Down Under Feminists Carnival

Those Hoydens at Hoyden about Town have published the first downunder feminist carnival! Lots of great posts there to read - just in time for a long weekend (shame the NZers have already had theirs).

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Paid Maternity Leave

The campaign for paid maternity leave in Australia has gotten renewed vigour following the recent change of government. The government has asked the Productivity Commission to enquire into what should be done.
And there are a lot of blog posts about it. Joshua Gans has written a series from an economic point of view, which culminates [...]

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Price signals vs coercion

Sydney’s water crisis is over, for the moment. Our dams are now 65.5% full - up from 33.9% on the 8th February 2007. That will last us around two to three years without any more rain, at the current rate, which feels like a reasonable cushion. Not coincidentally, Sydney’s water consumption went from an average of 1,800 or so [...]

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Work and life - some statistics

This week Beaton Consulting released a study on work life balance. Beaton’s main game is as advisors to professional services firms (law firms, accounting firms, etc). Every year they do a mammoth survey of those firms’ clients, to find out who is the best in each category. As a sideline, they tack on a few questions at [...]

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Populist economics

The Sydney Tele yesterday had a front page screamer about Glenn Stevens, Governor of the Reserve Bank - Is this man Australia’s most useless? There were two main parts to the critique. First, that the Reserve Bank should be stopping the banks from raising interest rates beyond the official cash rate;
“it is a key part of [...]

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Single sex schools

Around here, one of the common topics of conversation among the parent community is, “where are you going to send your kids to high school?” We genuinely have no idea. Our options are made much more complex by the fact that all of the six high schools within walking distance of our house (two public, four private) [...]

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Demographic pressures

When you have a new baby, suddenly you notice them everywhere. Certainly, that’s how I felt with Chatterboy. I assumed that in my formerly childless state, they’d always been there, but I hadn’t noticed them before. But I’ve just been looking at the census statistics for my local area, and it turns out that, like [...]

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Sorry

Many have written eloquently about the meaning of today. Until today, I had been too busy enjoying watching the liberal party squirm to think about it.
But watching Martin Place today crowded with people huddled under umbrellas watching and listening respectfully to Kevin Rudd’s speech of apology to the Aboriginal people was very moving. To see such an enormous [...]

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Heritage insides

There are some spectacular buildings in Sydney’s CBD - many of them heritage listed. My favourites are the sandstone public service buildings along Bridge St, but there some other pretty good ones scattered about the city. I was in one of them, today, and it struck me, again, how intrusive a heritage listing can be. This [...]

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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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