
Every now and then you have one of those cross disciplinary moments when everything you think you know about a discipline is proven wrong.
I thought I had a pretty good handle on economics, but was blown away last night to find that most economists apparently think that wealth is created […] Continue Reading…
It has to be only a matter of time before the ABC is offering advertising on its website and programs as the federal government opens up government websites to commercial advertising.
In the course of checking the weather to see how long the latest Brisbane thunder storm might last I […] Continue Reading…
Part of the secret of Tony Abbott’s success is that Labor and Greens underestimate him. The torrent of accusations that he is too dumb to be PM that has followed his election on Twitter and social media generally is proof of this.
For a really amusing example of this genre […] Continue Reading…
The Conversation is supposed to be a vehicle for university academics, but it seems to be becoming a repository for the work of anyone even tenuously connected with a university. Which means that advocacy organisations can insinuate their propaganda onto its pages, as long as one of their researchers […] Continue Reading…
On Line Opinion invented the genre of the online op-ed in 1999. In the 14 years since we’ve had lots of imitators, but when it comes to openness and balance, no competitors.
One of our closest imitators, so close that it not only copied the genre but stole our financial […] Continue Reading…
An email from Zeg Cartoonist came in (which I have reproduced in full below) along with this cartoon.
G’day,
It’s been most amusing and enlightening for me to watch the usual suspects in the mainstream media and surprisingly some not so usual ones, literally crying and bleating because the new Federal […] Continue Reading…
There’s the gag about the economist for whom reality was just a special case of his model, and then there’s the ALP reaction to the reality of Tony Abbott.
I find it bizarre, and dishonest, both to themselves and us, that because Abbott refuses to conform to the “cut to […] Continue Reading…