Gavin R. Putland

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2020/05/08

Huygens' principle: Simple mechanistic reason for the phase advance of the secondary sources

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2017/06/08

Who does what in the Australian economy

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2017/04/04

What century is this? — the ambiguity of ‘plane of polarization’

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Update (1 June 2019):  An improved version of this post has been contributed to Wikipedia as the article “ Plane of polarization ”, and su...
2017/02/03

‘Passive’ value capture is best

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2017/01/31

How we encourage the black economy

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2016/12/24

The Georgist case for a vacancy tax

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2016/10/08

Εὕρηκα 4th–8th October 2016: The observation by Huygens that should have discredited Newton's ‘rule’ for the extraordinary refraction of calcite

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2016/08/23

The Devil's talent

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2016/08/21

Private prisons lead to tyranny

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2016/08/17

Jury nullification: Your last defence against bad ‘laws’

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2016/08/16

Separation of powers implied by rule of law

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2016/08/14

Three unofficial state secrets about the housing problem

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2016/07/27

The reverse onus of proof for drug possession is contrary to the rule of law and therefore unconstitutional in all jurisdictions

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2016/06/29

The compulsory ‘retirement’ of home ownership in Australia

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2016/06/23

Negative gearing and the children-overboard effect

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2016/06/07

Errata in various editions of Huygens' Treatise on Light

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2016/04/20

Cheap housing is good for business!

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2016/04/02

Would a State retail sales tax require a referendum?

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2016/02/29

The banality of drivel: Henry Ergas on negative gearing

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2016/02/26

If you're not a property investor, your retirement plans don't matter, says IPA

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2016/02/22

Adam Smith on the irrational belief in one's own good fortune

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2016/02/08

The pons asinorum of value-capture

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2015/11/11

Negative gearing in context

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2015/09/17

The day the deal was done

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2015/08/10

Equitable methods of abolishing PAYG personal income tax

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2015/08/07

Housing: The mother of all economic issues

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2015/07/31

Crescent of Venus in daylight, captured by point-and-shoot camera

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2015/07/11

The price cannot be right: Taxation, sub-intrinsic-value housing bubbles, and financial instability

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2015/04/11

Jupiter & moons captured by point-and-shoot camera

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2015/03/06

Can the Australian Constitution be changed without a referendum?

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2015/02/02

Fine control over sizes of fractions in LaTeX

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2015/01/16

Convened-sample suffrage: Reclaiming democracy from vested interests

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2014/12/13

The Georgist dimension of fiscal devaluation: Why it isn't a zero-sum game

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2014/10/12

Precedents say stamp duties on new cars are unconstitutional

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2014/10/05

Rewarding employers for taking workers off the dole: A self-funding tax cut

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2014/09/27

Negative gearing is so 18th century!

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2014/08/17

How to install a Brother MFC-7460DN printer/scanner over a network on Linux Mint 17 ‘Qiana’ MATE 32-bit ed.

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2014/08/16

How to convert a PostScript file to PDF, embed all fonts, embed substitutes for missing fonts, convert colors to grayscale, prevent lossy compression of images, and preserve image resolution

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2014/06/25

Buy up Australia fair!

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2014/05/26

Abbott's plot to circumvent the minimum wage

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2014/05/13

Budget 2014: Top ten reasons why you have to work until you're 70

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2014/04/11

Why real developers and builders should split from the HIA

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2014/04/07

How to negatively gear your home

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2014/04/06

If you are charged under a retrospective ‘law’

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2014/03/26

How to invert colors in a selected region with GIMP

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2014/03/22

How to avoid stamp duty when you move house

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2014/01/26

Errata for Chapter 1 of Allen & Mills, Signal Analysis: Time, Frequency, Scale, and Structure (IEEE/Wiley, 2004)

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2013/12/08

A self-contained derivation of Kepler's laws from Newton's laws

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2013/11/26

A multiplatform Helvetica-like font stack that suppresses Arial

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2013/11/24

Using MathJax with a ‘Classic’ Blogger template

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2013/10/19

Ramsey taxation means land-value taxation

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This is an abridgment of an article first posted as “ Ramsey and Pigou: crypto-Georgists ” on the LVRG blog. The original runs to over 4000...
2013/10/05

Maximalist ‘fiscal devaluations’ for Greece and Australia

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2013/08/07

The price of eliminating ‘company tax’

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2013/07/26

Make banks collect personal income tax!

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2013/07/14

Pay all who collect tax, not just banks

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2013/07/07

Misrepresentation of ‘fiscal devaluation’ in the Weekend Australian

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2013/05/30

Internal devaluation by tax reform

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2013/05/22

You can increase the GST without raising prices

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2013/05/14

Retrospective laws breach separation of powers

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2013/04/27

Austerity without unemployment

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2013/04/12

Full employment: how the euro can work for Ireland, not against it

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2013/03/25

Is Australia's plus-70-year copyrort term unconstitutional?

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2013/03/23

The only way to make payroll tax legal

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2013/02/07

Abbott's constitutional own-goal

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2013/02/04

How income tax feeds into prices

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2013/01/23

Is myki unconstitutional?

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2012/12/26

Whether Section 82 of the Australian Constitution means what it says

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Woe unto him that buildeth his house by unrighteousness, and his chambers by wrong; that useth his neighbour's service without wages, an...
2012/12/21

Does the GST breach Section 55 of the Constitution?

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2012/12/13

An open letter to Australian Treasurers

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2012/12/07

Draft Federal Budget Speech, 2013-14

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2012/11/25

How inflationary is government-issued money?

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2012/09/29

Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 2 and Sabayon Linux 10 on Dell Vostro 360

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[ Note : This post was originally written for Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal” Alpha 2 on July 4, 2012. It was updated for Quantal Beta 1 and Sabayon ...
2012/09/09

Abolishing payroll tax & stamp duty is easier than you think

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“From 1 January 2013, payroll tax will be abolished. From the same date, all existing State property taxes will be abolished. These include ...
2012/09/05

Three font stacks to match DejaVu / Bitstream Vera

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2012/08/23

Real reform is qualitative, not quantitative

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What's better than reducing the company tax rate? Abolishing company tax. What's better than bailing out selected industries? Removi...
2012/08/20

The Parable of the Talents (Neoclassical Version)

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For the kingdom of heaven is as a man travelling into a far country, who called his servants and delivered unto them his goods. And to one h...
2012/08/18

The creation of Woman, and the Seventh Day (Neoclassical Version)

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And on the seventh day God rested from all his work which he had made. Therefore God said, “The seventh part of men shall be idle: though th...
2012/08/17

Render to Caesar... (Neoclassical Version)

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And there came unto him certain of the Pharisees and of the Herodians, to catch him in his words. And they said unto him, “Master, is it la...
2012/08/16

How to redirect Blogger pages to external URLs

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2012/08/06

Font stacks that look similar in Windows, OS X, and Linux

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2012/07/30

Diagrams for ‘Barlow-Newtonian and relay-Newtonian’

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My article “ Barlow-Newtonian and relay-Newtonian: Minimizing central obstruction and tube length ” was posted to the Amateur Telescope Maki...
2012/06/22

Draft letter to the ATO

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To:  The Commissioner of Taxation Cc:  The Treasurer      The Attorney-General      The Minister for Financial Services & Superannuati...
2012/05/13

Linux in full HD (with brightness control) on Dell Vostro 360

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Summary : You'll need kernel 3.2 or later with boot parameters “drm_kms_helper.poll=0 acpi_osi=Linux acpi_backlight=vendor”; and if you ...
2012/04/17

Australia's payroll taxes are probably unconstitutional

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Payroll tax is a tax on the value of labour, including the labour embodied in goods . Thus, in substance if not in form, it amounts to a dut...
2012/03/24

Linux kernel 3.3 on Dell Vostro 360

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2012/03/20

Employers: How to scare off the tax man

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Scenario 1 : An employer, facing prosecution or bankruptcy for making a mistake with employees' PAYE tax, tells the ATO that if the case...
2012/01/12

Replacing property taxes and payroll tax

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The revenue from payroll tax, property transfer duty, insurance duty... and the existing land tax could be replaced by a broad-based “land t...
2012/01/09

Keating's Great Big Tax on Everything

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2012/01/06

If Anna Bligh ran a body corporate (U.S. ed.)

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Once upon a time, there was a huge condo building called Brisbane . It had been built in stages. The ground floor, commonly called the “ce...
2011/12/23

How tax causes financial crises and unaffordable housing

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2011/12/15

Five secrets for a successful economy

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You cannot legislate the poor into industry by legislating the rich out of it. You don't add wealth by subtracting it. Government cannot...
2011/12/03

Ubuntu 12.04 Beta 1 on Dell Vostro 360

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[ Note (June 19, 2012) : This review was originally written for Ubuntu 12.04 Alpha 1, then edited for the Alpha 2 and Beta 1 releases. The l...
2011/11/27

Why renters are vermin

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My wife and I live near the top of a tall residential building on the edge of downtown Melbourne. The view from our balcony is slowly being ...
2011/11/11

Prosper Australia's doco Real Estate 4 Ransom

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Update : Since March 15, 2012, you can watch it online:
2011/10/25

Slump in property sales points to recession

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... In 2010-11, the index fell by the 3rd-biggest percentage on record. The biggest fall was in 1974, and was followed by recession in 1975....
2011/09/18

Can banks really evict tenants?

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... Even more iniquitous than full-recourse mortgages is the practice of evicting tenants when their landlords default... If you are a lende...
2010/03/19

Juries can already protect whistleblowers

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Your report on the Allan Kessing case ( The Australian , 19/3, p.29) fails to mention the whistleblower-protection law that we already have,...
2009/07/08

Legal notices

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Contact me

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Inlinks

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2009/01/25

Raising Australia's market share — Take 2!

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Or   Do you believe me yet? — A submission concerning the 2009/10 Federal Budget, by Gavin R. Putland .
2008/04/21

When $4 million for nothing isn't enough

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Now let me get this straight. The Property Council of Australia is complaining that if the value of your land has risen from $6 million to $...
2008/04/07

Still on the mountaintop: Economically rational racism

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Forty years ago, as Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the Promised Land and prophesied “ I may not get there with you ,” a quiet revolution i...
2008/03/12

Apply your razor to the FHOG — surgically

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Dear Mr Tanner, I respectfully submit that the First Home Owners' Grant (FHOG) should be available only for new homes . Such a refor...
2008/02/29

100 words for the Australia 2020 Summit

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Benefits of economic growth mostly disappear into land values. Benefits of infrastructure , including that which contributes to ecological...
2008/02/27

The myth of progressive taxation

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By “progressive” income taxation and “means-tested” welfare, governments make a great show of taking from the rich and giving to the poor. ...
2008/02/25

Can you stop paying the mortgage and keep the house?

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As falling U.S. home prices leave mortgage borrowers owing more than their homes are worth, borrowers are encouraged to stop paying the mort...
2008/02/11

How the Left could learn to love a retail tax

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Conventional wisdom holds that replacing income tax with a consumption tax would be regressive, and that it would devalue past savings by ra...
2008/02/08

Google shows two whales

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Google Maps showing two whales, 12m and 11m long, about 10km NNE of Sandy Cape (Fraser Island, eastern Australia):
2008/01/30

Will we all be Keynesians again?

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As a U.S. recession looks more and more like a done deal, many will argue that this is a great time for America to invest in public infrastr...
2007/11/28

Why patents are ‘basically iniquitous’

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2007/10/29

The Mother of All BBQ Stoppers

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All the “barbecue stopper” issues of the day come down to one: housing affordability. And wall-to-wall Labor governments are unlikely to do...
2007/07/31

Democracy vs. universal suffrage

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Democracy as we know it works like this. Two million wolves and eight million sheep vote on who shall decide what to eat. Meanwhile the “li...
2007/07/16

Haneef: So much for the separation of powers

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Yesterday I argued that the charge against Dr Mohamed Haneef was unconstitutional. Today the Minister for Immigration, by an executive deci...
2007/07/15

Haneef ‘charge’ unconstitutional

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Excuse me! As Dr Mohamed Haneef is a citizen of India, and as his alleged “terrorist” crime — giving his unexpired phone card to his second...
2007/06/03

Corporate solution to rape

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A global alliance of corporate think-tanks has come up with an ingenious market-based system for limiting the incidence of rape. It's ca...
2007/03/10

Secrets about the State Secrets Privilege

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The administration of George W. Bush is facing multiple lawsuits from persons claiming to have been wrongfully detained, deported, and tortu...
2006/07/24

Victims in double jeopardy

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The proposal to allow double jeopardy in certain criminal cases — now being revived by the Queensland Opposition and the Federal Minister fo...

Not quite a department-store telescope

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2006/06/30

Self-funding infrastructure

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The New South Wales government has announced that property developers will pay $33,000 per lot towards the cost of providing infrastructure ...
2006/03/31

The essential difference between patents and copyrights

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Why are software vendors racing to protect their ideas with patents, in addition to the usual copyright? Because, while the independent dev...
2006/03/14

Infrastructure on a bootstrap budget

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Submitted to State and Territory legislators, March 14, 2006. Reposted August 18, 2012.
2006/01/06

Little people vs. littler people

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An increase in building height limits in the riverside area of West End was approved by the Brisbane City Council on December 13, and is now...
2005/12/19

Majority verdicts threaten victims

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The Big Lie about the NSW proposal for majority verdicts is that it would help victims of crime.
2005/12/06

Ball in Property Council's court

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The imminent arrival of the four millionth Queenslander was the cue for the Property Council of Australia to make yet another complaint abou...
2005/10/19

Patently perverse incentives

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1999/12/26

Flag designs, Southern Cross theme, 2:3

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1999/12/12

The Single Means Test

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Submitted to the Reference Group on Welfare Reform (Chair: Patrick McClure), December 12, 1999. Abridged ( not updated) August 10, 2006. ...
1998/02/27

Flag designs, Southern Cross theme, 5:8

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1998/01/11

Flag designs, kangaroo theme

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1997/10/20

Modeling of Horns and Enclosures for Loudspeakers (PhD thesis)

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Author: Gavin R. Putland.  Institution: University of Queensland (Dept. of Electrical & Computer Engineering).  Supervisor: Dr. L. V....