Give us a home among the gum trees

A few summers ago, I was sitting in a beer garden with half a dozen friends who work as commercial lawyers in major firms. The conversation drifted to property, as it always does in Sydney, and each of them confessed that they were looking for a house so their young kids could have access to a backyard. Then they all sighed and said that there was absolutely nothing affordable even remotely near the city, and they couldn’t look too far afield because they didn’t want to spend an hour plus each way commuting.

They were keen to reiterate that they weren’t looking for anything big or fancy, just a little terrace or something with a modest rectangle of backyard so that their kids could burn off some energy within the safe walls of their yard. Maybe, they pondered wistfully, they’d host the occasional barbeque, as well?

Not being a commercial lawyer myself, the conversation made me wince. If these people, who had jumped through all of society’s hoops to guarantee themselves success and a healthy income, and put in long, dedicated hours doing finicky work for demanding commercial clients, were having trouble finding a house that wasn’t a brutally lengthy commute from the CBD, what hope did I have?

I grew up in a pleasant, middle-class environment in North Sydney where just about everyone I knew had some manner of backyard where we’d make cubby houses, bounce on trampolines and generally muck around. The houses in which I grew up were never big, but my parents put in partitions and fixed things so that my brother and I had our own rooms, and there was enough space to accommodate two boys who liked playing cricket or soccer outdoors. I had my 21st birthday party in our backyard, and although it was about the size of half a tennis court, we festooned it with lanterns, and it was a great night.

My generation, who is on either side of forty, is surely the first in the history of Australia to grow up feeling that the dream of owning a home like the one we grew up in is unattainable. In previous decades, houses have grown bigger and bigger as the nation grew wealthier, but the vast property wealth accumulated by our baby boomer parents and grandparents has put an abrupt stop to this.

As macabre as it seems, the best hope most people my age have of owning a house is inheriting one. What’s more, our parents are living ever longer (which is vastly preferable, of course!), so what will probably happen is that many of us will inherit significant property in their sixties, right when our kids are leaving home, and we no longer need it.

I know that many may think that the complaints about housing affordability are a whinge from a group that’s already extremely privileged, and I’ve not much defence against that suggestion except to point out how consistently Sydney prices have outperformed inflation over many years. Yes, growing up in the heart of one of the world’s most beautiful, safe and comfortable cities was a huge privilege, but it’s also one I’d like to be able to extend to my children some day.

When the Treasurer says “get a good job with good pay”, I wonder exactly how good a job you have to have to be able to afford a house in Sydney? The lawyers I know have extremely comfortable salaries, and they’re struggling to afford one. Even the Prime Minister, who presumably bought long ago when prices in Forestville were considerably lower, has admitted to suffering “mortgage stress”, even though the Abbott family, like so many, is a two-income household.

In these days of million-dollar mortgages, the concept of property ownership must seem absurdly unattainable to people in their twenties, many of whom struggle to afford their rent. Maybe their values are shifting, and home ownership isn’t as important as regular travel or employment satisfaction, so the thought of being a lifelong renter isn’t as off-putting as it feels to my generation. Then again, I’m pretty sure my cohort felt that way once, too, but now that so many of us are having kids, the lure of the backyard has become extremely strong for us.

Perhaps the reason why Joe Hockey’s comments have inspired such a strong reaction is because home ownership is such an emotive area for Australians. Owning a home makes us feel safe, both financially and physically, comfortable in the knowledge that when we own a place, a capricious landlord can never evict us.

The Coalition has campaigned successfully on being the party that keeps interest rates low, which shows that Joe Hockey’s party previously understood the place that home ownership had in Aussie hearts. Labor is talking a lot about the issue, too, but is unlikely to rock the boat with any major policy shift in areas like negative gearing – alienating existing homeowners is far too risky.

Prices rise when demand exceeds supply, of course. Unless Australians suddenly decide to reverse our centuries-long trend and abandon our cities for the joys of regional or rural living, or unless the economy wilts to the point where mortgages are once again 18% like they were in the mid-1980s, the only solution is surely to attempt to radically increase supply. This would place further demands on our already groaning infrastructure, and it might mean that we need to stop fantasising about backyards and be satisfied with balconies. But at least then future generation of Australians could feel more confident about their place in the world, because they owned a place in the world.

When social networking becomes your social life

There was a time when I scoffed at Facebook. There was a time when I kicked sand in the face of MySpace (RIP). There was even a time when I laughed at Friendster, the first social networking site, although the joke was on me for even having an account on it.

And that’s because there was a time when I thought it was absurd to try to replicate my precious real-life friendships on the internet. Surely social networking sites were for people who didn’t have real social lives or friends? Because if they did, they’d be out with them, not sitting at home alone with their computer.

Admittedly, Facebook and MySpace had a certain novelty factor as adjuncts to physical socialising, especially because they let us share embarrassing photos of our nights out. I can still remember the dread every time I received a morning-after email saying I’d been tagged in a photo album called ‘Crazy Night’, or more likely ‘Keray-Zee Night’ – yes, our madcap natures even extended to spelling.

Those were the pioneer days, back when we still found Facebook’s “poke” feature amusing. (Or perhaps that was just me?) But then the site began to tunnel remorselessly towards the centre of our social lives. Within a few years, just as soon as we’d learned how to block those infuriating messages about zombies, werewolves and lonely brown cows, Facebook became indispensable.

Soon, my friends abandoned bulk emails for social invitations, since they either uncouthly shared everyone’s email address or were BCCed and ended up in people’s spam folders. Instead, they created Facebook events for birthdays, housewarmings, barbeques and picnics, so much so that on some days I even found myself double-booked, and felt like some kind of e-Kardashian.

And Facebook became the preferred method of keeping in touch. Work email addresses and phone numbers changed as people moved overseas and back again, but Facebook friends remained constant. These days, having an account is mandatory if you want to stay in touch with friends you don’t see often, which is probably why the social network statistics socialbakers.com says that 65% of people with internet connections have an account. Admittedly, the same site also says that Bubble O’Bill Ice Cream is the fourth most popular brand in Australia with 1.1 million fans. But the 65% figure seems conservative, if anything.

Twitter came along at about this time too, and I quickly got addicted when I realised it provided not only an endless stream of breaking news and interesting articles, but a guilt-free way of cyberstalking celebrities. I can make no better argument for the importance of Twitter to human civilisation than by pointing out that it lets us access everything Kanye West thinks, in real time.

As the years have passed, I’ve stopped seeing the majority of my friends more than a few times a year. Many of them are at home with young children, and while occasionally we gather en masse for children’s birthday parties, or for weddings where other mutual friends sign up to commence that journey, that’s more or less it. We’ve adapted into comfortable middle age, and we’ve brought Facebook with us. The party invitations have been replaced by invitations to baby showers, and many of my friends have even changed their profile photo to their child’s, a practice that surely intrigues psychoanalysts.

But we’re all still Facebook friends, and when they’re are at home minding their kids, many of the parents I know hop onto these sites for a chat. Socialbakers says that 54% of Australian users are female, and that the largest age groups are 25-34, and given the site’s popularity with the mothers I know, that comes as no surprise.

Despite being neither 25-34 or a parent myself, I appreciate the way Facebook lets me connect with friends I haven’t seen in years, and might never clap eyes on again. Some are in London or New York or Asia, and some are in the same city, just a few suburbs away. We could catch up for a coffee, of course, but neither of us quite has the time. But we’re still connected, and there’s something comforting about that.

Most sociable of all is instant messaging, both via Facebook and Twitter and those earlier stalwarts like MSN and and Skype and Google Talk. When a little green light pops up next to someone’s name, we’ll occasionally catch up with text messages the way we never get around to catching up over a beer.

These sites have even given me a new category of friends, the primarily online ones with whom I’ve never spent much physical time. Often we’ve met in a different city, and in previous years would have drifted out of touch, but nowadays can stay connected using social networks. On the rare occasions we catch up in person, I experience the odd realisation that I’m now closer to them than many of my friends who live in the same city.

And so it is that social networking can become your social life. If you’d told me this would happen when I first signed up to Facebook, I would never have believed you. But now that transition feels more comforting than disturbing. I still reminisce about the days when I hung out with a large group of friends, but there’s no denying that they’re over. And it’s genuinely reassuring to feel that we’re all still in touch, and may meet up again someday. Because when we click “Like” on each others’ posts, what we’re really saying is that we still like one another, and that’s a reassuring feeling.

The social networks have won. They’ve become as important part of my social life as having a mobile phone – not least because I can access them on it. And I now take comfort from the knowledge that when major events happen in my friends’ lives, for better or worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, there will be a post about it in my Facebook feed. Until death, or dodgy internet connections, do us part.

An edited version of this article was published in Good Weekend on 23 September

Naked Eye #4

My final Sun-Herald column about Sarah Palin's TV job and Prince William's visit, among other things.

FOX News now Sarah and Balanced

The news that Sarah Palin would join FOX News as an analyst sounded like a (non-gay) marriage made in Republican heaven. She needed a job, having abandoned her state midway through her second term, and Fox needed high-profile Obama opponents. But her first appearance didn't exactly contradict MSNBC's Chris Matthews, who asked how she could be a pundit when "she doesn't know anything". She quickly got befuddled when asked by Bill O'Reilly how a McCain-Palin administration would have responded to the Iranian nuclear threat, and her answer to how she'd combat the rise in unemployment was that the Government should get out of the way of the private sector – the very approach which caused the financial crisis in the first place. Most damagingly, she admitted she thought Saddam Hussein might have been responsible for 9/11 before her Vice-Presidential debate in 2008. Still, at least there is now a clear heir to the Bush legacy.

Where there's a Wills

Understandably, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has cancelled her visit to Australia because of the disastrous earthquake in Haiti. But fortunately no crisis has prevented Prince William from visiting Sydney for a whole two days next week, in what is only his second visit ever despite being our future King. The Premier is taking time out from fixing our crumbling State to meet his plane, and then Wills will be attending a garden-party. It hardly seems worth the fuss, nor the substantial security bill. If he must come here, perhaps he could emulate some of our other young English visitors, and pull some beers or something?

Google and the Great Wall of Conroy

Google's dramatic announcement that it would stop censoring its search engine in China has been praised as a win for civil liberties in a nation where speech is far from free. Its decision has been applauded by the White House, with spokesperson Robert Gibbs referring to President Obama's speech in Beijing in November in which he advocated the "right of a free internet." And yet that's exactly the right that our own government is now proposing to restrict. So will Google refuse to play ball with our government's attempt to decide what its citizens should see? And will President Obama criticise Stephen Conroy's plan to make internet filtering mandatory in Australia? Labor Senator Kate Lundy expressed reservations about the plan this week, and presumably now risks being consigned to some gulag for expressing dissent.

Who wants to see a millionaire?

A big welcome to AR Rahman, the genius Bollywood composer whose compositions even sound good when they're performed by the Pussycat Dolls. He hopes his free concert for the Sydney Festival will help to build bridges between Australia and India at a time of considerable tension. Let's hope so, because the killings in Melbourne have done enormous damage to our image in the region. Rahman says the attacks are the result of drugs rather than racism, though, which seems about as optimistic as a boy from the Mumbai slums trying to win Who Want To Be A Millionaire.

Abbott’s Army vs Rudd’s Regiment

Tony Abbott has tried to seize the environmental mantle from the left this week, promising to create a 15,000-strong Green Army that will undertake a series of conservationist sorties around the nation. They will confront the urgent environmental challenges facing Australia, except of course climate change. But since Kevin Rudd already announced a Green Jobs Corps back in July, we are faced with the thrilling prospect of the two forces joining battle. And since Rudd promised to recruit 50,000 for his programme, Abbott might want to bump up his numbers before the warring sides take up their pitchforks and hoes.

Whan disaster strikes

Amid the flood of responses to the terrible tragedy in Haiti was a statement from the NSW Labor MP Steve Whan headed "New South Wales rescuers on standby following Haiti tsunami". The media release, which was posted on the NSW Fire Brigade website, suggests that our state's Emergency Services Minister doesn't know the difference between an earthquake and a tsunami. Hint: one involves water.

Naked Eye #3

This third instalment of my Sun-Herald summer political column deals with Kevin Rudd's children's book and the Jennifer Hawkins kerfuffle, among other delights.

Every dog has its Australia Day

This time last year, the tireless Kevin Rudd took a few days leave to dash off a quick 7,000 word essay for The Monthly, blaming the Liberals for the global financial crisis. This summer, with the pesky crisis as good as solved, he’s used his authorial talents to produce something considerably lighter: a children’s book, written with Play School host Rhys Muldoon and illustrator Carla Zapel.

It’s called Jasper + Abby and the Great Australia Day Kerfuffle, and stars the Rudd family pets. Jasper the cat and Abby the dog “end up saving the day on what could have been an Oz day disaster at the Lodge”, according to the PM. The book, which will raise money for children’s charities, is out later this month. No word yet on whether the villains responsible for this latest crisis are once again from the Liberal Party.

NSW’s job ad nauseam

Finally some good news from Kristina Keneally, who claimed this week that NSW was leading Australia’s economic recovery. The Premier cited big increases in job ads in November and December to show that the state’s economic motor is powering forwards. Three cheers for Kristina!

But wait – this is NSW Labor we’re talking about. So I did a bit more digging, and discovered that while Nathan Rees had announced a hiring freeze in the middle of the year, as of late December the State Government subsequently ignored it to advertise at least 180 senior public service positions in the past few months, splurging over $20 million in wages. About time we placed an ad for another new Premier, isn’t it?

Rolling out the Barry

Speaking of new Premiers, I heard a great rumour this week. Apparently there’s been a move on for a while now to replace the one leader in the country who only needs to turn up to the next election to win it comfortably – NSW Opposition Leader Barry O’Farrell. And while it would be fair to say that the State hasn’t exactly been electrified by his charisma, he does possess the one attribute that voters are looking for: he’s not a member of the ALP. The idea is to promote a fresh, young face, but surely the Libs should proceed with caution. The last time they went for someone fresh and young, they gave us Peter Debnam.

Rudd and Abbott in the pink

Jane McGrath day at the SCG was a wonderful success again this year, raising funds to help the McGrath Foundation provide breast cancer nurses. Everyone found a different way of getting involved and having some fun – Michael Slater donned a lurid pink suit that would later be auctioned for the charity, while Mark Taylor inappropriately quipped that Slats should take his suit down to Oxford St. Kevin Rudd dropped by the ground to cook snags on the barbie for the kids, while Tony Abbott joined the Pink Lads in Lane Cove for a 16km run to the SCG. While it’s great to see both leaders helping to tackle breast cancer, it’s clear which man is best placed to combat the youth obesity crisis.

Hawking Hawkins

Congratulations to Marie Claire for its groundbreaking decision to run an unretouched photo on its cover. Admittedly since it was of Jennifer Hawkins, it didn’t actually need any Photoshopping, but hey – baby steps. The use of unnaturally perfect, digitally manipulated images of women has become so commonplace that the French proposal for all retouched images to be labelled is looking increasingly sensible. Otherwise, there’s a genuine risk that girls will grow up thinking that the ideal body is shaped like one of those willowy aliens from Avatar.

Still, Marie Claire’s cover was a huge success – not with helping women develop confidence in their own bodies, as they claimed; surely nothing could be less helpful for that than printing nude pics of Miss Universe. But it won a heap of publicity for the magazine in a slow news week, and no doubt helped Marie Claire to sell thousands of copies to a whole new readership segment – teenage boys.

Naked Eye #1

I filled in on the Sun-Herald's political gossip column for four weeks over summer - not an easy thing to do when not much is happening! This one's about the Copenhagen summit and Kevin Rudd's Twitter, among other things.

The Copenhagen summit may have achieved minimal progress on climate change, but it has certainly produced a satisfying number of conspiracy theories. Was it China that derailed proceedings, like an evil Fat Controller? Or can we blame India for everything going horribly wrong, just as like to we do in cricket?

But the week’s best political conspiracy theory has nothing to do with Copenhagen. A YouTube video has been doing the rounds which alleges that Silvio Berlusconi faked his bonk on the nose from a replica of Milan Cathedral. It’s claimed that the scandal-stricken leader was attempting to boost his popularity, perhaps by adding wacky sound effects and featuring the clip on Italy’s Funniest Home Video Show.

If so, it worked – the Italian PM’s popularity has jumped nearly 10%. I’m sceptical, though – surely Silvio wouldn’t have gone to all that trouble to win sympathy from voters? He must have been trying to win sympathy from nurses.

Driving NSW taxpayers crazy

There’s been justifiable outrage this week at the Herald’s story that taxpayers are shelling out $2 million a year to former Premiers, including a chauffeur to shuttle Nathan Rees to and from that backbench of his. This figure will rise to tens of millions if, as I suspect, every single Labor MP is going to get a turn as Premier before the next election.

Now, our former Premiers should get some kind of victim’s compensation after they’re knifed by Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi. There are too many ex-Premiers nowadays for even Macquarie to employ. But what I can’t figure out is why they would even want a free driver in the first place. Surely they’d rather enjoy the fruits of their custodianship of NSW with unlimited free travel on our trains and buses?

Detailed programmatic Twittericity

Kevin Rudd’s always boasted had a commanding lead in opinion polls, but it’s amongst his fellow nerds on Twitter that his popularity is truly extraordinary. KevinRuddPM now has 844,724 followers who tune in for updates on his exciting excursions to watch Zombieland with his son and buy a birthday cake for “Swanny”. His former opponent TurnbullMalcolm is well behind with 18,683, while TonyAbbottMHR has a paltry 2527.

As usual, our State pollies are of considerably less interest. The official PremierofNSW account, which changes identity more frequently than Doctor Who, has only 2871, a mere 0.3% of Rudd’s tally. The only shock is that Twitter is the one place where Kristina Keneally is more popular than BarryOFarrell, who has 1671.

The Great Wall of Conroy

Despite widespread opposition, the Government is persisting with its plan to adopt the Chinese approach to internet regulation. And honestly, if the thing worked flawlessly, few would probably object. But in the real world blacklisting is riven with problems.

For instance, I’d like to ban Miley Cyrus’ website. As with many of the sites on the Conroy blacklist, it features a young girl alongside an older guy who’s genuinely disturbing, as anyone who remembers Billy Ray Cyrus’ singing career will recall. All I would have to do is persuade someone at ACMA that her work is offensive by playing them ‘The Climb’, and hey presto – she’d be blacklisted.

Actually, wait – that’s an argument in favour of the filter. But let’s not kid ourselves that banning a bunch of websites is going to stop the nasty stuff. All it’ll do is send it further underground, where law enforcement officers can’t find it.

Bangarooting Sydney Harbour

I don’t mind Richard Rogers’ controversial proposal for the Barangaroo site, even if the hotel seems a little high, but the idea of landfill is troubling. A government that’s already uncomfortably close to developers signing away a chunk of our harbour for yet another luxury waterfront development feels like a crossing of the Rubicon. And I mean literally crossing – I bet someone in the Premier’s office is developing plans to fill in the harbour from The Rocks to Kirribilli in a bid to raise some cash. Then again, NSW is the one place where adopting Dubai’s financial strategy would be an improvement.

Hey Hey it's a black day

Another week, another outrage perpetrated by the entertainment industry. And this time it’s Hey Hey It’s Saturday that’s in the firing line for that ‘Jackson Jive’ sketch involving blacked-up performers. At least it’s a change from the days when the show’s only crime was blandness.

Despite several opinion polls claiming today claiming the public didn’t think it was racist, to me the argument seems indisputable. It wasn’t an attempt at accurate impersonation, like when a white performer on Saturday Night Live dons brown makeup to mimic Barack Obama. Their choice of jet-black makeup was denigrating, transforming the performers into dancing golliwogs. So it was no surprise that the act raised the hackles of Harry Connick Jr, who hails from New Orleans, that town which recently experienced enormous racial tension in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The producers were intending to recreate a “classic” moment from twenty years ago, when the act was originally shown on Red Faces. But our sense of humour has changed in those intervening decades. I’m all in favour of edgy comedy, but white people mimicking other races feels inherently problematic nowadays even when it’s done by a performer as skilful as Peter Seller in The Party. Just as Paul Hogan’s 1980s ocker ignoramus Mick Dundee seems more embarrassing than amusing in 2009, Hey Hey succeeded only in proving that some classic television moments should not be revisited.

Though I can’t condone the act, our increasing hunger for the public crucifixion of would-be entertainers nevertheless seems an unhealthy trend. Crossing what can be a fairly blurry line in the sand of public sensibility should certainly be rebuked, but not with the kind of hysteria we’ve seen in recent weeks with the likes of Kanye and Kyle. Having been on the receiving end of the treatment with The Chaser team obviously makes my perspective biased, obviously, and we entirely agree that we made a serious error of judgement. But there’s a question as to whether the punishment fits the crime.

The reality is that unless we accept that making occasional misjudgements is an inherent risk of trying to entertain, we will end up with only the most tame, tedious television. If even a show as safe and dull as Hey Hey can provoke public fury, what hope is there for gifted comedians who push the envelope like John Safran and Chris Lilley, both of whom have also been subjected to the blowtorch of public outrage in recent years? If we don’t calm down a bit, we’ll get to the point where nobody except Sam Newman dares to try and make a joke on television. And that would be a very great shame.

This article was originally published in Grazia

A column about Morris Iemma and Nathan Rees

Morris Iemma won the 2007 NSW election, I believe, because he adopted a slogan whose humility was unique in Australian political history. Though it was widely mocked at the time by many sage commentators including myself, the phrase “More to do, but heading in the right direction” struck a chord in the electorate for one very good reason. Unusually for a political slogan, half of it rang absolutely true. Everyone who heard it intuitively agreed that Iemma had more to do, a hell of a lot more to do, and this made us think that the new Premier was a man who understood our concerns. Now, finally, Iemma has delivered on the second half of that slogan. Because the first Labor Premier to be dumped in the Parliament’s 117-year history is, without doubt, finally heading in the right direction.

Inspired by Iemma’s success, Rudd too adopted a slogan that was instinctively half true for his election victory: “New leadership. Fresh ideas”. Sure, the ideas are virtually identical to those of his predecessor, but no-one could deny that the guy delivering them was new. And so Rudd sold the electorate as well.

Those of you with long memories may faintly recall a fellow by the name of Peter Debnam. No? Well, he was the Opposition Leader Iemma defeated. Scarily conservative fellow who liked getting around in swimwear. Still no? That’s understandable, the same thing happened on polling day. His slogan was “Let’s fix NSW”, to which the reaction from voters was “Sure Peter, it desperately needs fixing – but I’m damned if I’m going to let you near the problem.”

In 2005, Labor gambled on an unknown in a bid to rid itself of the stench of the Carr Government. In 2008, it’s gambling on another unknown to rid itself of the stench of the Iemma Government. Nathan Rees, the new Premier, is even more of an unknown than Iemma was, and I have to say that everything I’ve learned thus far impresses me. He’s only been a Labor MP for 18 months, which is an excellent recommendation and he isn’t Morris Iemma, Joe Tripodi, Reba Meagher, Eric Roozendaal, John Watkins or, best of all, Michael Costa. In fact, I like him already.

A lot will be made of Rees being a former garbage collector. And for having worked with a different kind of refuseas chief of staff to the disgraced MP Milton Orkopoulos. But we cannot really hail as new someone who arrived in Macquarie St shortly after Labor’s election in 1995, working as an adviser to then Deputy Premier Andrew Refshauge. So really, unless Rees is unusually effective for a Labor politician, it’s hard to see him doing much better than his predecessors, who rose through the NSW Right, with great experience in headkicking and factional dealmaking but little, it seems in running a government effectively. Rees is from the Left, but I hear he switched to the Right to get the Premier’s job, which only goes to show that any idealism he may have had has been now leached out by such a long time in State politics.

It’s an interesting comparison to make with another obscure figure who has suddenly been catapulted to political centre stage, Sarah Palin, the Alaska Governor who’s become John McCain’s running-mate. She’s added considerable entertainment to the race, and while the idea of her being leader of the free world in the event of a recurrence of John McCain’s cancer terrifies me, I have to admire a political system that can actually bring genuine outsiders into the mix. Everyone we get in Australian politics, especially on the Labor side, has been through the party wringer and had their individuality dulled, with the result that their loyalties are to their colleagues rather than their electorate. The Liberals do draft in genuine outsiders from time to time, but generally from such noxious places as to make the effort hardly worthwhile, as we saw with Debnam.

The fact that the Labor caucus has again elected someone unknown by most voters without even referring to opinion polls to check whom the public might like to be made their Premier is, as we saw with Iemma and Unsworth, a recipe for appointing a poor leader, with little chance of engaging the public. I would be beyond delighted it if Nathan Rees proved a highly effective Premier who finally tackles our state’s appalling decline, but, like the President of the Committee To Make Michael Costa Premier (who surely must be Michael Costa, in lieu of any other members), I’m really not holding out much hope for the future.

A column about Christmas

Every year, I grow a little older, and Christmas becomes a little less important. I used to look forward to the festive season with considerable excitement, because it meant I got presents. As a child, my materialism was unrestrained by any pretence of decency, so I'd dive into the lake of presents that was the happy byproduct of a large extended family with some of the purest joy of my life. Now that I'm older, far more expensive toys do considerably less for me. And so perplexed relatives ring me a few days before Jesus' Big Day, racking their brain over what to buy me, and I'm never able to think of anything. Because if I could, I'd have bought it myself already. It's not that I'm fabulously wealthy, despite the largesse of The Glebe over the years. It's just that like so many Australians, I have a credit card with an absurdly high limit, and minimal self-control. Which is why I also have things like video games, an espresso maker I've used once in 18 months, and most absurdly, an electronic keyboard I can't play, which sits there besides my computer and accuses me of wasting money every single day. It's got a point.

So, Christmas has lost its traditional lustre. But there is one part I look forward to: the stockings my parents still make for us. As children, these used to constitute an exciting assortment of miniature delights, each to be individually unwrapped an enjoyed. Since we became adults, though, the items have transformed into knick-knacks of increasing uselessness and shoddy construction, to the crescendoing amusement of my mum and dad. They scour the local two-dollar shops for macabre-looking windup toys, plastic kazoos, wacky snowdomes, chocolates with that strange, cheap compound-chocolate taste, authentic-looking rubber spiders and appallingly kitsch DVDs. One Christmas they gave us an extensive series of clamps, and much to their disappointment, my brother found them genuinely useful for them in making artworks, and so I gave mine to him as well. They will never make that mistake again.

I've got all of them packed away in a box somewhere, where they'll doubtless remain for the term of my natural life, after which someone (presumably from the National Trust, or perhaps the United Nations) will sort through them before disposing of most of them, puzzling over exactly why I had in my possession a wind-up, fire-breathing zombie nun by the name of 'Nunzilla'.

The important thing, though, is that for one day each year, it's fun to get together as a family and open these pointless presents. The stocking's entire contents, many of which come from that cornucopia of crap that's misleadingly named Hot Dollar, probably only sets my parents back $30. But funnily enough, they're the gifts that stick in the memory, not the more expensive 'proper' items, which soon meld indistinguishably with the things I've bought myself.

So I've come to the hackneyed, and yet still somehow profound conclusion that what really matters at Christmastime is family. Sure, I know this is the moral of every sappy Disney Yuletide film, and I'm sounding like a pamphlet for The Santa Clause. But in an increasingly unreligious society, when you strip away the ancient traditions and the more modern tacky retail marketing, what are you left with? Coming together for a meal, and remembering, at least in my case, that even though I don't see them very often, the people I'm related to are pretty great. Stands to reason, really, since they share so many of my genes.

Being mainly Anglos, we do this over the unseasonal consumption of roast turkey and ham. Sure, fish is far a more sensible option in our climate, but we take a certain perverse satisfaction in persisting with the ritual despite the strangeness of gorging yourself on dead animals in the sweltering heat. And we do this for one simple reason: we're all addicted to that delightful combination of fat and alcohol that is brandy butter, and you're only allowed to eat it with Christmas pudding without feeling like an alcoholic. Plus, it tastes awful when you spread it on bread - I've tried.

Looking back at this column, I am somewhat disturbed to note that despite being something of a professional cynic, I have pretty much written a piece about the True Meaning of Christmas. Perhaps it's a special time after all? Or more likely, as I've long suspected, I am some kind of prophet. In any event, season's greetings to you all, and make sure you enjoy some brandy butter during the brief window when it's socially acceptable to do so.

A column about bucks nights

As an Arts graduates of the University of Sydney I consider myself sensitive to feminism, and will gladly pontificate about the patriarchy. And yet there’s one age-old male ritual that transforms me from a committed warrior against gender inequity into a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal: the bucks night. Whenever a friend gets married, I’ll gladly set aside all my painstaking political correctness and celebrate their descent into matrimony the old-fashioned way: by regressing into adolescence.

When my friends first started getting hitched, we debated what the modern, progressive gentleman should do to mark the occasion. Should the events be classy and mature, we wondered, rather than revolving largely around drinking and silliness? One friend of mine flatly refused to have one, in response to which elaborate kidnapping plans were developed, but ultimately abandoned because of that other time-honoured male tradition: laziness.

But as time has passed, and the number of grooms has advanced into double figures, we seem to have hit upon a consensus. When a bucks night is held, all familiarity with the concept of women’s liberation is temporarily suspended.

In typical male fashion, none of us ever actually sat down and formally made these decisions, so none of us will ever take responsibility for them. You know, it much the same way as none of us blokes ever actually decided to systematically oppress women, but it just kind of happened. And so we have come to agree, non-verbally, on the definitive rules for bucks nights.

Firstly, a highly structured programme of fun group events must be followed. This may include activities like paintball, bowls both lawn and tenpin, attending horse and greyhound races, ping pong tournaments and even pub trivia. One particularly adventurous bucks’ night involved a trip to the old Korean bathhouse in Kings Cross where we all bathed nude together, in a scene we tried to convince ourselves was reminiscent of Ancient Rome rather than Modern San Francisco. (Strangely, the result was genuinely bonding.) No doubt some day, my friends and I will go the whole hog and spend three days camping in a forest, playing tribal drums and chasing wild boars.

Secondly, there’s the drinking. You’d think it might be nice to have a few quiet beverages, and chat about the major life change that a member of the group is about to embark on. Those who are already married might dispense helpful advice, and those who are single might take the opportunity to learn something about the nature of love and commitment. This is what our female counterparts seem to do at their hens nights – or at least the sort that don’t go for harbour cruises and jockstraps. Well, that never happens. Instead, we drink a lot, to the point where even some of my most mild-mannered, gentlemanly friends have been unable to stand up straight.

Practical jokes on the groom are also an essential part of the formula, and often seem to involve eating, probably because that inevitably subsequently means vomiting. After going on about the place for years, one friend was made to eat his way through the entire menu of Baker’s Delight, falling short only at the full loaves, while another diet-obsessed friend was forced to engorge himself on Pizza Hut all-you-can eat. Recently another friend was forced to eat a pie every time a team scored – at a one-sided Rugby League World Cup match. It’s not quite as exciting as chaining someone naked to the upper deck of the Manly Ferry, but it’s a lot less illegal.

The final, and most important, rule is that women are never invited. I’m not entirely sure why this is so sacrosanct, but it is, with the notable exception that – and I regret to admit this, but in the interest of full disclosure, I must – many bucks’ nights end up at one of those venues where women disrobe for money. I’ve never entirely understood the appeal of paying large amounts of money for titillation, and generally pretty tacky titillation at that, but it seems to be an essential part of the bucks night experience – even in groups of guys who wouldn’t ever dream of going to a strip club otherwise.

Above all, a bucks night gives men carte blanche to enjoy everything that we usually see ourselves as too mature to do. I’m not entirely sure I approve of the system, especially as if I ever get married, I fully expect the earlier bucks’ revenge on me to be terrible indeed. But I wouldn’t dream of challenging these unwritten rules. Because in the end, that’s all just another part of what it is to be male.

A column about Barack Obama

Where were you when Australia II won the America's Cup? When the World Trade Centre collapsed? And the day Barack Obama was elected President? The answers to these questions are sometimes fairly dull – in my case, sofas feature prominently, and a fortnight ago, Doritos as well. But I'll never forget those experiences of watching history unfold live before me, and I've no doubt that the 2008 US Election will live on in our memories for as long as the moon landing. Because Barack Obama's victory was so moving that even Karl Rove said one or two nice things about it.

As I sat and watched a skinny, youthful-looking, biracial man address the world whose free bits he'd just been asked to lead, I'm not ashamed to admit I had a tear in my eye. Of course, that may have been because my mind was addled by seven straight hours of CNN and Fox News. But I'd like to think that at least one of the droplets that ran down my cheek was because a country that fought a civil war over slavery only 150 years ago had come so far as to elect an African man President. And even more movingly, as far as I was concerned, to not elect Sarah Palin Vice-President. The beacon of democracy was shining so brightly the other night that even John McCain stopped implying that Obama was a terrorist long enough to make a genuinely honourable concession speech.

But as I sat and watched the faux hologram of will.i.am on CNN, I got to wondering how long it will be before our own electoral barriers were overthrown. We have our first female Deputy PM, and Julia Gillard has shown she's more than competent enough to be entrusted with the big job if Kevin falls under one of John Howard's hypothetical buses. But I doubt we'll see a black Prime Minister in this country anytime soon, and Obama's election provides an opportunity to take a good look at our own country, and ask ourselves why not.

Only two Aborigines have ever been elected to our Federal Parliament – Neville Bonner, who became a Senator in 1977, and Aden Ridgeway, who had as minimal an impact as only a Democrat could. In the NT, the Deputy Chief Minister is Marion Scrymgour, who has served as Acting Chief Minister and thus became the first Aborigine to lead any state or territory. But perhaps the most likely indigenous Australian to hold a high Parliamentary office is Warren Mundine, who served as Labor's National President until last year – and since Labor has never elected an Aboriginal candidate to the Federal Parliament, one can only hope they seriously consider it.

While the structure of the Parliament means that parties can effectively appoint Aboriginal candidates to safe Senate seats anytime they like, an Aboriginal Prime Minister would need to commit to party politics for long enough to earn preselection to a safe seat – and it would be understandable if most potential candidates were deeply cynical about getting involved with either party. There are many Aboriginal leaders who are widely respected, from the Yunupingu brothers, Galurrwuy and Manduwuy, and Lois O'Donohue, all Australians of the Year, to Mick and Patrick Dodson. And Cathy Freeman certainly has the popularity to win votes. But it's understandable if they value the freedom to speak their mind openly and honestly in representing Aboriginal people and stay well clear of the parties that have generally served Aboriginal people poorly.

Just electing one or two members of a disadvantaged group is not sufficient to reverse centuries of discrimination, of course. Obama's election has enormous symbolic importance, but it's worth noting that his resignation from the Senate left that body without a single African-American among its 100 members. Still, his victory shows millions of black kids that with talent, determination, luck and Oprah behind them, they can win the White House as well. And I've no doubt that means a lot.

But indigenous Aussie kids have no reason to believe that similar doors are open to them. Unlike the US, we've never had a black High Court judge, or Foreign Affairs Minister (or Federal Minister of anything, in fact), or head of the Armed Forces. So perhaps we should redirect a little of the enthusiasm we feel about Barack Obama back to Australia. And then perhaps one day we will see delighted members of the Aboriginal community chanting “Yes We Can” in unison with the white community, like tens of thousands of Americans of every colour did the other night in a field in Chicago.

A column about babies

At first there were none, and everything was peaceful. Then, the first one showed up, and then another, and I began to worry. Then, as the years passed, more and more reports of their impending arrival flooded in, and I began to panic. Now, it’s clear that they will win, and it’s only a matter of time. Nearly everyone will succumb, and although I’ll hold out for as long as I can, I realise that one day too, I will give in.

I’m not talking about an alien invasion – well, not quite. I’m talking about babies. A few months short of my thirty-second birthday, many of my friends are new parents, and the signs are clear that within a year or two, they’ll constitute a majority. Already, there is a worrying shortage of people to stay out late and do foolish things with, and it’s clearly just a matter of time until the invasion of the body snatchers (well, they invade their mothers’ bodies for nine months, anyway) is complete.

Last weekend, I went to a beachside barbeque and met, for the first time, the freshly-minted offspring of some of my oldest friends. All the kids were cute, and all the parents were tired but delighted by the additions to their families. The conversation centred, naturally, on parenthood. Funny stories and helpful parenting tips were exchanged, and everyone just seemed so – what’s the word – happy.

So I sat there awkwardly, not having much to contribute to the conversation. I didn’t dare to actually handle any of the babies, of course, because of the clear and present danger of being covered in drool or worse, and also because I couldn’t remember how not to drop them. Ultimately, I retreated to the one place that was guaranteed to be a baby-free zone – the barbeque itself, where I talked to a few other babyless refugees about a range of non-baby subjects. It came as sweet relief.

As I watched the grilling sausages, I thought about how ironic this situation was. At uni, I’d been one of the younger, dorkier members of this particular social group, and felt my relative lack of wildness keenly. (This was before I started writing for The Glebe, of course, and my membership of the A-List became indisputable.) But nowadays, I’m one of the few who’s regularly awake in the early hours of the morning for reasons other than a crying baby. So, I felt a little out of place again, just as I had in those early days of getting to know them, but for the opposite reason. I wasn’t the square guy, sitting in the corner at a party in the backyard of some terrace house, looking at people who were cooler than me. Now I was the sociable guy whose friends had inexplicably swapped mixing cocktails for baby formula. I was feeling tired and had bags under my eyes because I’d been up half the night with some friends, but the bags under their eyes were substantially bigger because they’d been up with a screaming baby.

But as the afternoon progressed, I realised something. The parents were looking at me, partnerless and with no prospect of scoring a baby of my own except through misadventure or outright theft, and they still felt a little sorry for me. Once again, I was missing out on the richness they had in their own lives, and once again, I couldn’t be a full member of the club. It wasn’t that they thought it was cool to have babies and that I was lame because I didn’t. It was more that they’d stopped caring about what was cool, because they had more important things – and people – to worry about now.

As I drove home, I tried to calculate exactly how far away I was from reproducing. Even if I’d met someone suitable at that very barbeque, it’d surely take me at least four years to get through all the stages of committing, moving in together, perhaps marrying, and then actually managing to produce a kid. And then, at another barbeque with these friends in five years’ time, my kid would be the odd one out, sitting in a pram helplessly while all the older kids ran around and played games. And I realised that if I want to give my child every chance, including the opportunity to be the cool older one in the group that their old dad never had, there are only two solutions: adoption, and finding some younger, daggier friends.

A column about the global financial crisis

You know, John Howard warned us that if we elected Kevin Rudd, the economy would go to hell in a handbasket. (I’m not sure why that seems to be the preferred transportation method for those sentenced to eternal damnation, but apparently handbaskets are the appropriate way to get there.) But he could might clarified that he meant the entire world economy. If we’d only known tossing Howard out of Kirribilli House would cause the whole of Wall St to collapse more rapidly than Sarah Palin’s popularity, surely we’d have thought again.

The other day, for instance, Iceland was on the verge of going bankrupt. Let’s stop to think about that for a moment. An entire country – and not a basket case African nation like Zimbabwe, a mature Scandinavian liberal democracy – faced being simply unable to meet its debts. Which seems about as implausible a scenario as the yowling in Björk’s latest single shattering the entire polar ice cap, and causing sea levels globally to rise by a metre. (Although anyone who’s heard Volta will realise that this was, in fact, a distinct possibility.) It was only averted after the Swedish Government lent them billions of dollars, and the Icelandic Government nationalised all three of the major banks.

Now, I’ve no idea how Kevin Rudd was responsible for the collapse of Iceland’s economy, but I know that somehow, when all the facts are known, his perfidious involvement will become clear. If only Peter Costello’s steady hands were still on the tiller of our economy, instead of busily stabbing the backs of everyone else in the Liberal Party. Or, if only Malcolm Turnbull were in charge, instead of merely taking credit for things like the recent drop in interest rates without actually having had anything whatsoever to do with it. Don’t forget that Turnbull used to run Goldman Sachs, the local division of one of the big Wall St banks. So he presumably understands how to cause an economic crisis, if not stop one.

Though most dramatically illustrated in Iceland, banks everywhere are getting taken over by national governments to stop them from falling over. Even in America, with its abiding love of small government, the Fed is preparing to buy strategic stakes in the major banks. And most astonishingly of all, everyone, even the Republican Presidential candidate for goodness’ sake, is complaining about the greed of Wall Street, and threatening tighter regulation.

While it’s too early to assess the long-term impact of this crisis, one thing is clear. For decades, we’ve been told that the market always gets it right, and that the job of governments is to get out of their way. That the road to utopia involves to allow millions of people to act in their own self-interest, and somehow, magically, everything will come up roses. Well, guess what? It turns out that most central tenet of capitalism, the invisible hand, doesn’t work. So, like a spoiled child who’s devoured too many chocolate biscuits, the bankers of Wall St came crying to the White House, asking Uncle Sam to somehow make everything better.

It seems that in 2008, public ownership is the new black – or perhaps more accurately, the new red. (And if – God forbid – Mac Bank goes under, can we have our darn airport back, please?) While though I know it’s unfashionable to even mention him, Marx did predict that untrammeled capitalism would lead to exactly this kind of chaos. Oh how he’d laugh, if he’d ever exhibited any evidence whatsoever of a sense of humour.

But the truly strange thing, at least for Australians, is that despite the disaster that we seem to have been plunged into, nothing much has changed. Sure, the dollar’s fallen badly, and that’s rough for many people – but it was really high, so all this means is that things are now essentially back to normal. Against that, interest rates have been slashed, which is a pretty darn sterling silver lining if ever I saw one. There even was an article in the paper today predicting zero interest rates in the next little while. In the event of which, I can tell you right now, I’m going to be running me up one sweet credit card debt.

And sure, Kevin Rudd seems to be doing a great job of buttressing us against the worst of it, guaranteeing all of our savings and releasing money into the economy so that things don’t slow down too much. He’s even chucking in a grand to buy nearly every Aussie kid a Christmas present. But never should we forget that if we hadn’t elected him last November, none of this whole economic crisis thing would have happened.

A column about Sarah Palin

Politics is often about managing expectations. If you’re Sarah Palin right now, you want expectations to be lower than the effectiveness of abstinence-based sex education. And, as her daughter Bristol could probably tell you, that's very low indeed.

And that’s why Sarah Palin nailed the American Vice-Presidential debate on Friday. Simply by turning up and not being completely outclassed, she confounded the record television audience who tuned in to watch her fail. I sure did, hoping that she’d go to pieces even more comprehensively than she did against Katie Couric, to whom she gave that now-classic answer about Putin raising his head and going over Alaska. I still don’t understand quite what she was trying to say, and I’m absolutely certain that she didn’t. But an abject lack of foreign policy credentials has rarely been more amusing.

Commentators agree, though, that she didn’t stuff up this time. Sure, she really never strayed from the soundbites she’d memorised, meaning that her replies often bore only the most minimal connection to the question she’d been asked. And she grinned and winked throughout, even after Joe Biden talked about losing his wife in a car crash. But since the White House’s current incumbent can’t even deliver a convincing soundbite when his country’s attacked by terrorists, Palin definitely crossed the bar, ankle-high though it was.

Most importantly, she didn’t fall to pieces, and consequently staunched the damaging flow of stories about her inadequacy, throwing the focus back John McCain. And that’s surely the only way the Republicans can win this. Because the novelty of a VP candidate who’s a former beauty queen and knows how to unload a hunting rifle into a moose – which was admittedly considerable – has well and truly worn off. The hope that Palin would bring over Hillary’s voters now seems a forlorn one, since roughly the only thing they have in common are their pair of X chromosomes and their hatred of Barack Obama.

Still, for now the Alaskan Governor has managed to stop the story being about her, and that wasn’t easy. She’s the least qualified person on a Presidential ticket in living memory, and her argument that she has foreign policy experience because you can see empty bits of Russia from empty bits of Alaska making George Bush look like a diplomatic grandmaster. This becomes especially relevant when the chance of her needing to step up to the top job are quite high. John McCain is not only asking to be elected the oldest President in American history, but survived multiple skin cancers and apparently has an excellent chance of contracting another. In short, he’s more likely to die on the job than a BASE jumper with slow reflexes.

But if Sarah Palin can survive as a potential President, for now it least, where else can the managing expectations trick work? Perhaps not in Australian politics, if you consider Brendan Nelson. Despite the low expectations of an Opposition Leader in the first year of a new Government, he still managed to fall well short of them. And voters’ low expectations of our own spunky lady maverick, Pauline Hanson, haven’t helped her win anything much either – not even Dancing With The Stars.

Managing expectations could work, however, when it comes to dating. Next time I take someone out to dinner, I will start the meal by explaining that I will talk largely about myself, appear bored when they’re speaking, and steal food from their plate when they go to the bathroom. If my date appears concerned, I’ll reassure them, Palin-style, that I have considerable dating experience because people go on dates near where I live, and I can see them, often through binoculars. How can it fail? And if it does, they’ll have been forewarned. Making it their fault.

The other people in this election who have been cultivating low expectations, of course, are American voters themselves. If I may paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to elect George W. Bush once may be regarded as a misfortune, but electing him twice looks like carelessness. If the voters do choose to place Sarah Palin a tumour away from the nuclear launch codes, the rest of the world will have been forewarned as well. And if the result should go to the US Supreme Court, we would all definitely expect them to make the wrong decision. Next month, let’s hope that American voters, like Sarah Palin when she took on Joe Biden, pleasantly surprise us. Even if that’s just by not making as big a hash of it as we expect.

A column about the Marrickville by-election

So, whatsisname the new Premier (Morris Iemma, Google reminds me) has survived his second major test, narrowly winning the ‘Triple M’ by-elections – Maroubra, Macquarie Fields and Marrickville. If only he’d had as much success with his first major test – getting people to work out who he is. Still, at least we know how to pronounce his name, thanks to the ALP’s incredibly awkward radio ads: “Is it ‘I-yee-emma’? No David, it’s ‘Yemma’.” No Morris, it’s humiliating.

Of course we wouldn’t have needed that help if anyone had actually heard of him before. Iemma became Premier like Steve Bradbury won gold at the Winter Olympics – all the more experienced contenders fell over. It’s fair to say that most people in NSW, myself included, still have virtually no idea what he’s ever done, what he stands for, and where he wants to take the state. Other than to a better understanding of Italian surname pronunciation.

Which is why it was ironic to see the Marrickville by-election ads talking up the candidate, Carmel Tebbutt, as part of Morris Iemma’s team. The leader is usually featured in advertising to boost the local candidate’s profile. This time it looked more like the high-profile Education Minister boosting Iemma’s. Tebbutt’s been widely tipped as a future Premier, and why not? It doesn’t take much to get the gig in the NSW ALP these days.

The timing of the by-elections was particularly awkward for Iemma because of the furore over Mark Latham’s diaries the week before. Among the dozens of incendiary accusations, perhaps Latham’s most consistent theme has been “machine politics” – the control of the Party by backroom types who put winning ahead of policy – and, as Latham points out, aren’t necessarily all that good at it anyway. (Take Labor’s failed attempt to retake Sydney City Council by including left-wing Glebe and South Sydney, ultimately alienating the electorate.) Faceless backroomers would have to be a fairly awkward topic for the new Premier.

He received a substantial reprimand from Marrickville, a seat so left-wing that the two-party-preferred contest is between the Greens and the Labor Left candidates. The Greens won a whopping 38% of the primary vote, and Iemma’s Macquarie St machine men got a strong message that voters weren’t satisfied with Labor’s performance in areas like health and public transport.

The tragic thing about our Westminster political system, though, is that this message couldn’t have yielded any meaningful result no matter who won the election. Unlike in, for instance, the American Congress, Labor MPs always vote in the interests of their Caucus, not their local community. It would be hard to govern if they did otherwise, of course, but party discipline makes the promise of strong local representation trotted out every election-time a joke. Because you can guarantee that the views of Marrickville voters – and even Tebbutt herself, given her faction – are considerably more left-wing than anything we’ll ever see from the Iemma Government.

So if Labor won’t represent your views, why not vote Green to get your voice heard? That’s a terrible idea, particularly in a Lower House poll. If the Greens had won, it would have been a novel anomaly, like the Greens’ Michael Organ who represented the Wollongong seat of Cunningham after a 2002 by-election win but lost it last year. Unless they’re part of the majority or hold a balance of power – incredibly rare in the Lower House – the Greens’ concerns are pretty much ignored.

Look at the lack of influence the Greens have had over the Federal political agenda, even though they now hold four Senate seats. Their opposition on issues like the war in Iraq and gay marriage has accomplished nothing in policy terms. Bob Brown’s major accomplishment during the previous term was being evicted during George Bush’s speech.

The overwhelming majority of Marrickville voters wanted a strong left-wing agenda advocated in State Parliament, by a left-wing Green or Labor MP. Tebbutt is a senior minister – almost a best-case scenario for representation in our current system – but while she will be able to help local voters on local issues, her vote on state-wide matters like health and education will be determined not by Marrickville voters, but by the ALP machine. It’s not surprising so many local voters are apathetic, as The Glebe recently found, when local representation isn’t worth much more than lip service on election day. Who’d have thought that amidst the bile, Mark Latham might actually have a good point?

A column about Lehman Brothers

This may shock regular readers, given the extraordinary breadth of my wisdom in almost all areas of life, but I really don’t get the world financial system. Generally, it seems to make a lot of fairly unpleasant, money-obsessed people even richer than they already are, and far richer than they could ever need to be. But then, occasionally, it goes utterly pear-shaped in a matter of days, and the very same people start tearing their hair out and donning sackcloth and ashes. Zegna sackcloth, of course, but sackcloth nevertheless.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers this week made me remember a slightly less high-profile fraternal financial failure, that of the Leyland Brothers. And more specifically, their World, a theme park up north of Newcastle. As with Lehman, it failed partly because of dodgy loans, or at least one dodgy loan – theirs. The one-time TV stars couldn’t make their repayments in that early 90s “recession we had to have”, so had to turn the place over to the Commonwealth Bank. Lehman Brothers lasted for 150 years, but Leyland Brothers World only lasted 18 months.

And yet its memory lives on to this day because of its major attraction, a one-fortieth scale model of Uluru made out of red-painted cement. All those who pass turn their heads to laugh briefly at it before continuing on towards Coffs Harbour, and those few of us who recall the Brothers and their World reflect with a little wry amusement, tinged with not inconsiderable pathos, on the enormous folly of sinking your life savings into a massive concrete model of Ayers Rock.

As the largest bankruptcy in US history, Lehman Brothers’ failure in similarly difficult times is more newsworthy than the collapse of Leyland Brothers World. But while their renenue may have been $59 billion in 2007, what do they have to show for their century and a half? Not so much as a giant concrete Ayers’ Rock. All they’ve done is shuffle money around. Generally they did this fairly well, and were compensated obscenely for it. This year, they did so very badly, and the firm went under.

Really, it’s hard to have much sympathy for anyone who works there, except for perhaps the cleaners. The bankers who were responsible will have fat savings to see them through, and perhaps use their enforced break for a round-the-world trip or something. But the maintenance staff, who are never responsible, are always the ones who suffer most when things go belly-up.

I don’t really know that many of us ever sat down and explicitly agreed to these terms of this deal, but capitalist economies are essentially casinos. Egomaniac businessmen such as the new Leader of the Opposition convince themselves that they’re brilliant, and their famous firms are unsinkable, but there is no profit without risk, and sometimes your number comes up. Look at the ancient Barings Bank, banker to the British monarchy, which was sunk by one young idiot in the Singapore office. And really, if you meet a few young bankers, you will know that in that profession, idiots are not exactly in short supply.

I’m glad that Lehman Brothers was allowed to founder, because those are the rules of the game. And if any of our local equivalents do the same, I won’t have much sympathy. Especially if Macquarie Bank fails, as predicted by one analyst last week. Because really, what did Macquarie ever do for any of us other than toll the living daylights out of us?

I don’t own a single share in a publicly listed company because I’m scared of days like last Thursday, when the market slumps unexpectedly as all the supposedly ice-cold, ultra-rational traders run around like headless chooks selling everything. Then in a day or two, everyone calms down, and it bounces back. What kind of way is that to run a world economy.

At least when you invest in property, you get a place that can keep the rain off your head. And a space in which you can actually have a modest chance at happiness. I don’t see anyone getting much joy out of their share certificates. Which are essentially scratchies, only without even a cheesy illustration of a cartoon cat on them.

So when I’m a poor ancient writer, and I’m joined in the soup kitchen queue by poor ancient bankers who’ve been reduced to my level by the unpredictability of the world economy, I’ll take pleasure in pointing out that at least I’ll be survived by a bunch of columns in The Glebe, my legacy to future generations. But I doubt that 150 years of shuffling funds at Lehman Brothers have left much behind them at all.

Union or no union, our campuses need more cash

Kevin Rudd has been busily undoing the worst excesses of the Howard government in its Senate majority or "megalomania" phase, but has generally shied away from simply replacing what was there before Howard. Even with the abolition of WorkChoices, unions haven't been given carte blanche to wreak revenge on employers. Rudd is more of a centrist than that, and we're seeing this with the proposals that were reported yesterday to repair the damage voluntary student unionism did to our universities.At the time of writing, it's not entirely clear what the ALP intends to do, and the apparent leaking of the plans appears to have resulted in denials, while the PM has ruled out reintroducing "compulsory student union fees". I hope that this is in fact a piece of sophistry to do with whether the fees go to student unions. Some kind of additional funds need to be found, whether or not students technically join the union, or it's all collected by the university, or even if the government decides to fund it directly. Because the fact is that VSU has gutted university life.

Sure, the funding isn't applied equally. I nerdily did every activity I could at university, and no doubt received more than my fair share of subsidies what with things like publications and revues. And I'm biased, because without the experience gained from these activities, and our reluctance to give them away and grow up, my friends and I wouldn't have started The Chaser. Meaning that without well-resourced student organisations, I probably would never have been in trouble with the police.

But student activities were open to everyone, and frankly, those who chose to keep their heads in their books or bongs missed out, because a mindboggling array of activities were available. And the services on offer benefited everyone to some degree. Furthermore, many of them were there as a safety net, and it's fundamentally contradictory to have a user-pays safety net, as everyone who believes in Medicare will doubtlessly understand. Sure, not every student may have needed advice, or legal help, or counselling, or childcare, or a second-hand textbook shop, or a service that found jobs and housing for struggling students, but the services were there as an insurance policy for those who needed them, and subsidised by everyone equally. And because students paid for them, their representative organisations ran these services, and made sure they delivered what students actually wanted.

And why is it that universities have to be user-pays when the rest of society isn't, anyway? There is an inherent value in a vibrant culture, and I don't see why the artists, performers, sports people and the like in our society have to feel guilty because occasionally they are subsidised. No-one seriously objects to the government funding Olympic athletes, or running an art gallery, or paying for community centres, so why is it any worse when a university or a student union does it? The notion that this is somehow unfair, because some of the money invested theoretically comes out of other students' pockets, is very shortsighted.

To my mind, the analogy with a local council, which Barnaby Joyce made in supporting the legislation, is the right one. You don't get to say "I don't like parks, or the lending library, or the streetlamps, or the roadworks, and I won't use them, so I'm not paying for them." That just isn't how complex human societies work, because what user-pays systems actually do is ensure that nobody pays. And for all you might like to bang on about freedom of choice and association, as the Australian editorial page has today, these principles, while admirable in other contexts, are considerably less important than ensuring the vibrancy of our campuses and providing adequate services for the students who need them.

I will be particularly delighted if, as was reported, the Rudd Government has taken steps to ensure that its new system is ideologically fireproofed, so it has a chance of resisting the next conservative purge. And that's why a ban on the use of the fees for political activities is sensible. There was rorting when I was at university, with Labor students using arts faculty society funds to do a mass mailout of promoting their own candidates a particularly heinous example. And I'll be delighted if it's stopped, not just because it's somewhat immoral, but because it will make the next argument to abolish these kinds of fees that much harder to win. If you want to get elected to the SRC, kids, pay for your own mailouts.

Like the critics of compulsory student unionism, I don't much like the idea of student funds being spent on banners to use in demonstrations that most students don't care in the least about, or sending money to help out imprisoned socialist warriors on Death Row in America, as the Sydney Uni SRC once did for Mumia Abu-Jamal (pictured above). Who I'm delighted to see he's still alive, no doubt thanks to that $200 my fellow students and I sent him in 1995.

But even where that kind of silliness that occurred, it was a tiny part of the overall expenditure of student organisations. Universities are ultimately supposed to be stimulating environments both in and out of the classroom, with the services that help students when they need it so they can finish their courses. It's in the interests of our society to ensure that as many of its members as possible receive as good an education as they can, particularly as we make the transition to more of a service economy. John Howard destroyed our valuable campus culture to make an unimportant ideological point, and the sooner his work is undone, the better.

The Olympic Games Opening Ceremony did not take place

I'm fascinated by the report that said that part of the footage of the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony was faked, and since it was top story on this website yesterday, I'm evidently not the only one. The organisers went to great lengths to show us what the giant footstep-shaped fireworks would have looked like, had it been possible to film them. The 55 seconds of footage apparently took the head of the visual effects team, Gao Xiaolong, almost a year of his life to create, and sadly for him, the ultimate result is that everyone's now shocked that some of the footage of a supposedly live event was in fact completely artificial.

But does it matter whether they show us what's actually happening, or a shot that simulates what it would have looked like if it could have been filmed? If you'll forgive me tapping into a part of my arts graduate learning that's actually, for once in a blue moon, relevant, this reminds me of the famous argument made by Baudrillard in 1991 (sorry, I did try to warn you) that was ultimately published as the book "The Gulf War Did Not Take Place".

Its observation was that from a Western perspective at least, the first conflict with Iraq was almost entirely virtual - it was observed and experienced primarily at a distance, on screens. Even for the pilots flying on bombing missions, it was all about the "smart bombs" whose cameras broadcast back their success in locating the targets. Vietnam may have been described as the first armchair war, but the first Gulf War was practically fought in armchairs by the allied combatants.

So, Baudrillard's point was that the whole thing could have been an elaborate simulation, and many of the participants would have been none the wiser. Of course, for the people killed, the Gulf War very much did happen, and quite definitively so. But his point was that so often in the modern era, our sense of reality is derived from images on a screen, which we trust as being an honest representation of reality, but don't necessarily reflect it.

Now, I don't want to get all first-year philosophy here, and start blowing everyone's mind by asking how we know anything at all is true, and how we know we aren't just brains sitting in a bucket with scientists feeding us stimuli, or trapped in Matrix-like pods. That sort of thing only really creates a sense of wonder when you're pretty intellectually inexperienced, and/or consuming quite a lot of pot.

My point is this - if China will go to such lengths to ensure that its Opening Ceremony is perfect, why not just computer-generate the entire Olympic Games? It's not that big a difference from what the Games has already become, to the point where the main swimming competition is between Speedo and the other manufacturers, rather than between athletes. (Pity it's not an Aussie company any more, or we'd already have taken home a lot more golds.) And of course, as we've recently seen with cycling, there's also an ongoing competition between the labs that test drugs and the ones that develop masking agents.

With a computer-generated Olympics, you could even tailor the results to every country, so everyone thinks they've won gold. For an Australian audience, surprise losses in the basketball competition would be a thing of the past, and Thorpie could have competed in Beijing after all, instead of wussing out and making public appearances exclusively on Top Model.

Authoritarian regimes have always kept the punters happy with a combination of bread and circuses, so it's no surprise that China wanted every element of its biggest circus ever to go off without a hitch. And I'd be fascinated to know what the domestic coverage is like over there. With near-total control of the media, what's to stop China pretending they've won every gold medal? Defeats for Chinese athletes could be erased as quickly and efficiently as Tiananmen Square was. And if they can computer-generate amazing fireworks sequences, what's to stop them generating better news to tell the billion people who are glued to their televisions, waiting for China to dazzle the world?

And, while they're at it, why not computer generate some peaceful images of Tibet, where the local population welcome the influx of Han migrants that's slowly but surely wiping out their culture, and monks welcome the PLA instead of opposing them? Perhaps the next Dalai Lama will be entirely computer-generated by some whizkid in Beijing, and inserted into fake news footage so he can say nice things about the Communist Party?

Whereas once television was the great source of truth, bringing the real world into our lounge rooms through footage of events like the Vietnam War, which ultimately put pressure on the US Government to pull out, it can now be used for the opposite effect. We probably never could, in truth, but we certainly can now no longer believe what we see on our TV screens. I always dismissed the theory that the moon landings were faked as the ravings of cranks, but if it was impossible then, it's safe to assume that it's possible now. And that's a disturbing thought.

That said, more computer-generated content might dramatically improve reality television. A computer-generated Daryl Somers couldn't possibly be as annoying as the real one, and just think - with entirely artificial contestants, Ten might actually be able to make Big Brother interesting.

Goodbye, Starbucks. Hello, coffee.

I'm sorry that 685 employees - sorry, "partners", to adopt the fiction in the official term which implies that they have a generous financial interest in the company - of Starbucks Coffee are going to lose their jobs. But I'm not at all sorry to hear that 61 of our nation's 84 Starbucks branches are going to close. My only regret, in fact, is that the company hasn't decided to close all 84. If the nation's espresso aficionados are lucky, the branches will be replaced with cafes that sell something a little different from what's on offer at Starbucks - a beverage we like to call "coffee".

It would be hypocritical of me not to admit that at times, my own caffeine addiction has driven me to pay Starbucks' exorbitant prices for a substandard "cup o' Joe", as the Americans call it. But those were times when I was overseas. I'm even willing to confess that I went to what was probably the most sacrilegious Starbucks in the world - among the ancient buildings of the Forbidden City. And I'm glad to find that it recently received the traditional penalty for those who violated the inner sanctum of the Chinese emperors - the death penalty.

So I've actually welcomed the Starbucks logo in places such as China and Thailand. In Australia, though, you can get better coffee, more cheaply, almost everywhere else with the effect that, unless you're one of those people who likes iced coffee with absurd quantities of whipped cream on top, there is essentially never any reason to shop at Starbucks.

The mass closures of Starbucks outlets in the US have been linked to the economic downturn, and fair enough. In America, Starbucks coffees count as expensive luxury items. And if you're serious about coffee, you wouldn't be drinking it, so it's understandable that in tough times, taste-insensitive customers want to go somewhere cheaper. But I'd like to think that, in Australia, the failure of Starbucks doesn't reflect the tightening of belts as much as the fact that it's pretty hard to find a place right next to one of Starbucks outlets that isn't serving considerably better coffee.

And in decent sizes. When Starbucks first opened here, its small size was the regular Australian small coffee size, as opposed to in the US where it started at medium and went all the way up to the obscene "Venti". But that soon ended, and we now have the American sizes, where even the smallest has far too much milk in it. Still, at least it means you can't taste the coffee. Which is also why Starbucks likes to put caramel and toffee and other variants of sugar in the coffee to make it more palatable, and the milk taste less burnt. I can still taste that horrible milk ... but I'm digressing, when I should be gloating.

And I'm willing to bet that most Aussies won't mourn Starbucks' passing, in contrast to the US where people are organising petitions to save their local branches. That linked article from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer also references the tragic phenomenon of Starbucks outlets being perceived as a yuppie status symbol in much of America, illustrating the terrible deprivation many Americans suffer under, never having known anything better.

There's also the quite amusing phenomenon of Starbucks opening so rapidly that it only hurts its other outlets by cannibalising their sales, ultimately doing to itself what it did to so many other small coffee outlets. Really, it couldn't have happened to a nicer multinational.

But there is one thing that's truly great about Starbucks, which I will miss. (This is my vain attempt to inject balance by thinly veiling my delight in dancing on the graves of closed outlets.) And that's the atmosphere in its outlets. Yes, I know it's highly corporatised, and that Starbucks' attempts to make it feel like a neighbourhood coffee-house are, in the end, naff, with all those posters about the amazing coffee varieties from exotic places around the world that Starbucks manages to make taste uniformly bland. But there are precious few places where you can sit for hours without feeling unwelcome, and Starbucks, to its credit, offered that.

Sure, part of the reason is that because, since you can now get better espresso even at McDonald's, there's never much demand for tables. But having just spent a few months travelling around major cities, I can say that I often found myself checking into a Starbucks to do a bit of tapping away on a laptop. Sure, I always ordered a mineral water. But nevertheless, its generous attitude to their space was welcome. J.K. Rowling famously wrote much of the Harry Potter series in an Edinburgh Starbucks, which is perhaps where she got the idea for the foul concoctions in Professor Snape's laboratory. Nevertheless - and I say this as someone with Scottish heritage - she is from the land that gave us haggis and deep-fried Mars bars.

Fortunately, there's plenty of real estate available at Gloria Jeans, and Dome, and a bunch of other similar chains that have shamelessly copied the formula, but with better drinks. Sure, lots of coffee snobs attack GJs, and it's hardly one for the gourmets, but I reckon that it can generally rustle together a half-decent latte. Sure, I'm scared that part of every dollar I spend there will ultimately end up in the coffers of Hillsong Church. But, as opposed to Starbucks, the coffee's tolerable. And that's probably why GJs is not sacking much of its workforce.

The truly sad thing about those "partners" is that their skills won't be transferable. Sure, everyone hires good baristas, but if I was a café operator, and someone turned up with a CV noting that he or she had graduated from the Starbucks Coffee University, or whatever they call it, I would send them immediately to some kind of re-education camp.

OK, so I'm a horrible coffee snob. I admit it. This entire article has been full of the same irritating smugness that makes me go into a café and ask, with a straight face, for a "piccolo latte". So please forgive me the pure joy I feel after the failure of the world's leading vendors of inadequate coffee has shown me that, in Australia at least, I'm far from the only one.

These anti-annoyance laws are Papal bull

What on earth has happened in this state? Not much that's good since Bob Carr flicked Morris Iemma that hospital pass (literally, since our hospitals imploded shortly afterwards) and shuffled off to retirement. But though their incompetence is increasingly clear, I didn't think our State Government was hideously authoritarian. Things got a little hairy during APEC, sure, but after the wheels of justice finally did their thing, even my colleagues at The Chaser eventually got away with it. But suddenly, simply because the head of a religion that most of us don't recognise happens to be in town, the Government has quietly, without so much as a decent debate in Parliament, pushed though laws so draconian that Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen might have blushed, if his cheeks hadn't already been coloured that permanent shade of pink.

Let me recap. During World Youth Day, it will be an offence to annoy people or inconvenience them. And protest materials will need to be pre-approved by those well-known arbiters of good taste, the police.

There are so many things wrong with this legislation. What could be more patently un-Australian than passing a law against taking the piss? And especially when we're talking about an institution that deserves it as thoroughly as the Catholic Church. Its history of sexual abuse, and then covering that abuse up, and its backward attitude to contraception which will cost countless lives in the African AIDS pandemic thoroughly justify protest, and the mere fact that it's one of the world's most rich and powerful institutions renders it an excellent target for dissent. As does the fact that, like Australia under Kevin Rudd, it has a leader who believes he's infallible. But instead of upholding our tradition of peacefully poking fun at the mighty, the police are being sent out to make sure our precious pontiff and pilgrims can move about the city in an irritation-free bubble.

And how do they propose to define "annoying", anyway? I can't think of a more subjective, vague principle. For instance, I find Kyle Sandilands annoying, but I'm not about to ask the police to prevent him from broadcasting, as tempting a prospect as that is. And are the police the right person to make these kinds of calls? They weren't exactly big fans of The Chaser's during APEC, or that little incident with the Bulldogs. So if they get to determine what constitutes "annoying", you can guarantee that the line will be drawn very rigidly indeed. But their calls on the day were ultimately at odds, in those cases, with what the DPP and a court eventually decided. Our police force is known for many things, but not generally its excellent sense of humour.

But the most fundamentally unreasonable thing about the laws is that if they were applied evenly, the people who would most deserve prosecution for causing annoyance and inconvenience, and broadcasting messages that others may not agree with, are the organisers of World Youth Day. The rest of us could put together a hundred protests, a thousand offensive t-shirts, and an endless motorcade of Chaser stunts, and the irritation we caused to WYD would be a drop in the ocean compared with the inconvenience that it's causing us. They're the ones who are implementing "unprecedented closures" of our roads, gumming up our public transport and filling our public spaces with Catholic paraphernalia. They're the ones who are shutting down our beloved Hyde Park for months on end, and they're the ones who have been given an astonishing $95m of taxpayers' money in a city that could desperately use those funds for more important things. Heck, I could egg the Popemobile and let off a massive firework right when His Holiness is mid-homily at Randwick Racecourse (as a matter of fact, there's an idea) and I guarantee you that I'd cause His Holiness a lot less annoyance than his event is going to cause Sydney.

But that's not what the laws are about. They're about mollycoddling an institution that has no grounds for special treatment, and is perfectly capable for sticking up for itself. They're about stopping protesters from wearing provocative t-shirts and handing out condoms - items which, if estimates are to be believed, will be sorely needed. It's very much in contrast to Jesus' admirable advice to "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's" - an early source for the excellent principle that is the separation of church and state. And when he entered Jerusalem, I don't remember the Messiah asking the local authorities to arrest the crowds if they inconvenienced him. What's more, He warned there might be a spot of persecution here and there for believers, and he never said anything about going and whingeing to the fuzz.

And all so a bunch of kids can camp out in classrooms, see the Pope as a speck in the distance across an overcrowded racecourse, and, somewhat morbidly, hang out with the remains of a young saint who was apparently a really cool dude. For this, we get our fundamental human rights curtailed?

I'm prepared to accept that World Youth Day is a valid event for Sydney to host. We held the Gay Games a little while ago, so we might as well cover the opposite end of the spectrum as well. But given the inconvenience we're already putting up with, and the money we're already spending, the decision to tear up civil liberties in the interest of a religious minority is utterly unacceptable. And it will cast a pall over the whole event. Sydneysiders are generally an easygoing, welcoming mob, as we showed during the Olympics. But we don't like APEC-style heavy-handedness. You can guarantee that this ridiculous legislation will make every moderate in Sydney who might previously have been inclined to welcome the Catholic hordes, wondering whether it mightn't be worth putting together a little protest or annoying a few pilgrims. Not because they have a big problem with World Youth Day, but because there are few things more annoying than a law that says you can't annoy people.

Never mind the breathing, it's the Olympics

I can't quite believe what I read today, so let me take a deep breath and try this on for size. Australian track and field athletes are apparently planning to skip the Opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games. Now, boycotts of Beijing 2008 have been suggested by many activists, and some politicians have decided not to attend to make a statement. But our boycott is because of ... wait for it ... smog. That's right. Smog.

Now, sure - it's an issue, because Beijing is a horribly polluted city. I've been there a few times, and as an asthmatic, I can verify thanks to numerous unpleasant incidents that the air quality is appalling. And it's not surprising, given that any trip requires sitting in traffic jams on one of the massive ring roads for between 30 and 90 minutes. Even the total cessation of heavy industry is unlikely to have made much of a difference in the short time it's been undertaken. Perhaps if they'd shut the entire city of Beijing down within moments of winning the bid, there's a chance the air might have cleaned up in time for the Games. But I doubt it.

And it's not just the smog, folks. Last time I went to the Forbidden City I was accosted by a threat that the ancient Chinese emperors certainly wouldn't have anticipated - sandstorms. Yes, that's right - in the middle of a major international city, you get sand blowing into your face from the Gobi Desert, which, thanks to environmental mismanagement, encroaches a little more on the city every year. Let's just say it's a unique tourist experience.

In terms of athlete well-being, it's a terrible place to have the Olympics, and at a terrible time. Because they want to start the event on the auspicious (and admittedly quite cool) 8/8/08, it'll be swelteringly hot. I was there in June last year, and the humidity was so intense that after 10 minutes of walking in the sun and I sweated enough to make a major contribution to the diving pool.

And if that wasn't enough, it's the rainy season. The plan to avoid rain, apparently, is to use advanced technology to prevent rainclouds from forming. Having been soundly drenched last year, all I can say is that anything short of a giant, city-wide umbrella is unlikely to do much.

China would have been far wiser to choose Shanghai, where sea breezes keep the temperature down. But the Communist Party has never much trusted it, with its Western heritage and free-wheeling capitalist ways. And it doesn't contain Tiananmen Square or a giant portrait of Mao. Which I view as points in Shanghai's favour - but if you want to symbolise China's immense power in its moment on the world stage, Beijing is the only choice.

But come on. The time to object to the choice of Beijing was when they took the vote. Everyone's in the same boat for the Games (well, everyone except Sally Robbins, thankfully), and the right response at this point is to grin and bear it. If we don't have our athletes there for the Opening Ceremony, we'll look like massive wusses. The other countries will laugh at us, and kick even more sand in our faces than Beijing's weather will for being wimps. When they finally line up to compete, everyone will be asking the poor dear Australians if they'd like a tissue because they're carrying a light sniffle. What a way to trade away your psychological advantage.

I'd tell our athletes to soldier on with Codral, but that would probably get them banned. But for goodness' sake. I know they've been preparing for four years for this, but if they have a runny nose or a hacking cough on the day, they'll just have to put up with it.

But what's most unimpressive about the smog boycott is that, well, it's for smog. Of all the valid reasons to pull our athletes from Beijing 2008, potential respiratory ailments would have to be the most pathetic. We wouldn't dream of making a political statement because of Tibet, or the overuse of the death penalty, or the almost complete lack of free speech in China - goodness no. Australia has a proud history of putting such irrelevant concerns as human rights aside when there are gold medals at stake. We're one of very few countries never to have missed a Games. And now, finally, we intend to tarnish that record, and why? Because we think medals could be are at stake. Well, at least we're consistent.

If Australia's full team doesn't march out at the Opening Ceremony, I for one will be extremely unimpressed. Admittedly, I find most Opening Ceremonies unimpressive - which perhaps has something to do with the combination of crappy dancing, clunky symbolism, and the commentary of Bruce McAvaney. But the point remains. The athletes are representing Australia. And we would never ask our sportspeople to focus on winning at all cost, without any consideration for the spirit of the game. Well, except our cricketers. And our tennis players. And - actually, on second thought, let's boycott the entire Games Village, and get the RAAF to drop our athletes directly off at the stadium for their event, and airlift them out of there immediately afterwards. After all, there's gold medals at stake.