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Showing posts from March, 2006

The Refreshingly Out Spoken Nick Minchin

Thursday, 9th March, 2006 The gap between political-speak and the truth has grown so great that there is always surprise when a politician actually says something both unscripted and interesting. There is an immediate assumption that there has been a blunder and the minders start running around suggesting that the uttered words do not really mean what they seem to say and if they do then it was a personal view that counts for nothing. So it was yesterday as Canberra reacted to the unauthorised release of a tape recording of Government Senate Leader and Finance Minister  Nick Minchin  addressing the  HR Nicholls Society  at a private meeting on Friday night. The fragments of the speech played on ABC radio that I heard surely were not all that remarkable. Senator Minchin foreshadowed that more changes would be made to industrial relations law if the Coalition Government won again. It would seek a mandate for those changes at the next election. He expressed some nervousness about the

Of experts, hedgehogs and foxes

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Friday, 3rd March, 2006 Experts. They bob up on the television news and talk shows every night. Without the talking heads, ABC radio would find it impossible to fill in the hours. We watch them endlessly and hear them pontificate on what will happen to interest rates, to growth, to John Howard and George Bush, the likely developments in Iraq, China and Timbuctoo. On thousands upon thousands of websites around the world - including this one - people with more (and sometimes less) knowledge than me set out to explain what is happening and predict what will happen. And what is all this expert opinion worth? Well, according to a recently published book by by Philip Tetlock, the Mitchell Professor of Leadership at the University of California, Berkeley, the answer is not much. After years of research, during which he worked with almost 300 experts known for commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends, Prof Tetlock concluded: when you compare the aggregate accuracy of ex