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Stay tuned for the red underpants theory of bad TV
Occasionally, usually by accident (sometimes if they think nobody is listening) politicians say what they really believe. ''I have unfettered legal...
Regulations that worked in 1901 do not work now
On this day in 1781 the British army in North America surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown. Six years later an independent United States...
Costs lost in the focus on climate
It is more than 25 years since the possibility that carbon dioxide and other human-induced greenhouse gas emissions achieved currency as possible...
Romney finds momentum in moderation
A week is a long time in politics, Harold Wilson once observed at the end of a bad week, and the remark was considered so brilliantly penetrating...
What's the crisis in the Cuban Missile Crisis?
Fifty years ago, on the morning of October 16, 1962, the CIA delivered to John F Kennedy aerial reconnaissance photos revealing Soviet missile...
Rose-coloured glasses make for sentimental fools
Labor used to say John Howard had a shameful nostalgia for the 1950s. The ALP is sentimental, too. But Labor's nostalgia is entirely about itself....
Australian politics gets the British disease
For a long time we worried Australian politics would end up like American politics. We now know that fear was misplaced. This week in Canberra...
We do not need an internet overlord
At first glance, the United Nations' International Telecommunications Union (ITU) seems benign. The agency helps coordinate global telephone...
Government's creeping hand
The federal government's proposed data-retention regime deserves every bit of the immense amount of public criticism that has been heaped upon it....
Don't just tinker with government - reduce it
There are few concepts more nonsensical in Australian politics than the "efficiency dividend". Yet in the politics of public service cuts, few are...