politics

What is Tony talking about?

17 September 2012

I first experimented with word clouds several years ago and used them to visualise the speeches of Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull. I have now learned from the Fell Stats blog (via R-Bloggers) that there is an R package for generating word clouds.  The package makes use of tm, a text mining package for R, which I have been [...]

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A way with words

4 January 2011

Sometimes the things that are unsaid are far more telling than the things said. I had cause to reflect on this when I stumbled across a book on my shelves that I have not opened for many years. The book, entitled “Deutsche Bank: Dates, facts and figures 1870-1993”, is an English translation of the year-by-year [...]

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Polls apart on climate change

7 December 2010

Regular Stubborn Mule guest James Glover (@zebra) turns his statistical expertise on some apparently contradictory polls gauging opinions on climate change. Two polls came out today on the question of whether people believed climate change is real and if so whether it is caused by human activity. The first was a Newspoll published in The [...]

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A Delicate Balance

12 September 2010
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Ever since Julia Gillard managed to scrape through to a second term in government, speculation has focused on how long the arrangement can last…what do you think?

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More Informality

24 August 2010

Yesterday’s post on informal votes generated a lot of questions, both on and off the blog. One commenter was interested in understanding why there was so much variability in informal votes in New South Wales. It is a good question, and one I do not have an answer to. Presumably demographic differences across electorates (such [...]

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Dress: Informal

23 August 2010

While Australia still waits to see which party will manage to scrape into power, the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) has announced an investigation into the unusually high rate of informal votes. Veteran ABC analyst Antony Green observed that the rate of informal votes was the highest since 1984. Some are attributing the rise to the [...]

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Recognise this?

20 August 2010

Last night I was watching the Chaser’s Yes We Canberra (only a day late), and jumped out of my chair when I saw Craig Reucassel corner Tony Abbott to challenge him about his obsession with reducing Government debt. Have a look at this to see why! Here is the post referred to in the video. [...]

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Infrastructure Bonds

17 August 2010

With Australia’s Federal election looming, the opposition has today proudly announced a new policy to fund infrastructure without actually increasing Government debt! What are we to make of this? It’s hard to determine the details from a media announcement, but based on the text posted by Peter Martin on his blog, it would seem that [...]

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Broadband Poll

12 August 2010

As a follow up to our guest post on the numbers behind Labor’s broadband policy, here is a quick poll to see whose policy you prefer. Let us know what you think!

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Labor’s National Broadband Network – Less than $10/month

11 August 2010

Our regular guest contributor James Glover (aka @zebra) returns today with a look at the numbers behind the National Broadband Network. He asks: do you think it would be value for money?

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