Posts by Andrew
The Devil Made me do it (and his name is clubs Australia)
News reports have claimed that problem gamblers are being targeted by organised crime to act as drug mules and to allow drugs to be grown or stored in their home. ABC news investigations found, in a study of the parole records of Vietnamese drug offenders in Sydney’s south-west that almost three-quarters of them blame problem gambling for their crimes. Sounds like a clear cut argument in support of Andrew Wilkie and Nick Xenophon’s private member’s bill restricting poker machines doesn’t it? Is there a missing connection here? Could it be that the NSW Department of Public Prosecutions offers reduced sentences if the plea of mitigation states...
Read MoreCrisis – What Crisis? Learn Spanish not French or Greek.
Does any one remember the UN millennium goals from a few years ago? One of the suggestions for easing child poverty and disease in the 3rd world was to relax or forgive some of the more disadvantageous debts held by third world nations. How did that go? If your answer was ‘it didn’t’ then you would be right. And yet here we are in 2011 and a ‘developed’ nation is now demanding (not pleading, but finger pointing) that the rest of Europe forgive 50% of its sovereign debt. I don’t know if anyone has traveled to Athens recently, but I have heard that it is no Darfur or Tripoli. Instead of hearing regret for years of living beyond their...
Read MoreWhy an Uncommonwealth (or Donald Horne was a giant douche)
Hi, thanks for reading this, the first post on Uncommonwealth. So why have I decided to write Uncommonwealth – well it is because I think Donald Horne was a douche. Not to hack on one of the pre-eminent thinkers and social critics of Australian public life in the 1960s – but he was well out of order. Don’t know what I am blagging on about? Have you heard of the “Lucky Country”? This is Horne’s most famous quote (and title of his 1964 book- newsflash: not exactly a page turner). You may have heard this expression, only about a billion times if you have ever followed politics in Australia. What most people don’t realise is that...
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