UK Tory Government climate policy is enough to create a slight yearning for the days when Australian conservatives looked to the so-called Mother Country for guidance.

These days Australian Tories seem to be a contradictory amalgam of fundamentalist Christians, neo-liberals and enthusiastic culture warriors who look to venerate US political conservatives almost as much as they once did the monarch. Now they combine enthusiasm for royalty and opposition to republicanism with being, to all practical purposes, US Republican epigones. read more

Remember the Alamo, remember the Maine, remember the Gulf of Tonkin, remember the weapons of mass destruction and now remember the Kokuka Sangyo tanker.

For a country such as the US, which has been at war for 226 years (93% of the time) in the 243 years since its independence in 1776, it’s remarkable that it has resorted so often to manufacturing excuses to go to war instead just doing it as it usually does. Of course, the manufacturing is partly a result of the abiding ignorance, misremembering, malevolent intent, propaganda and fundamental belief in the nation’s peace loving nature which infect its population and many of its political leaders. read more

Life and times memoirs are often lives leavened with some tangential nods to times. In Iola Mathews’ book, Winning for Women: A Personal Story, a remarkable life is inextricably linked with the remarkable times which she did much to shape.

It is the story of a feminist, the Australian feminist movement and the hard slog involved in achieving political, legal, workplace and community change in an era in which transformational social and economic changes were driven by Iola and many other committed women. read more

The automatic response when you hear the word Tweet is to associate it with Trump. Yet some recent Pew Research Center suggests the Tweeter in chief is out of step with most other Tweeters

In a paper, Sizing up Twitter Users, Stefan Wojcik and Adam Hughes find that “US adult Twitter users are younger and more likely to be Democrats than the general public. Most users rarely tweet, but the most prolific 10% create 80% of tweets from adult US users.” The study was based on a nationally representative survey of 2791 US adult Twitter users. read more

Well, after a couple of weeks’ consideration, just another Steven Bradbury phenomenon, something else altogether, or perhaps just a re-run in more virulent form of the fake news and social media negative campaigns seen in the 2016 Presidential election.

The range of explanations is wide. The first, and most obvious, is that it’s hard for someone like Bill Shorten, who is neither liked nor trusted to sell a big agenda. The second – the success yet again of negative campaigning. In this case part of the evidence for this explanation is reminiscent of the Bush campaign, magnified here by social media,  in which the Democrats were accused of planning a ‘death tax’ – a US focus group tested concept the Liberals stole holus bolus. This influenced people who would never be affected by inheritance taxes even if they were reintroduced. The same applied with franking credit and tax policies where the 20% who would have been affected were successful in terrifying the 80% who wouldn’t have been. read more

The City of Port Phillip, the blog’s local council, is yet again trying to establish new benchmarks in world’s worst practice community consultation.

This time it is a variation on one of its previous efforts – consultation over its budget. The last time the Council tried such a consultation it announced it with a multi-coloured leaflet letterboxed to all properties. Sadly it so closely resembled junk mail that many, including the blog, put it out in the recycling bin. read more

In the unlikely event that an Australian journalist asks Scott Morrison about  Sri Lanka, and the refugees his colleague Peter Dutton has sent back to the country, he will no doubt say the question is in the ‘bubble’ and then express deep and profound regret about the terrorism over the past 24 hours. read more

Cost benefit analysis

Scott Morrison and elements of the media are demanding that Bill Shorten release cost estimates for his climate action program.

The demands are an indication of their ignorance of both the issue and elementary accounting and economics. What is required in simultaneously assessing the costs of addressing climate change and the benefits of doing so is simple – conventional cost benefit analysis. read more

Policy debates

While it is difficult to imagine that there is a deep policy debate going on in Australia given the current election campaign there actually is one.

Indeed – while we are waiting for ScoMo to announce that if people vote Labor God will send a great plague, fires and damnation to the nation – the Grattan Institute continues to produce high quality work over a wide range of policy areas. Most importantly, they regularly evaluate their impact and report back on it the public. read more

The blog is taking a break – but in the meantime (over the next couple of days) here are some odds and sods.

Western civilisation

It is ironic that those spruiking loudest for the virtues of Western civilisation include not only the Ramsay Foundation, Tony Abbott and John Howard but also America’s far-right ideologues. In a recent book, Not all Dead White Men, Donna Zuckerberg describes how groups from the alt-right to misogynistic men (frequently the same) drawing on the classics for inspiration and justification. read more