Blogotariat

Who make up the one group that humanities and social science academics typically feel entitled to analyse and pontificate about without actually studying them in any serious sense? Without talking to them, following them around, examining their letters, documents and memoirs, or reading the work of anyone who has.

That would be business folk.

When I was young the postman came twice a day. You could post a letter in the morning and if you were lucky have it delivered across town by the afternoon.It was the only way to send messages (apart from telegrams, which were expensive).Then came the phone (and the increasing usefulness of phones - they weren’t very useful at first when only a few houses were connected).

Two state election are due in March 15, 2014 in Tasmania and SA.

Letters, Australian Financial Review  15 January 2014  p33    Peter Pitt (“High wages force companies to consider offshore options”, AFR January 10) suggests that a lower minimum wage will improve employment retention in Australia. The lower wage countries he uses to support his point include the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand and Japan.    Of these, […]

South Australia's outgoing whole of government chief information officer Andrew Mills, who this month took up the same role in Queensland, has dramatically revealed the extent to which the state's IT infrastructure is being targeted by online attacks against.

It is said Rolf Harris tampered while sane with some girls who were aged, at different times, between 8 and 18. It is said some fathers raped while sane their infant daughters, repeatedly. It said some priests while sane and possessed of a moral choice buggered, or forced oral sex on, children of either gender indifferently, describing this to their victims as ‘an aspect of God’s love’.

How do the words ‘while sane’ make sense when included in such a narrative? How does the concept of ‘crime’, and a crime that is punished by imprisonment, occur in the discussion of these activities?

US-based venture capital firm Technology Crossover Ventures has invested $30 million into Australia-based company SiteMinder, which develops software that allows hotels to better monetise their inventory themselves and via more easily connecting to online platforms.

The Israel defence minister Moshe Yaalon has described John Kerry as displaying “misplaced obsession and messianic fervour” in attempting to secure a peace framework between Israel and Palestine. The US has reacted by calling the remarks “offensive and inappropriate”. Ya’alon has apologised saying he “had no intention to cause offence”. A storm in a tea cup? Probably. Does it imply that the peace framework is any more likely? No. It is not as though others have not made similar comments. Jackson Diehl writing in the Washington Post has called the peace process a “quasi-delusional bid for a legacy by a […]

Public outrage is rarely a good reason or basis for law reform. The debate on sentencing for violent offenders should not be coloured by the tragic death of Daniel Christie, writes Hannah Ryan