People & associates
Richard Allsop
Not your house. Not your land.
Normally, if your house is heritage-listed, you have a problem if you want to knock it down, or renovate it. Robert Masters of Gunbower in northern Victoria is happy to leave the home his great-grandfather built in 1863 exactly as it is. So where...
Pearson's long consistency
Richard Allsop reviews Up From The Mission: Selected Writings by Noel Pearson (Black Inc, 2009, 416 pages) On a personal level, Noel Pearson loses me on page 336. It is at this fairly late stage in this collection of his essays that he expresses a...
The best known woman in Australia
Richard Allsop reviews Enid Lyons: Leading Lady to a Nation by Anne Henderson (Pluto Press, 2008, 356 pages) This is the biography of a woman who ‘was for many years the best known woman in Australia'. It says something for the fleetingness...
Gambling in a Free Society
Presentation to the RSL & Services Clubs National Conference 27 July, 2009 By Richard Allsop Gambling is a pastime that has brought pleasure to free citizens through most of recorded history. I say to free citizens because it is a striking...
Presentations from 'Managing Personal Behaviour, Risk and Responsibility'
Presentations from 'Managing Personal Behaviour, Risk and Responsibility', an IPA Symposium held in Melbourne on the 25 February, 2009.
Free to gamble: The roles of the gambling industry and policy in a modern Australian society
How Labor factions broke New South Wales
In the six months following the 1975 defeat of the Whitlam Government, Australia's two most populous states held elections. In Victoria, the voters re-elected a Liberal government that had been in office for 21 years; in NSW they rejected one that...
Sporting prowess obscured by the history warriors
Richard Allsop reviews Tom Wills: His Spectacular Rise and Tragic Fall by Greg de Moore (Allen & Unwin, 2008, 336 pages). The 150th anniversary of the first game of Australian Football in 1858 has not passed without acrimony. Some historical...
Superannuation and MacBank as the zenith of the Australian nation
Richard Allsop reviews Unfinished Business: Paul Keating's interrupted revolution by David Love (Scribe, 2008, 264 pages) According to David Love in his new book Unfinished Business: Paul Keating's interrupted revolution, Paul Keating and...
Class and casinos
Opposition to gambling and poker machines is a confused mixture of patronising‘compassion' and political rhetoric, writes Richard Allsop. Kevin Rudd hates them. Brendan Nelson has expressed deep concern about them. Bob Brown wants huge cuts...