May | 2007 | The Dog's Bollocks

May 29, 2007 • 11:12 pm 0

Stolen Land – National Week of Reconciliation

We should not forget that Howard’s 10 Point Plan legislated away the landmark High Court ruling on Native Title and the Keating Government’s Wik legislation. In the words of Deputy PM Tim Fischer the 10 Point Plan delivered ‘bucket loads of [Native Title] extinguishment’.

Together with Howard’s refusal to say Sorry or accept the findings of the Stolen Generation commission, Australia again was turning its back on our indigenous culture and society after coming so far through every government from Frazer and Whitlam to Hawke and Keating.

We’ve hardening our hearts and are destroying the soul of our nation. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Australian values, Big Picture, Indigenous, Music, Politics

May 29, 2007 • 12:29 pm 2

Known Unknowns

At The Thinkers Podium, Bruce ponders pre-suppositionalism and a priori premisses.

…placing an argument a priori requires sound reasoning and the larger and more complex your body of a priori, the more validation it requires and the more likely it is to be invalidated. And of course you don’t want your a priori premise to be invalidated because anything a posteriori will also be invalidated.

This is standard application of logic to hypothesis making – pretty much the scientific method. You have an idea, come up with some ways of testing it and draw conclusions about the validity of the idea. Perfectly sound and reasonable. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Big Picture, Philosophy, Religion, Science

May 25, 2007 • 8:11 am 1

Rudd’s attack on WorkChoices neutralised! They wish.

On AM this morning a breathless reporter claimed that the kerfuffle over Rudd’s wife’s business underpaying 54 staff had neutralised his attack on Howard’s WorkChoices. It is further evidence of the parallel universe inhabited by the commentariat. I can just hear the 1 million disgruntled WorkChoice victims breathing a sigh of relief, “That’s it then, I was going to vote for Rudd but now I’m going to vote for Howard!” Rudd has correctly acknowledged the embarrassment, the problem’s been fixed, move on – a behaviour never exhibited by Howard. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Media, Nonsense, Politics

May 24, 2007 • 9:40 am 0

Costello hands Future Fund to Enron Pension Managers

In yet another dazzling example of the ‘natural brilliance’ and ‘sound economic management’ of the Howard government, the Future Fund has been handed to Northern Trust Corporation, the trustee of the Enron pension fund in which some 20,000 employees lost up to $US1.6 billion and paid a settlement of $US37.5 million to the new trustee. With close links to the Bush Administration, the Enron collapse was the largest in US corporate history. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Big Picture, Economics, Nonsense, Politics

May 19, 2007 • 6:21 pm 1

What 2 million plastic bottles in five minutes looks like!

Tag surfing in WordPress revealed this gem from visual artist Chris Jordon who “looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on.” Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Big Picture, Environment, Media

May 19, 2007 • 5:01 pm 2

Possum Pollytics a wizard of statistically freakish economic analysis

My favourite new blog discovery this week has to be Possum Pollytics. Possumcomitatus is a witty wizard of statistically freakish economic analysis – I’d venture the only person who could do on-the-spot analysis of regression for a party trick, and certainly a desirable dining companion if you ever need to work out the split bill at a Chinese banquet.

Great stuff. Check it out.

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics

May 18, 2007 • 9:15 am 3

I can’t believe it’s not WorkChoices!™

With news that WorkChoices is now a poisoned brand, the Howard government is set to spend another $70 million or so of tax-payers’ money on a re-branding exercise. Might I suggest “I can’t believe it’s not WorkChoices!”™?

Further confirmation that HowardCo is rapidly running out of steam and credibility. Do they really think they are fooling anyone other than themselves? As further evidence of their increasingly delusional state of mind, they are blaming the rejection of WorkChoices on the effectiveness of the ACTU ad campaign – nothing whatsoever to do with the policy itself, or that it was rammed through without a mandate.

Filed under: Economics, Media, Nonsense, Politics

May 17, 2007 • 6:40 pm 0

Howard shifts cash from workers to corporate profit

Kenneth Davidson again cuts through the budget smoke and mirrors to reveal that “between 1996 and 2006 the wages share of gross domestic product fell from 56 per cent to 54 per cent, while corporate profits rose from 23 per cent to 28 per cent. That is equal to about $40 a week if wages had maintained their mid-1990s share of national income.”

To add insult to injury the federal tax burden has increased from 23.3 to 25 per cent of GDP in the same period. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Economics, Politics

May 16, 2007 • 6:19 pm 2

Free-market widens gap between rich and poor schools

A study by Melbourne University’s Associate Professor of Education Stephen Lamb has found that the three significant changes in education in the last 25 years — competition (giving schools more autonomy to be more competitive), privatisation (more public money to private schools), and rationalisation (school closures and mergers) — ultimately widened the gap between rich and poor schools. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Economics, Education, Politics

May 13, 2007 • 10:51 pm 1

WorkCoices is screwing our productivity

Peter Martin has an excellent post in his Saturday Forum wherein he argues convincingly that the system of enterprise bargaining introduced in the 1990’s made Australia’s workplace productivity soar and that the system of individual bargaining introduced to eclipse it is winding those gains back. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Economics, Politics