Fairness at the top

EOWA recently released a study of remuneration of the very top of the Australian corporate tree. They took the public information about the top 200 listed companies, their five highest paid executives, their top management team – described as executive managers (CEO and director reports) and analysed the gender splits by role and salary.
They point out in [...]

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Book Review: The Secret River

Today, on Australia Day, it seems appropriate to write about The Secret River, by Kate Grenville.
Australia Day commemorates the day in 1788 when the First Fleet landed in Sydney Cove with a cargo of convicts from Britain. The first recorded time that Europeans settled in Australia. Many Aboriginal people call it Invasion Day, and hold [...]

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Computer games

The school holidays are nearly over here. Chatterboy goes back to school next Wednesday, and Hungry Boy has his first day at big school next Thursday. So they will both have had five weeks of pretty relaxed holidays – going to the beach, and museums, visiting friends and other bits and pieces, but a lot of [...]

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Middle class welfare

This week, in the post, I got a cheque for $50 from Morris Iemma, Premier of NSW, which included a cheesy message reminding me that he is the father of four children. It was the back-to-school allowance for Chatterboy (I get Hungry Boy’s in a month’s time after he’s actually started Kindergarten).
In 2006, according to the census, [...]

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Caesareans

The SMH has  a series this week going on caesareans – why they are on the increase in Australia, and increasing evidence of their long term riskiness.  About 30% of births in Australia are now by c-section. It’s a good series, which points out that as well as appearing to have higher risks of themselves [...]

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Party party party

Hugh McKay has a very grumpy rant in the SMH today about the excessiveness of children’s birthday parties. He starts with a description of a two year old’s party, which is more extreme than any two year old’s party I’ve ever been to (I must move in the wrong circles), and then goes on to [...]

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Cycle Lanes

In a front page story in the SMH today, the NRMA (NSW’s peak motorist lobby group) accused the government of wasting money on cycle lanes.
“The Iemma Government is building a cycleway alongside choked Epping Road, despite as few as 25 cyclists using that corridor each day. At $7.6 million for the Epping Road cycleway, the [...]

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Book Review: Immigrants – Your country needs them

Today’s book review is Immigrants – Your Country needs them, by Philippe Legrain. Legrain is a British journalist (but with a complex heritage involving Estonia, the US and France) who started writing this book just after the July 2005 terrorist attacks on London.
The book’s introduction is titled “It’s time for fresh thinking about immigration”, and it [...]

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Happy New Year

There’s an easy meme going around, which is the first sentence of your first post of each month, to see what was occupying your mind during the year. On reading mine, I think I need to work on my opening sentences!

There have been a couple of articles (probably because it is the silly season) recently [...]

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