Are Australian politicians overpaid?

A nice pithy comment, I thought, in the way that a 140 character limit encourages. I didn’t expect it to be too controversial, especially given the low standing of our politicians at the moment. But, as happens on the internets, I found myself pitched as the opponent of meritocracy, attempting to lower the standards of politicians by discouraging our best and brightest from applying.

I have a lot of writing that I’m supposed to be working on at the moment, so I thought the best way to procrastinate (sorry Antoinette and Geoff) would be to explore this question in a blog post: Do we get good value from our politicians?

Income management

Below is an article I submitted to South Sydney Herald, and that ended up published as a guest editorial in the October edition.

It was initially going to focus on how income management could effect residents in south Sydney, especially given the high concentration of disadvantage in parts of that community. However, during my research I realised that there would be significant impacts on tenancy rights coming out of the Bankstown trial, that I hadn’t seen raised elsewhere. So that’s where the focus went.

Whose war is this, anyway?

The internet is awash with opinion about the causes of the London riots (or should that be UK riots now?), not much of it backed with evidence. Whilst I can’t add to that evidence here, there is a fair amount of intellectual laziness floating around. How many times have you heard it said that “the riots aren’t political”, for example?