Author: John Quiggin

Make them pay, part 2

John Quiggin67 Comments

In response to my last post about taxpayer-funded IR propaganda, Things I’ve Seen comes up with a neat suggestion.

At the end of every advert, where we currently have “Authorised by”, add “This advert was paid for by the Australian taxpayer”. Then let democracy take its course.

The neat thing is that if ads were genuinely helpful and informative, tazpayer-viewers wouldn’t mind.

A requirement of this kind could be inserted by legislation, and it would be a brave government that subsequently removed it. Of course, it would only happen if it could be done in the first few days after a change of government, when the habits of power had not yet grown familiar.

League tables

John Quiggin2 Comments

Everybody loves league tables, especially when they do well. A couple of people (Graeme Halford and Jack Strocchi) pointed me to the Times Higher Education Supplement university league tables. Unfortunately the tables themselves are behind a paywall, but those ranked highly have not been quiet about it. The University of Queensland is ranked in the top 50 in the world and, for the social sciences, comes in at number 25. (It’s a bit annoying, by the way that the UQ press release runs first on the #29 ranking in biomedical science, and lists social sciences as an also-ran)

This is a pretty impressive ranking, though I’d be interested to see the criteria that put 17 Australian universities in the world’s top 200, compared to 54 in the US and 24 in Britain. It seems to overstate our relative importance, and to suggest that we are punching way above our weight. Still, the THES doesn’t seem likely to suffer from pro-Australian bias.

More terror attacks

John Quiggin11 Comments

More than 50 people have been killed in the latest terror attacks in Delhi. As usual in a globalised world, the victims apparently include Indians and foreign visitors, Hindus and Muslims and people of all social classes. Its premature to speculate on which particular group is responsible for this crime, but almost certainly it’s a group horrified by the prospect that peace might break out between India and Pakistan as the two countries work together to respond to the tragic earthquake in Pakistan.

Chutzpah

John Quiggin21 Comments

The Weekend Fin (registration only) quotes Gloria Jean’s executive chairman, Nabi Saleh, as complaining that his competitors sold lousy coffee. Saleh wants to establish some sort of trade body to squeeze out independent competition.

My view is summed up by the AFR’s exercise in voxpop. They asked a couple in a Sydney GJ’s. The wife said you could get as good or better at plenty of plenty of places in their hometown of Bowral (not the sticks but not exactly the centre of cafe culture either), while the husband generously allowed

This isn’t the worst coffee I’ve had though. That was in the army

It seems appropriate to me, in a variety of ways, that GJ’s is closely associated with Hillsong Church.

Make them pay

John Quiggin75 Comments

I’m really getting annoyed by the continued onslaught of ads in support of the Liberal Party’s proposals for IR reform. I think it’s time Labor actually stood up to them over this. I suggest nominating a cutoff date and saying that if the ads aren’t stopped after that, a future Labor government will legislate to recover the money from the Liberal Party (or from members of the Cabinet personally). Of course, the chance that they would actually do something like this, let alone follow through on it, is near zero. More likely, this outrage will be treated as a precedent, and taxpayer-funded ads supporting the government will become routine.

Weekend reflections

John Quiggin27 Comments

Weekend Reflections is on again. Please comment on any topic of interest (civilised discussion and no coarse language, please). Feel free to put in contributions more lengthy than for the Monday Message Board or standard comments.

More blog panic

John Quiggin8 Comments

The mainstream media panic about blogs reaches new heights with a piece by Daniel Lyons in Forbes (free registration required). Thanks to David Heidelberg for the alert.

The title Attack of the blogs is about the most level-headed sentence in the whole piece. The author’s main concern is “attack blogs” that have the temerity to criticise corporations. Bloggers are variously described as “online haters”, “evil” and “an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective”. He suggests using the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which requires hosts to take down copyrighted material used without permission) as a way of silencing critics.

Interestingly, Lyons suggests that “50% to 60% of attacks are sponsored by competitors”, which rather suggests that the appropriate target of his ire should be the corporate sector rather than the blogosphere.

There’s a lengthy critique at Americablog.
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