I’d protest the death of Fantales, but my teeth are stuck together

My fellow Australians, what have we done? First we stood by as the world’s largest living structure, the Great Barrier Reef, was bleached as deathly white as a Mintie or the board of a major Australian company. Now, our callous indifference has consigned Fantales, the chocolate-covered caramels which are almost as hard to bite into as coral, to oblivion.

Manufacturer Nestlé has announced their demise not only because we’ve stopped eating them but because the machines that make them are breaking down. Presumably even they can’t cope with the sheer tensile strength of the world’s most impractical lolly.

Are we going to let this happen? Is the Fantale to be rudely consigned to the dustbin of Aussie confectionery history when even the Curly-Wurly is inexplicably still on shelves? Oh, cruel world that – with the internet – has invented a more efficient way to discover random facts about movie stars than reading tiny blue text on a crinkled, waxy yellow background while we glue our teeth together with Carameldite.

I was going to rush out and grab a packet to consume while I wrote about Fantales, but I stopped short. Not only have I eaten so many that I recall them vividly enough to give Proust’s madeleines a run for his francs, but to be honest, I don’t fancy more than two or three. Nobody ever does. There’s only so many you can eat before your jaw dislocates. So, I see Nestlé‘s point.

Fantales are a survivor from the mixed lollies era, when they were a key component of the white paper bags full of Minties, Jaffas, jubes, snakes, mint leaves, chalky bananas and those weird disembodied teeth that were the preferred, and often only, confectionery option available in our local independent cinemas. The corner shop sold them too, for an illicit sugar hit on the way home, after which we’d spend many minutes trying to extract bits of caramel from our teeth with our tongues and fingers before heading home to our ruined dinners.

Still, when the New York Times sought a uniquely Australian sweet for a 2018 roundup of idiosyncratic global treats, it chose Fantales. Surely partly due to their iconic status, but also because, let’s be honest, they’re a weird idea nowadays.

Once, the Hollywood bios were perfect for playing Guess Who with your family or friends during the tedious wait for the opening credits, or on a long car ride. It was a version of Hard Quiz where the most difficult part wasn’t the question, but physically consuming a sweet so you could justify unwrapping another. But these days, we’re on our screens in every dull moment, so celebrity trivia no longer has even the limited entertainment value it once did.

Quite a few people on Twitter mourned Fantales in the hours after the announcement. Several wondered whether they could freeze a batch for posterity – I congratulate them on finding a way to make them even harder.

But I suspect it’s not the opportunity for dental trauma that we miss, but simpler days of simpler pleasures. Objectively duller days, let’s be clear – but that was the youth many of us had, where going to the movies was not only hugely exciting but one of the few options available to break up an endless, sweaty summer holiday.

Sure, Nestlé could try to reboot Fantales for 2023. They could rename them Followtales, with wrappers featuring influencers like Logan Paul and Roxy Jacenko. But it’s surely time to say farewell, and thank you for your service. The remarkable thing is that Fantales lasted almost longer than cinemas themselves will.

Just don’t mess with Minties, Nestlé, or you’ll get an army of middle-aged candy lovers on the streets, trying to protest while our teeth are stuck together. It won’t be confected outrage, what’ll really be upsetting us is growing old in a world where 20¢ no longer buys enough lollies to satisfy our cravings for sugar and food colouring. And who will help our dentists buy beach houses in the future?

Vale, you sweet, sweet, infuriating sweets. But if we all make it to 93 like you, we’ll have had a better innings than most of the starlets whose life stories once filled your wrappers, only to be cut off halfway through, before we could guess who they were.

Dom Knight is a writer, broadcaster and co-host of the Chaser Report podcast.

I'm more worried about Mark Zuckerberg than this government and its tracing app

The government has released its coronavirus tracking app, and people are worried about privacy. The concern is that "COVIDSafe" marks a descent into an Orwellian fever-dream that features actual fever.

I know this, because many people have said so on social media. And I know that after they hit send on those Facebook posts, the site automatically ticked the "worried about privacy" box on their profiles, so they can be offered gold bullion and VPNs.

A new app released by the government aims to help trace the spread of coronavirus, but how well does it work and what data does it store?

Our privacy is constantly being eroded, whether by CCTV, scammers or our beloved smartphones – search for “Google Timeline” or “iPhone significant locations” if you’d like to experience acute paranoia.

But the COVIDSafe app might just be the first privacy incursion that benefits us, instead of advertisers or the state. We’re a little short on rights just now – freedom of movement and association, for starters. I have to pretend to exercise just to leave the house. We can’t even enter Queensland – so there is some upside. But we need to be able to relax these restrictions while controlling new infections.

Of course, we shouldn’t have unqualified faith in a government that gave us robodebt and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton – although I still trust it more than Mark Zuckerberg.

Members of groups that the government frequently targets, like minorities and journalists, understandably won’t be convinced. Fortunately, they don’t have to be. We only need 40 per cent uptake of the app – call it nerd immunity.

Besides, is COVIDSafe really the app to usher in a scary digital panopticon? Every day, the app begs me to open it, because apparently it needs this for the Bluetooth connection to work properly on my iPhone. If it has to be full screen to reliably function, as some have suggested, my main concern isn’t privacy, but that COVIDSafe is a lemon.

If the government’s app strategy doesn’t work, the alternative is a more laborious, imperfect form of contact tracing – where the government also gets to find out our movements. Living in a society always means giving up freedoms for the collective good – and this seems a reasonable trade-off.

In future, infection control apps could become invaluable in flu season, or to control STIs. I’d also love an app that warned me of approaching anti-vaxxers – not because I’m worried about contracting their measles, but because I really don’t want to hear their views on vaccines.

That said, if the government introduces a more intrusive app, I will gladly take to the streets. But only with an app to tell me whether the people next to me in the barricades have COVID-19.

Dominic Knight is co-host of The Chaser Report podcast.

When 'Get Krack!n' took a crack at itself

Get Krack!n was already the funniest show on Australian television before Wednesday night’s finale tore its own premise to pieces. The Kates, McCartney and McLennan, have always targeted themselves as unsparingly as their genre, in the tradition of the two Larrys – Sanders and David – while adding an acidic feminist humour all their own. They even score consistent laughs from their chyron jokes, awkward overlay and irritatingly cheerful production music.

But the decision to get real-life Indigenous actor mates Nakkiah Lui (Black Comedy) and Miranda Tapsell (The Sapphires) to guest-host the final episode, playing upon their public images as an outspoken activist who appears on Q&A and an endearing, popular rom-com specialist respectively, enabled a commentary on race that took Get Krack!n well beyond its usual evisceration of morning television.

It was a watershed moment for the medium, not least when McLennan’s waters broke. Even McCartney and McLennan hosting a show packed with female co-stars broke ground, but this finale was all Lui and Tapsell’s. Unsurprisingly, both contributed to the writing. Tapsell’s advice on how to make it as a black woman in TV – "Be bright. Be breezy. Don’t make a white lady cry. Don’t mention genocide” – was devastating, as she purported to teach Lui how to fake bland geniality instead of challenging the audience with the reality of indigenous lives.

To steal another great joke from the show, Tapsell and Lui changed the face of mainstream Australian TV comedy, simply by starring in an episode of mainstream Australian TV comedy, which just goes to show how low the bar of mainstream Australian TV comedy is.

It was effortlessly hilarious, until it deliberately wasn’t, with the kind of superb one-liners mixed with sharp social commentary that feature in Lui’s own acclaimed plays, and made Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette a global phenomenon. Get Krack!n’s similar blend of comedy and anti-comedy also deserves a global audience. And I won’t spoil it by explaining quite how they did it – not when it’s available free on iView.

But perhaps my favourite gag was the throwaway line that snarkily dismissed one of our best known performers, when a production assistant gave  Lui "darker shapewear" that previously belonged to Chris Lilley. No white guys playing Tongan schoolboys here.

We must have more from the Kates, of course, but this episode asked a more important question. Why aren’t there many more Indigenous faces on our screens? And specifically, Lui and Tapsell, all the time? They’re such excellent performers that they nail their parody-presenting in every scene here – surely they’d out-host just about everyone who’s a daily fixture on network television?

In the meantime, we can only hope Tapsell and Lui keep “decolonising this shit” on a regular basis. Sunrise producers, you know who to call.

I'm planning to sleep through NYE

At midnight on December 31, as 2018 ticks over to 2019 and revellers’ cheers erupt across the eastern seaboard, I fully expect to be fast asleep.

Couples will kiss, singles will hug awkwardly, and Auld Lang Syne will be sung despite nobody knowing what an “auld lang syne” is. The air will be crackling with good cheer and, shortly afterwards, thick smoke from the fireworks. And I plan not be conscious for any of it.

I know New Year's Eve is supposed to be the ultimate party night, the one night when we all go hard and push through until dawn. These days, it’s also the one night where Sydney's allowed to stay open late. In Melbourne, it’s just another day of sensibly managed 6am closures, ho hum.

But as dull as I’m planning on being tomorrow night, I’ve had my fair share of late nights this year. And I’ve spent many of them the same way I used to spend NYE – awake long after midnight, hanging out with someone who can’t speak intelligibly or walk without falling over, and is liable to spew at any moment.

My nine-month-old daughter is an awful lot cuter than your average tipsy partygoer, however. And she frequently wears nappies and bibs, adult versions of which really should be handed out by the authorities on NYE. It’d beat most 3am portaloos.

I always worried that when I became a parent, I’d miss going out, and while I occasionally pine for a carefree night on the tiles - or indeed any kind of flooring - it's far easier than I’d expected to write off the biggest night of the year.

Everyone should experience a Sydney New Year's Eve at least once, but when you've lived here a while, the novelty wears off. It's always the same experience – gorgeous harbour, impressive fireworks, immense difficulty getting a decent view of said harbour and fireworks, police barriers everywhere, packed crowds, pissed crowds, and a commute home that’s so long and involves so much walking that no matter how hard you go, you’re sober by the end of it. By which time you’re so exhausted that you promise yourself you’ll watch it on TV next year, no matter what bizarre experiment the ABC serves up on its coverage.

And while I’d be spending midnight in bed even if the harbour display was promising to top the extraordinary twin spectacles they pulled off for the millennium and Olympics in 2000, I’m not entirely sold on firework guru Fortunato Foti’s plan to wow the crowd this year. 2018’s big innovation is pastel fireworks, in lime and peach, two shades more associated with gelato and activewear than eyeball-popping visuals.

I’m fascinated to know where he got the idea. Were fans telling Fortunato that they loved his fireworks, but wished the colours could be more muted? Are heritage authorities insisting that our fireworks match our Federation bungalows? Or is the country’s preeminent nanny state going to see in the new year with a giant replica of nanna’s favourite cardigan spanning the Harbour Bridge?

And what’s the plan for next year? Fireworks inspired by Fifty Shades of Grey?

I do pity the event designers, though, because it’s Sydney’s one night of getting a free tourism ad onto news bulletins around the world, and really, what’s left to do after all their past brilliance? They’ve done rain from the Bridge deck, fireworks from atop the Bridge span, and fireworks off the surrounding skyscrapers. There’s no structure left to launch fireworks from, except perhaps that one bizarre train that always rumbles across the Bridge in the middle of it all.

Sydney has also projected every conceivable thing onto the Opera House, from pinball machines to Alan Jones’ mobile number. What fresh ideas are left for NYE? I could only think of immolating a giant cruise ship, ideally one of the ones that blocks the view during Vivid. Or maybe we could make many architecturally conscious Sydneysiders’ dream come true and detonate the Cahill Expressway at midnight? Now that I would come out to see.

Thank goodness for the 9pm fireworks, which are pitched as child-friendly, but really, they’re parent-friendly – they let parents pretend that their kids have seen the main attraction before bundling them off to bed. They weren’t around when I was a kid, and I’m sure I ruined several parties for my mum and dad with my determination to stay up until midnight. These days, parents can start doing jelly shots at about 9.15.

But not me. Not this year. I’ll be happy to lie down next to my daughter’s cot and sleep through the last few hours of 2018 alongside her. I don’t need to say “happy New Year” at midnight – one is guaranteed; next year will be the year she learns to walk, talk, and hold her drink – as in, hold her own bottle. I can’t wait.

Besides, I want to get all the sleep I can before she wakes us, one hour into 2019. And then four hours into it. Auld Lang Syne!

Questions for the Sandpaper Three

This year has featured some spectacularly poor decisions. Peter Dutton’s leadership challenge, Justin Milne’s mutually assured dismissal and the Central Coast Mariners’ Usain Bolt misadventure were all epic pieces of incompetence.

But none holds a candle to Australia’s two best cricketers and a gormless newbie getting busted ball-tampering. After years of scandals about picked seams and sticky sweets, our tactical geniuses thought it’d be bonza to use sandpaper in front of multiple high-definition cameras.

It was a worse Bunnings slip-up than any barbecued onion. And those involved seem to be under the misapprehension that they can talk their way out of it. On Wednesday Cameron Bancroft fingered David Warner, saying that he complied with his request to ball tamper because he “didn’t know any better” and “just wanted to fit in”, like a 13-year-old at the cool kids’ table – except he was 25 at the time.

When I was in the 13Ds, my entire team knew better than Bancroft. We lost every match, and while I’m not sure cheating would have helped much, it never occurred to us to try.

Ricky Ponting called this twaddle for what it was – an attempt to “rebuild his brand”. I’m not sure whether Roxy Jacenko was involved (she appeared with the Warners while David gave that deeply unsatisfying press conference), but it couldn’t have been any worse if she started marketing Bancroft bows on Instagram.

Steve Smith told Fox Sports that he should have asked himself “if this goes pear-shaped, how’s this going to look?” Thinking about the optics of getting caught is certainly an improvement on his decision-making in Cape Town, but how about not cheating because it’s, y’know, wrong?

Smith’s revelations about the team management telling players they were paid to win were interesting, because Cricket Australia seems not to realise that it’s in the doghouse as well. All its hype about the awesome “summer of cricket” fails to acknowledge that this is a mediocre summer by comparison, and it’s partly to blame.

So where’s Cricket Australia’s year-long penalty? Why hasn’t it made one of the days of each Test free to say sorry for its mismanagement? Why isn’t the chief executive apologising at every home Test match, and better yet, padding up at lunchtime to be personally pelted by the Milo kids?

I want to see the Sandpaper Three play again, but they need to acknowledge they’ve permanently sandpapered the lustre from their precious personal brands. They won’t even get a sponsorship deal from Black and Decker.

And the next time anyone wants to interview them about the incident, they should respond like Smith should have when cheating was mooted in Cape Town - with a big fat no.

A message to visiting expats: shhh

At Christmas time, Santa isn't the only one circumnavigating the globe to deliver joy. At this time of year, it feels like the entire million Australians who live overseas fly home for beach time, family time, and frenzied catch-ups with those of us lucky enough still to be deemed their friends.

I love seeing my expat mates – they’re lovely, clever, entertaining people who are doing terribly well in NYC or Singapore or Kalamazoo or wherever is lucky enough to have them. But as our globetrotting pals regale us once more with their tales of their glamorous existence exhibiting avant garde paintings in Shoreditch or collaborating with the UN in Geneva or saving lives in rural Myanmar, I have one small request.

Beloved expat buddies, could you please refrain from those subtle, snide comments designed to show how utterly you’ve transcended Australia? You know the ones – about how you can’t have a global career in this backwater, or how we aren’t on the map for major events, or how you can’t imagine not being able to fly to Europe for the weekend.

We never contradict you, we just think quietly to ourselves that you’ve become a bit full of yourself since you bought that one-way ticket overseas – and you know how much we Aussies dislike people who are too full of themselves. Or at least, you used to.

It might also be prudent to cool it with those broad declarations about how bereft Australia is of intellectuals/culture/world-class anything. They only make you seem snobbish or uninformed.

Besides, we know living overseas isn’t necessarily so splendid. America’s full of guns, Trump supporters and Trump supporters with guns, whereas Britain isn’t shooting itself in the foot over Brexit, it’s trying to amputate the limb.

Patronising expats should take care, and remember they hail from the land of the boomerang. As unlikely as it may seem when you’re young, childless and career-driven, you expats often decide to move home so your kids can grow up like you did, in a comfortable, pleasant place with a good climate and quality, subsidised education and health care. You’ll find yourself wanting to spend time with your parents while you can – and getting their help with the kids.

Then, during Christmas catch-ups, you’ll hear your expat friends desperately trying to convince themselves that they’ve made the right decision, and you’ll wince with self-recognition. And then you'll smile, and remind yourself the beach they’ve flown halfway across the world to visit is a short drive from your house, and that living here isn’t so bad after all.

If Trump can be president, why shouldn't Tom Hanks be next?

Whether you consider yourself one of "Trump's Aussie Mates" like Mark Latham, or view the President-elect as one of the Four Businessmen of the Apocalypse, one thing cannot be denied about Donald J. Trump. Of all the candidates who ran in the US election, he was undoubtedly the most entertaining.

Hillary Clinton was predictable, safe and samey, a policy wonk who probably spends her holidays devouring briefing papers by the pool. Whereas Donald Trump spent his career slapping his name on gaudy buildings, and firing people on television. If the voters had been looking for traditional qualifications like experience, it would have been as easy as choosing between Trump University and Harvard.

But they weren't. They were looking for something to shake up the status quo and add some entertainment to the dreariness of politics. When Trump speaks, policy challenges seems simple, and victory seems inevitable. Many Americans knew and liked him, so they gave him a shot.

I loved watching The Apprentice, and not because I enjoyed the "business" tasks, which generally involved cheesy promotion for Trump-brand bottled water and neckties. It was all about Trump in the boardroom. He's a brilliant, unpredictable performer, and his confidence and charisma were compelling.

I didn't come away from the series convinced that this was the man to guide the free world through a complex, threat-filled era. But it left me well disposed to Trump, so much so that I once stayed in his Hawaiian hotel out of sheer curiosity. And I was certainly keen to keep watching.

Trump's carnival barker talents made him an unprecedentedly successful first-time campaigner. He cut down his Republican rivals with brutal, brilliant attack lines, and then crafted a message that connected with swing state voters. Despite a long career of being in it for himself, he convinced millions of Americans that he'd fight for their interests as effectively as he has fought for his own. Voters agreed that they needed a president who wrote the  who wrote the Art of the Deal, even though we learnt during the campaign that somebody else had.

Ever since Trump descended those escalators to launch his campaign, he's been all we've talked about. His presence dominated even the debate that he boycotted. Covering the campaign on ABC Radio, I was constantly drawn to the candidate that our audience knew, and who wasn't another cookie-cutter Republican.

Reading a transcript of his speeches at his rallies, he seems rambling – the Ross Noble of politics. But watching him is a far more engaging experience. He was selling the same product as on The Apprentice – Trump, the passport to a better life. He lives in a giant penthouse atop a skyscraper with his name on it, the clearest embodiment of the American Dream since Gatsby – and there's no sign of a tragic ending.

Celebrities have done well in American politics before – Reagan, Schwarzenegger, and who can forget Jesse "The Body" Ventura? But Trump nevertheless seems like something new. The self-promotion abilities he honed as a celebrity businessman and TV presenter made him an unbeatable politician. How long until others with his communication skills make a similar move into politics?

Wouldn't Australians respond better to a budget delivered by Kochie, or a plan to improve public health crafted by Commando? And wouldn't Lisa Wilkinson or Waleed Aly retain much of their adoration as prime minister?

We have our own businessman-turned-public figure-turned politician in The Lodge, of course, but Malcolm Turnbull must envy Trump's unfiltered candour. Every time he speaks his mind on an issue like the republic, his colleagues get nervous.

The closest analogy in our system is Derryn Hinch, whose long media career has prepared him perfectly for the Senate. His maiden speech, full of outrage yet tinged with humour, sounded like an editorial on his old TV show. We can't elect engaging mavericks prime minister, because of the party system, which certainly seemed to hold back Peter Garrett during his time with Labor – but personal popularity can certainly get them to the crossbench. Ray Hadley and Alan Jones could well follow him, if they can stomach the pay cut.

Machine politicians are so buttoned down and media managed nowadays that anyone different intrigues us. Even Rod Culleton has charmed many Australians with his Darryl Kerrigan-esque struggle against the legal system.

So, don't be surprised if the Democrats try to beat Trump with an entertainer of their own. There's a growing call for Tom Hanks to unseat the other side's celebrity president. Maybe Meryl Streep will step up, or Alec Baldwin will run in character?

If Trump is a disaster, we will no doubt return to safe but bland Hillary types. But if voters continue to value personality and popularity above policy nous, we could be seeing the first in a line of President Trumps, with Ivanka next. And perhaps prime minister Richard Wilkins isn't so implausible here, either?

2016 might be ending, but we can expect worse in 2017

David Bowie. Alan Rickman. Prince. Muhammad Ali. Leonard Cohen. Sharon Jones. George Michael. Carrie Fisher. The list of the icons that we've lost this year reads like a morbid update of We Didn't Start the Fire.

At times, the deaths have come so rapidly that we haven't had time to process one before being slugged by another. In January, David Bowie, Alan Rickman and Glenn Frey within eight days. And just since Christmas, George Michael, Carrie Fisher, and then her mother Debbie Reynolds.

We talk of 2016 as a particularly awful year. It's as though a temporal supervillain is stalking our most beloved celebrities. Artist Chris Barker has been compiling images of this year's losses into a 2016 remix of the Sgt Pepper's cover – he's now run out of room.

As George RR Martin – whose own demise is widely feared by fantasy aficionados – wrote this week , "Death, death, and more death … please, let this wretched year come to an end."

Of course, it's not as simple as the calendar ticking over. The BBC tested the perception that 2016 has seen an unusual outbreak of celebrity deaths by counting the obituaries it has published. The first four months were an outlier, but overall there had been a consistent increase since 2012. So there were more this year – but the years ahead should be worse still.

BBC obituaries editor Nick Serpill says this is because "we're now half a century on from the flourishing of both TV and pop culture in the 1960s, which massively expanded the overall pool of public figures." It makes sense, especially factoring in the post-war population bubble. And in most cases, it's Baby Boomers whom we've been mourning.

To Gen Xers like me, these losses feel particularly shocking because we're losing people who've been superstars for as long as we can remember. Let's Dance, Diamonds and Pearls and Faith were on high rotation at our place during my childhood, and those artists' peak popularity coincided with the advent of music videos. They really were everywhere.

I was born the year Star Wars came out, so Princess Leia has been a hero since I was old enough to have them. And like so many, I have learnt of Ali's feats with no little awe.

Once, the icons on our walls were religious – now they're actors, athletes and pop stars. We once memorised prayers and mantras, now it's lines, lyrics and stats. Cultural highlights like a big album or movie serve as the waypoints in our own lives.

Pop culture helps us form our own identities, too. So many have said that Bowie helped them understand their sexuality, and that Leia inspired them by proving women could be heroes instead of needy damsels, and that Ali made them feel proud of their ethnicity or religion. Many of these artists pushed the boundaries of what's permissible, and the rest of us followed behind them.

It might seem strange to mourn people who simply made music, or played other people on screen – and were paid well to do so. But we do it because life is about more than politics and economics, and culture is what we do with much of our free time.

We don't gather around the fire to hear the village storyteller, we gather in darkened halls to watch movies, or plays, or hear music. And when we mourn a cultural figure's death, we are acknowledging what they did for us when they lived.

Previously, the only collective space for mourning was on the streets, where Londoners congregated after Princess Diana's death. But now our primary shared space is online. We no longer don sackcloth, or tear our hair, but we still perform public displays of grief.

Nowadays, we try to bundle up our shock and sorrow into words that somehow capture those feelings, and we publish them on social media. All year, we've been finding the words to say what these departed heroes meant to us. And when other people leave a reply, it reminds us that we're not alone in feeling this way. This is perhaps another reason why 2016 feels so sad – because we've all mourned together, all year.

Despite the sorrow threaded throughout this year, each loss has also provided an occasion for celebration. Whenever we lose someone, we're reminded to enjoy their work all over again – and doing so makes us confident that it will live on. Because while death is an inevitability, the greatest artists never truly leave us.

I'm over Pokémon Go... what's next?

On Sunday night, I found the best Pokémon I've ever seen. Right in the middle of Hyde Park, inappropriately close to the Pool of Reflection, I discovered a Golduck worth a whopping 917 combat points – more than anything in my Pokédex.

If you're one of the rapidly dwindling number who isn't playing Pokémon Go, that's like coming across a $100 note, if the $100 wasn't worth anything except in some stupid game.

But I was excited. With this spiky-headed blue creature in my Pokéarsenal, I could win my first Pokégym battle and capture the nearby obelisk for Team Red.

(And yes, that's a big deal, in case you're wondering.)

I asked my three companions to wait, tempted the Pokémon with a Razz Berry to soften it up, and flung a Pokéball at it. (Strangely, you capture "pocket monsters" by chucking cricket balls at their heads.) A direct hit! I was stoked.

And then the app froze. The Pokéball containing the precious Golduck just sat on my screen, not doing anything.

I quit the app and reloaded. It took several minutes to let me in, but all was not lost – the Golduck was still there! I scored another direct hit. And the app crashed again.

After this had happened four times, it was clear that my companions' patience was also on the verge of crashing, so I reluctantly walked away. I would claim no gym that night.

The game refused to work properly for the next 18 hours, and this gave me time to reflect. When I'd first played Pokémon Go 7 days earlier, I'd been blown away. There was a map with my street on it, and all the nearby landmarks were in the game! And I immediately found a Zubat, right there in my bedroom, the cheeky devil! The gameplay seemed ingenious and fun.

I didn't yet know that those stupid Zubats were about as rare as Bogong moths during migration season. I've now captured 136, and let's just say it doesn't get any more entertaining the more you do it. Checking my work email now seems fun by comparison.

So... many... stupid... Zubats...

As I progressed up to Level 17, the game became significantly harder. Pokémon would jump back out of their ball-shaped prisons, and take off, leaving a cloud of dust. A straight flick that should have scored a direct hit would veer off sideways. The already tedious task of snaffling Pokémon varied randomly between easy and impossible.

Eventually I realised that there isn't much to the game. You wander around the city map, hoping to find new Pokémon and scooping up endless Zubats in the meantime. Occasionally you'll try to capture a gym, which involves a whole mess of tapping, swiping and hoping. But otherwise, you clock up the kilometres, hoping the random Pokéalgorithm favours you, and that the ever-tenuous servers don't crash.

And also that a car doesn't crash into you. I've mostly played in the CBD, where hordes of Pokémonners roam the streets, their phones plugged into external battery packs, and I've seen seen several near-misses. If you are going to play, please look out – there are some crashes from which you can't reboot.

From here, I can't be bothered playing on to "catch 'em all". I don't have the stamp collector gene, fortunately, so am unfazed by the idea of letting rare Pokémon go uncaught. Finishing the game, even if that were possible, simply doesn't have the challenge of finishing a Mario game. There's no mastery required for Pokémon Go, just time.

More advanced players say that as you play on, the difficulty and frustration scale up even further. Even at the lofty heights of level 30, you only get to collect 121 or so of the 147 Pokémon – and it'll take you a whopping 500,000 experience points to progress to 31.

Advanced players say that the temptation to just buy Pokéballs instead of collecting them from local landmarks becomes "intense". And of course it does, because that's the business model.

With the freemium approach that most mobile games now use, you can simply pay your way to glory. The attempts to pressure us into buying stuff have become increasingly obnoxious, and in-game achievements have become as meaningless as a doctorate from an online degree mill.

So I'm going to let go of Pokémon Go. Like the Trump campaign, the more I see, the less entertaining it gets. But the game's success means that a zillion other augmented reality apps will soon flood into the App Store. No doubt some of them will combine the excitement of exploring our own cities with genuinely innovative gameplay that becomes more enjoyable as we move through the levels.

And if you've got any Nintendo shares, I'd sell them now. Because if my experience with Pokémon Go is any indication, investors are going to end up dumping 'em all.

Sydney shouldn't shut down just because it's cold

Sydneysiders used to hibernate in cold weather. After months of beach dips, backyard barbecues and outdoor festivals, we'd shut ourselves away from May to August, only leaving the house if paid to do so.

In winter we shivered under our doonas and hugged hot water bottles because as a matter of pride, we refused to build our houses with central heating. I mean, we aren't Melbourne.

It's a vibrant time of the year for Sydneysiders, when the glow from the 23-day festival takes over the city.

Our winter social calendars were emptier than a screening of Zoolander 2. It was unthinkable to attend weddings, parties, or anything beyond a pub with a roaring fireplace and the footy on a big screen.

Not any more. Since the Vivid juggernaut kicked off eight years ago, we've flocked to the harbour in such overwhelming numbers it's like New Year's Eve every night, in terms of feverish excitement but also congestion and transport delays.

In the new Sydney, we'll gladly endure the cold if promised pretty lights and selfie opportunities. There's never been a more exciting time to sell Thermoses and longjohns.

The May-June period gets more crowded every year, and not just thanks to the ever-increasing scale of Vivid, which boasts Music and Ideas streams besides the lights.

There's the Writers' Festival, which fills the Walsh Bay wharves with people queueing for David Marr's autograph. Up the road at the State Theatre, there's the Film Festival, which features enough foreign languages to give Pauline Hanson an aneurysm, and the Comedy Festival, which now serves up more galas than the average greengrocer.

If that somehow isn't enough, there's now TEDxSydney, Fashion Week, the Head On Photo Festival, and, biennially, the Biennale.

It requires military-level logistics skills to find time between your movies, comedy gigs, gallery trips and talkfests to fight through the crowds and look at the lights. The schedule's become more confusing than the Senate voting system.

This May-June cultural bonanza now rivals summer as my favourite time of year. Many of the world's best writers, comedians, musicians, filmmakers, and TV producers converge on our city, and the atmosphere is electric.

During those weeks, Sydney rivals the likes of London and New York in terms of the sheer volume of heavy hitters who come through our airport to share their boundless wisdom and complain about jet lag. It's enough to momentarily banish our cultural cringe.

But then it stops. July comes around, and the tap is switched off. We are left to curl up in front of our heaters until September brings the footy finals and the Fringe Festival.

I'm particularly conscious of this gap this year, because I was travelling in May and June, and arrived home on July 1 with only the election to look forward to. Yes, that's how desperate I became.

I can't understand how this constitutes sensible planning by our event organisers. Why have they crammed the first half of winter with so many competing cultural events that we can't possibly get to them all? There are direct clashes like TEDx and SWF, while July and August boast barely a meagre seminar to lure us out.

Surely the Sydney Film Festival, at least, could move to the coldest part of the year? It's always toasty in the State Theatre. Or maybe if Vivid was in August, it wouldn't conflict with the older May-June events?

No doubt there are complicated factors that determine these timings. So instead, perhaps we should dream up even more events to keep us entertained through the rest of winter.

I've often pondered starting a Festival of Stupid Ideas to rival the Dangerous one, and maybe we could spend a fortnight in July gathering at the State Theatre to binge-watch Breaking Bad?

Paris has a week when all the cinemas sell tickets for only $6, which would be excellent, and there might also be scope for a jazz festival, or a theatre one, with performances in unusual venues. Death of a Salesman in a Westfield, perhaps, or A Streetcar Named Desire on board the light rail?

Now that we've all bought thick jackets and gloves, we'll take anything to get us out of the house. Maybe Barangaroo can pick up the slack and prove that it's more than just a pretty bit of landscaping to view from the new casino

Sydney's now an excellent place to live for 10 months of the year. We just need to pull together a few great activities for July and August, and we'll really put those so-called festival-loving Melburnians in their place. Their cold, dark place.

LinkedIn is the worst

Even LinkedIn's slogan, "Connect to opportunity", is nauseating. But it's now worth so much that if everybody in Australia tipped in $1000, we'd still be $10 billion short.

If you haven't used LinkedIn, imagine Facebook if every user had their boss looking over their shoulder the entire time, so that instead of sharing amusing distractions, they instead raved about their passion for generating shareholder value.

LinkedIn is like a school reunion with only the people you didn't want to keep in touch with, boasting about their career accomplishments to try and make you feel inferior. It reads like the fake employee testimonials in a recruiting brochure.

Today I logged into my LinkedIn account to try and understand how it can possibly be worth all that money. The site was up to its usual irritating tricks – before I got to the feed that displayed my contacts' most recent workplace 'accomplishments', it served up the usual series of nag screens, demanding I tell it what my interests are, then insisting that I add people I would gladly expunge permanently from my life, then asked me to grant it total access to my email account so it could hunt down more of them.

And then it demanded I buy a premium account!

I'm told that LinkedIn is handy for "networking", which I think means strategically accumulating faux-friends. And if you're looking for work, it's supposed to be invaluable. Recruiters apparently comb its listings looking for talent to prise away from the current jobs in which everyone claims they're doing so well. (I can't attest to this, never having been offered so much as a floor-scrubbing role on LinkedIn.)

Having a work-based social network makes some degree of sense when our contacts change their work email addresses with every new role, so there's definitely a role for a digital Rolodex out there. And it's true that we are a different version of ourselves at the office from what we are at home, and the division is probably a useful thing.

What's more, the site certainly seems to be popular – most of the people I know seem to have LinkedIn accounts. But I wonder how often they use it. My feed rarely contains anything worth clicking on. Instead, there are links to unengaging webinars, articles about the content strategies of companies whose content I've no interest in consuming, and above all, humblebrags

Whereas Facebook unerringly knows me to a frightening degree, the top article that LinkedIn's algorithm served up for me had the headline "Aurecon's Giam Swiegers brings Big Four thinking to engineering". I've never heard of Aurecon, Giam Swiegers or the Big Four, and all I know about engineering is that I don't know anything about it, and don't especially care to know more.

I'm willing to believe there are people out there that find LinkedIn's offering less tedious than I do, but I very much doubt that there are enough of them to justify a US$26 billion valuation.

What's particularly galling about the inflated value of social media sites like LinkedIn is what those numbers mean for traditional media. As Media Watch pointed out this week, they're devouring the ad revenue that once went to media organisations that pay people to produce quality content. Instead, social sites cash in on the content that we users produce for free.

You could probably buy most of the major news publications in the English-speaking world for $26 billion these days. Sadly, though, our economy values the lily-gilding of LinkedIn's corporate narcissists more than the hard-won facts and informed analysis offered by traditional media.

I can understand why Microsoft bought LinkedIn. It produces the software that still powers most businesses, but free business applications produced by Google and Apple are cutting into its profits. If they can integrate LinkedIn into their increasingly cloud-based Office suite, they may be able to milk healthy profits from the corporate sector for a while yet before the cloud wipes out the market for expensive productivity apps.

But when I log onto Twitter or Facebook or even LinkedIn, the most popular things being shared are content from news websites. When they're dead and gone, will we be left with a world in which the only content consists of press releases and cat videos?

Yes, we definitely will, so I'm going to have to grit my teeth and embrace LinkedIn. "Writer" means nothing in that environment, so I'm going to rebrand myself an "Executive Content Generation Specialist". Would you mind logging on and endorsing my "Content Strategy" skills? In return, I'll gladly give a thumbs up to whatever you pretend you do.

Court throws Manus overboard, so what's next?

As someone who was briefly detained after the botched execution of a Chaser prank, I'm a fan of the rule that people shouldn't be locked up without a good reason. This notion, which goes back to the Roman principle of habeas corpus, is the crux of the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court's recent decision overturning the detention of asylum-seekers on Manus Island.

Reading section 42 of the PNG constitution, I wonder why we ever thought it would permit the detention of people who have committed no crime. It prevents detention except under specific circumstances – although it's unclear whether that covers pranks involving public nudity.

Shouldn't arbitrary detention bother Australians, too? We often throw up our hands when an Aussie's locked up overseas even after being convicted, but we're fine with locking up non-Australians who've dared to seek asylum. Which is not only no crime, but protected by a treaty to which we're a signatory.

We've blithely embraced Guantanamo logic, where it doesn't matter what your government does as long as it happens on a remote island. Whereas I suspect that if our government set up its razor wire in the middle of Martin Place, the public would tear it down in a day.

The Pacific Solution, Malaysia Solution, PNG, Cambodia – over the past decade, we've had almost as many Solutions as prime ministers. Even Nauru's now mostly an "open centre", and when your most loyal client state has moral qualms, you're on perilous ground.

Like the ground in Nauru, in fact. Perhaps the Nauruans remembered that they might need resettlement themselves someday?

Our government responded with the usual tough talk. Immigration Minister Peter Dutton promised that the 900 men won't be settled in Australia, although it's hard to see where else we can send them. Non-convict hulks, perhaps?

Or maybe we'll lease a newly made Chinese island? It'd surely be cheaper than paying Cambodia $55 million to resettle a mere two people.

The news of Manus' closure has upset the current gentlemen's agreement not to talk about boats in the campaign. Bill Shorten doesn't want to – the issue plays badly for Labor, even though it devised the PNG policy. Malcolm Turnbull doesn't want to either, as part of his ongoing effort not to sound like Tony Abbott.

But the PNG Supreme Court wanted to talk about boats. And we all must, yet again. We need a solution that doesn't simply park desperate people in incubators for mental illness.

Some say "let them stay", which is sweet, but ultimately as simplistic a three-word mantra as "stop the boats". It seems indisputable that offering a legal advantage to those who reach our shores creates more danger for vulnerable people.

The independent Australian Border Deaths Database puts the toll under Labor at over 1100 – which is only the cases we know about. (Hundreds also died under the Coalition.) We cannot allow those numbers to climb further.

This problem is too big for any domestic politician to solve, because it reflects a flaw in the international system. Despite being designed for safety, the rules now encourage this deadly nautical gamble, because obligations are triggered only when entering a signatory territory.

This approach made sense for post-WWII mass displacements, which predominantly involved land borders. But in today's Europe, as here, maritime borders are proving deadly. We must start again.

It needs to be easier to reach safety. The international community should assist asylum-seekers to escape, whether via maritime rescues, organising flights or even negotiating with regimes to allow people to leave.

If the international community facilitates a departure, it can choose the processing site. The destinations may predominantly be developing countries, but asylum seekers could live in safe community housing while waiting for permanent resettlement. The costs would largely borne by wealthier nations, but the foreign assets of repressive regimes could also be seized to help their victims.

Anyone landing in Australia would be transferred to an international centre, and the UNHCR would choose the ultimate country of resettlement without reference to the entry point. Seeking asylum should not short-circuit regular migration processes.

But Australia should take more refugees who have entered the system at other points. We accommodate 1 per cent of the UNHCR pool, but that's a tiny proportion of refugees worldwide – and it's not like we don't have room.

Besides, immigration has enriched Australia in countless ways, and many of our greatest citizens arrived as refugees.

We must not only close down the much-discussed "business models" of people-smugglers, but take Australia out of the business of offshore prison camps for those we've promised to protect.

I don't have all the answers, but surely Australia will need to contribute a lot of money to solve the problem, as we already do, provide a lot of spaces, and conduct diplomacy on this issue more successfully than we have lately.

Domestically, we need constructive discussions that acknowledge asylum-seekers as a collective responsibility. And we need to rediscover the empathy that originally led us to sign up to the system. After all, who among us would not try to leave a place where our lives were threatened?

The last thing we need is more sloganeering in this campaign. Instead, we must try to fuse the humane with the pragmatic. Anything less is unworthy of a nation that should serve as a beacon of compassion. And we can start by finding a safe home for the people on Manus.

Originally published in the Sydney Morning Herald

How would Australia deal with President Trump?

Somewhere in Canberra, in a bunker that requires a retina scan for entry and is swept hourly for bugs, experts from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Defence Force and the Advanced Hair Studio are undoubtedly war-gaming a scenario that was once unthinkable, but is now looking increasingly likely: President Trump.

Once best known for fake-sacking fake employees and writing his name on garish buildings, the billionaire's candidacy has gone from enacting a joke from The Simpsons to becoming the Republican frontrunner, while remaining no less amusing.

His policies consist exclusively of "captain's calls", he has offended just about every demographic group besides white men, and his platform's as confusing as our new $5 note. But still The Donald marches on to what will soon be known as the Trump White House Resort And Casino.

So Australia needs to start thinking about how to deal with a man who combines Jacqui Lambie's maverick unpredictability with Kanye West's love of a Twitter outburst.

While we've traditionally enjoyed a close relationship with the US, we could be in trouble if Trump takes up residence on Pennsylvania Avenue, because we've done very little to ingratiate ourselves with his business interests.

The most obvious problem is that there are no Trump properties anywhere in Australia. We would be wise to approve a few shiny towers as a gesture of goodwill, ideally on the Gold Coast. To celebrate the new Trump Surfers Paradise, we could present him with a pair of white sandshoes featuring the presidential seal.

There are also some markets where we dare to compete with the Trump Organisation. We run our own universities and produce our own wines, and we continue to export our own beef despite him making it very clear that Trump steaks are the best in the world, regardless of whether they're actually on sale.

We even screened a local version of The Apprentice, in which we replaced The Donald with a guy you just know he'd call Borin' Mark Bouris. Sad!

Most impertinently of all, we've got a competing billionaire politician in Clive Palmer. Like Trump, he gets media coverage for every bizarre whim, thanks to a fascinating lack of filter between brain and mouth. And like Trump, Palmer has owned resorts featuring golf courses, and has a – well, let's say an interesting business record, because he's as litigious as his American counterpart.

Given our cheek in competing with the Trumpire, it might be time for some displays of obeisance. Ambassador Joe Hockey could be sent to stand awkwardly on one side during a news conference, and since Trump appreciates endorsements from former politicians with a unique approach to the English language, we should deploy Pauline Hanson as a special envoy.

Australia will want to align itself with President Trump's policies, but they aren't always easy to discern, even for Trump himself. It is clear, though, that he wants to "bomb the (expletive) out of ISIS", – presumably in keeping with our usual approach, we'll simply go along with him on all this.

We could appeal to his love of walls by offering our rabbit-proof fence expertise, and no doubt he'd also approve of our habit of making special policies for casinos. In fact, it might be prudent to appoint James Packer as a special cultural attaché, just as long as Trump has forgiven him for building the hotel he once wanted to construct in Barangaroo. The potential president might still go for a joint venture, especially if it was called Crowned Trump.

The former Apprentice presenter has taken a strong position against American companies' overseas manufacturing, preferring that the US makes things such as iPhones on its own soil. This will suit us, seeing as we have practically no manufacturing industry. What we can offer is iron ore for future skyscrapers, which we should begin marketing as "casino-grade".

There are some points of difference, however. He's opposed to gun control, wants to take on China at the trade table, and has released a more comprehensive tax reform plan than any major Australian party has dared to put out.

While President Trump would be our most sensitive diplomatic relationship since Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman split, the good news is that we have the right leader in place. Malcolm Turnbull knows how to handle irascible billionaires, as he was Kerry Packer's lawyer. Like Trump, he's also a prolific tweeter with a fondness for waterside mansions. In fact, since the PM isn't using it, Kirribilli House might make an excellent Sydney Mar-a-Lago.

If Trump wins the election, Australians can be confident of one unique advantage. The usual rules and restraints of political conduct simply won't apply, meaning that anything could happen at any time. After the bizarre unpredictability of the past six years in Australian politics, we will be well prepared to handle President Trump.

Originally published in the Sydney Morning Herald

Is it too hard to be prime minister in 2016?

In the future, Andy Warhol said, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes. In Australia's future, everyone will be prime minister for 15 minutes, before being brutally rolled.

We've had five prime minsters since John Howard powerwalked away after 11 years, and not one has served a full term. Our political system's become as volatile as Kanye West on Twitter.

Voters are realising they rejected Labor's musical chairs only to sign up for the Coalition version. Polls recently hit fifty-fifty and the PM is running against both the Opposition leader and his predecessor, who's been dubbed "Tony Rudd".

It's eerily reminiscent of 2010, when Craig Thomson held the balance of power and Peter Slipper the speaker's chair. Another Convoy of No Confidence can't be far away.

Why are we trading leaders as regularly as our smartphones? Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott won landslides, and Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull were installed because they seemed competent. Surely there's more behind their difficulties than coincidence or bad luck?

Although each leader has unique shortcomings, the similarity of their fates raises questions about our system. Since Howard, the job has become harder, to the point where no leader can be confident of survival.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott departs after the partyroom meeting after losing the leadership ballot at Parliament House in Canberra. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen

For a decade, Bob Carr dominated NSW headlines with a carefully-curated stream of "announceables", but nowadays it's harder to control the news cycle. New policies only get brief coverage before we return to Tony Abbott's surfing antics or whichever sideshow has captured our fancy.

The front page and the 6pm bulletin were once key, but today's news beast needs feeding 24/7. Via clicks and shares, it's not editors or producers but the public who determine which stories have impact. We like personalities more than policy, which is why our politics are merging with our soap operas. And we reward leadership spills with poll boosts, but lose interest when our adrenaline fades.

John Howard held on despite months of trailing behind both Kim Beazley and Mark Latham, but modern leaders aren't afforded that luxury. The political scientist Sally Young has shown that poll coverage increased significantly through the 2000s. Opinion polling now rivals cricket as our national sport.

This has rendered our politics more pain-averse. The carbon tax and 2014 budget reforms died after backlashes, and it's hard to imagine the dollar's flotation or the GST's introduction today. Scott Morrison pondered a GST increase only to yank it off the table when the prospect of more tax was, astonishingly, not welcomed by the electorate.

Proposals like Tony Abbott's parental leave policy are gradually undermined by their critics and, when a leader like Julia Gillard is determined to hold the line, the pressure drives marginal MPs to become colleagues of no confidence.

We love a good backlash. The likes of Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones stir up dissent on radio, TV and in print, while chatty new websites like Buzzfeed, Pedestrian and Junkee are always on the lookout for a target. Their criticisms are amplified by social media, and then the reaction becomes the story.

The political conversation's now a two-way street. Focus groups are obsolete when we can tell our leaders what we think immediately. It took seconds for the news of Prince Philip's knighthood to be followed by the first jokes on Twitter.

Governments have tried to adapt. Instead of launching new policies, they float test balloons. When they founder, worthwhile proposals get abandoned and the government becomes inert and reactive. Before long, the dice is rolled on a new leader.

In recent weeks, Malcolm Turnbull has gone from criticism for drifting to praise for boldness, but his ploy of proroguing parliament was quickly tainted by mass amusement at a line that was reminiscent of the TV show Veep.

He might look enviously at his NSW counterpart, who's taking advantage of fixed, four-year terms to implement extensive reforms. But fixed federal terms would require a referendum, which seems about as likely as Mike Baird opening a nightclub.

Over the past decade, technology has transformed the media, and our politics along with it. To borrow a Turnbullism, our politicians will need to be agile in order to survive.

There may never have been a more exciting time to be prime minister, but it's probably never been this difficult to govern. While the pace of political reporting and voter reactions have become dizzyingly rapid, our need for considered, long-term policymaking remains the same as ever.
Originally published in the Sydney Morning Herald

Sydney is too expensive for young people to take a risk on a good idea

The world is full of bright young people building spiffy websites and nifty apps. They're skipping the stability of traditional employment to code in cafes and co-working spaces. But they're probably not doing it in Sydney.

World Economic Forum research found that young Australians were poorly prepared for the digital economy, and faced intense labour market uncertainty. Fewer young people want to work for a start-up than in any other country surveyed – a mere 3.8 per cent.

Who can blame them for choosing a nice, safe bank job in expensive, uncertain Sydney? Starting a business can mean years of earning almost nothing, and just surviving in this city is fiendishly expensive, let alone funding a house big enough for kids.

I don't know many successful Australian tech entrepreneurs – presumably there are a few who haven't moved overseas yet? But when we left uni 20 years ago, lots of my cohort had a go at becoming artists, musicians, writers and comedians – equally risky propositions. Many of them are still thriving today.

My friends and I started a satirical newspaper called The Chaser when I was 22, in what would now be called an ultra-niche content play. Even in 1999, we knew it was foolish – our first edition contained a history of failed independent newspapers.

Our paper joined them after six years, 90 editions and roughly a dozen legal threats that were abandoned after the lawyers estimated our assets. But we've worked in the media ever since, somehow surviving on the gag-writing skills honed over 90 all-nighters. (Topical comedians are nothing if not agile.)

My generation was lucky that back then, Sydney seemed as cheap as our jokes. These days, Demographia says it's the world's least affordable city after Hong Kong.

In Sydney, the NSW government's identified a Diagon Alley for the magic of innovation. Premier Mike Baird wants the disused White Bay power station to become "Australia's own quantum harbour". Personally the word "quantum" reminds me of Scott Bakula​, but Opposition Leader Luke Foley supports the idea.

Our leaders envision a harbourside hub buzzing with minty-fresh ideas, rattling as disruptive coders bash their keyboards to grow the digital economy. All we need is entrepreneurs to start up the start-ups.

Politicians aren't the only ones advocating entrepreneurship. A recent report by the Australian Council of Learned Academies identified an "urgent need" for more businesses to commercialise our publicly-funded research.

Apparently we have superior technology but can't sell it. We're the 2016 equivalent of Betamax.

But unleashing world-beating innovation isn't as easy as tossing around buzzwords and generating 3D renders of groovy co-working spaces full of hip young techpreneurs. (Apparently that's a word.)

If we build these exciting hubs and incubators, will anybody come? Surely the lack of a groovy converted power station isn't the only thing stopping smart people launching startups to commercialise breakthroughs made by researchers with safer university jobs. Not when starting businesses has the risk profile of a Game of Thrones character.

Sydney's full of cheerful yellow posters advertising the government's "ideas boom", like so many pre-election daffodils. When announcing his innovation package in January, Malcolm Turnbull praised countries where "entrepreneurship is valued and taking calculated risks or 'having a go'... is considered to be the norm".

It's not surprising that this PM believes in taking chances – it worked out for him last September. But Labor's spruiking innovation too. Bill Shorten promises "regional innovation hubs" and a "Landing Pad for Australian innovators", which sounds as though he'll install mattresses under the windows of every co-working hub.

Both leaders want to sound future-focused in the hope that voters will give them one. We might not be seeing the contest of ideas that was hoped for after Malcolm Turnbull's ascension, but there's certainly a contest to talk the most about them.

They'll struggle to encourage young people into entrepreneurship, though, if they don't address the boom that isn't spruiked on posters – the housing one.

Rents on four-bedroom inner-city terraces have tripled since I shared one with friends 20 years ago, according to Housing NSW. Rents have risen almost as much in the outer suburbs, too. Whereas wage growth has stagnated recently.

This means that it's more expensive to roll those dice than ever. An average room in an two-bedroom inner-ring apartment now costs $330 a week. Food, bills and the rest can easily double that, which is an awful lot when you're putting in sweat equity and have to cover your business' costs, too.

Making Sydney affordable enough for entrepreneurship will require an ideas boom from our policymakers. Otherwise not only will Australia never establish the startup culture we're told we need, but nobody will start dubious new satirical publications. It would be tragic indeed if those few agile innovators who do claw their way to the top had nobody to lampoon them.

First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

You can't have edgy comedy without occasionally going over the edge

Ricky Gervais returned as host of the Golden Globes this week, and as sure as night follows day and regret follows the purchase of a hoverboard, his routine sparked off yet another chorus of controversy.

The comic himself predicted it, tweeting "Better get dressed and offend some humourless c---s, I suppose" before the ceremony even began. Whether or not you agree with his characterisation of the many people who took exception, Gervais certainly achieved his objective from the first moment he took to the stage, nursing a beer as a palpable symbol of his disdain for the audience and the gig.

The indifference was an affectation, of course, because if there's one thing that matters to Gervais even more than his forthcoming David Brent movie, it's his reputation as a stand-up comic.

While the Oscars may be the movie awards night with prestige, the Golden Globes have become the ones that are reliably funny. Whether Gervais or the equally acerbic Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are at the helm, the room will regularly fill with the sound of uproarious laughter instead of the trite standing ovations you get at the Academy Awards.

They've turned the night into an industry roast whose fire temporarily cleanses Hollywood of the smug self-congratulation that is otherwise its default setting. Nothing is sacred – including, in one of Gervais' more memorable gags this year, the priesthood itself.

All night, Gervais only lavished the kind of praise on stars that is habitual elsewhere in the industry when he was setting them up for a punchline. Anyone he praised for having had a good year was on the verge of a skewering. He picked on Ben Affleck, Mel Gibson, Sean Penn and the tinpot Globes themselves, delivering great lines each time, but he also went for some less safe targets.

Which brings us to the night's most controversial joke, the Caitlyn Jenner gag, which illustrates why edgy material often gets bigger laughs. As soon as she was mentioned, there was an intake of breath in the room. How, Hollywood wanted to know, would Gervais make a joke on this topic funny rather than abominable? His attempt involved her perpetrating negative stereotypes of female drivers, thanks to a fatal car accident.

Ouch, right? When I summarise it in those terms, it sounds awful. But listening back, in the moment, it's certain that the joke got one of his bigger laughs And it achieved that result because mentioning a sensitive subject raises the audience's hackles pre-emptively, but also increases the chances of a really huge laugh. Sacred cows can be the most rewarding to prick.

Watching back, the Jenner joke somehow bypassed the crowd's rational analytical processes and made the cream of Hollywood laugh despite themselves. Cutaways of some of the actors in the room betrayed a degree of sheepishness – Jamie Lee Curtis looked thoroughly disapproving, for instance. But she still had a chortle.

I won't add to the many analyses of the joke published elsewhere – like dissecting a souffle, picking humour apart inevitably ruins even a perfectly defensible joke. If you laughed, you laughed; if not, the line didn't work. A joke's success ultimately reflects how many of our involuntary humour buttons it manages to push. And there's a place for material that makes us groan, too.

The joy of comedy is that it entertains us despite our better judgment. It appeals to our actual sense of humour, not an affectation. You can fake trendy musical taste by memorising Pitchfork (I've tried), but you can't fake the genuine belly-laugh when a comedian hits one out of the park.

The unvarnished honesty of audiences is what makes comedy rewarding, but it's also what makes it difficult. Being funny is hard at the best of times, and being funny amid the general torpor of awards nights is about as hard as it gets, which is why even certifiable geniuses like David Letterman haven't been invited back to the Academy Awards.

While it probably means that we're all terrible people, there can be little doubt that humour is getting meaner. We've travelled from the gentle situation comedy of Family Ties, via Seinfeld with its total lack of likeable characters, to Amy Schumer, who doesn't so much poke fun at things as burn them to the ground. Bless her for it.

When comedy is cruel, it sometimes chooses a sacrosanct target, or misses a blow. In that case, it delivers a wince rather than a laugh. But that doesn't mean comedians shouldn't try to hit the right targets, and hit them hard.

And when they fall short, we should react with indifference rather than fury, unless we want comedy that only ever delivers benign, bored smiles. If we keep tarring and feathering our edgy humorists, we'll only have the dull ones left.

Personally, I'd rather Ricky Gervais delivered lots of big laughs and a few "ooh, that wasn't quite right" moments than a lifetime of inoffensive comics doing safe material. Otherwise, we'll have to watch the Golden Globes for the awards, and that would be far more painful than a few off-target one-liners.

Forget Chris Gayle – let's talk about Meg Lanning

Like Chris Gayle, Meg Lanning is a cricket superstar who can win a game single-handedly. Like Gayle, she averages more than a run a ball in Twenty20 internationals, and regularly smashes bowlers all over the ground with the carefree panache of Shane Warne on Tinder.

Unlike Gayle, though, Lanning is not serially sleazy towards female journalists. And if her bedroom has a mirrored ceiling, she's not known for posting boastful photos of it on Instagram, a site upon which she has not chosen to nickname herself "UNIVERSE-BOSS".

Illustration: Simon Letch from SMH 

Instead of focusing on herself for yet another selfie, she focuses on cricket. Last year, Lanning captained Australia to an Ashes victory, and was named the ICC's one-day cricketer of the year. This summer she's captaining the Melbourne Stars in the new Women's Big Bash League, and is one of the major reasons for its instant success, with four half-centuries in the six games so far.

Lanning produces runs as consistently as Tony Greig used to produce cricket memorabilia. She's an extraordinary leader, a world record holder and she's only 23. So if we were going to spend the week discussing a cricketer, wouldn't it have been an excellent idea to choose her instead of Chris Gayle?

Off-field behaviour isn't the only significant difference between Lanning and Gayle, though. No prizes for guessing which one of them gets paid to play full-time, and which one could afford to simply laugh off the $10,000 fine for his now-notorious conversation with Channel Ten's Mel McLaughlin.

It's not clear how much Gayle is earning for this stint down under, but in 2011 he turned down an offer of $250,000 from the Perth Scorchers. That's probably more than Meg Lanning has earned from cricket across her career to date.

Fortunately, things are changing. Lanning and the other brightest sparks among the Southern Stars received a significant salary increase last May, and the strong audience appeal of the WBBL, both on television and at the grounds, is likely to lead to significantly higher contracts still.

It should be no surprise that we're warming to the women's game given the stark contrast with men's cricket. I don't mean in terms of the play – sure, women's sixes might not be quite as massive, and the pace is less likely to cause severe injury, but the contest between bowlers' guile and batters' skill is no less engrossing.

No – the biggest contrast is the lack of behavioural issues. The WBBL promises equivalent excitement without the gauche egomania. What's not to like?

Not all women are paragons of sporting virtue, of course, as Marion Jones' steroid-fuelled athletics career amply demonstrated. But women's team sports still seem to be played primarily for love. That commodity often feels in precious little supply amongst sportsmen these days.

Professionalism was undeniably good for men's sport to begin with, opening it up across the class divide, but in many sports, the deluge of money from television deals has created a generation of obnoxious, entitled multimillionaires. We seem to be paying our male sports stars to disappoint us, and many of them are very happy to oblige, with a level of preening self-regard that Vladimir Putin would consider excessive.

Compared to the tedious cycle of disappointment, outrage, condemnation and limp apology that we see in men's professional sport, women's sport feels almost zen-like in its focus on the fundamentals of the game itself.

What's more, Australia is winning in women's team competitions, and we all enjoy that. The Hockeyroos are always in contention, the Diamonds won the netball world cup last year and the Matildas went further at the FIFA (soccer) World Cup than any senior national team ever has before.

But money is tight here, too – the Matildas followed up their success with a protracted pay dispute with the game's governing body, and their pay is still extremely modest compared to the men whose international accomplishments they have now surpassed.

Fortunately, this gulf in attention and compensation does not exist in all sports. When it comes to the Olympics, interest and coverage levels are broadly equivalent, and the same goes for tennis after many decades of campaigning from pioneering female players like Martina Navratilova.

Surely it's no coincidence that in tennis and the Olympics, the men and women compete simultaneously? This summer, scheduling WBBL matches as double headers with the men's games has been invaluable for its promotion, and the same approach should probably be adopted elsewhere.

At the last two FIFA World Cups, we got three chances to wake up early and cheers for the Socceroos, and it felt like we were out of things too early. Wouldn't it be great if we could also barrack for the Matildas during the world's largest sporting event? While their heroics last year received significant coverage, I've no doubt that running the two competitions simultaneously would lead to far more.

The gender pay gap is broad enough to make all of us blush, baby. Our excellent female athletes deserve parity, both because of their accomplishments on the field and their lack of nauseating misbehaviour off it. And it's a problem we can fix from our couches when we choose what to watch.

Of course there's a chance that a huge outpouring of money into women's cricket would create fresh egomaniacs – something along the lines of a Christina Gaylina. It's a risk worth taking.

This year of sequels does not bear repeating

The 2015 that Marty McFly visited in Back to the Future II was only partly like the year we've just lived through. We haven’t got flying cars or self-drying jackets, and let’s not say a word about hoverboards, especially to Russell Crowe.

That holographic shark that loomed at our hero to promote Jaws 19, however, was spot on. Because 2015 was truly the Year of the Sequel.

This year, it felt like most movie franchises with an admirable legacy jeopardised them with another instalment. The machine was as unrelenting as anything in Terminator Genisys, and also gave us a new Avengers, Fast and the Furious, Jurassic Park, Hunger Games, Mission Impossible, Bond and even Mad Max.

We reached Peak Sequel, though, with The Force Awakens. I’m unclear whether the title refers to George Lucas’ midichlorinated mumbo-jumbo or the slumbering merchandising colossus that recently produced Star Wars-branded fruit (not called ‘Bananakins’, sadly). But whichever it was, the Force is here to stay as we enter 2016.

Some of this year’s sequels were forgettable – I submit for the prosecution Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2 – but having dutifully trudged along to most of the big sequels, I can affirm that the batting average would make at least the West Indies jealous.

In box office terms, though, this cavalcade of sequels has been spectacular. Jurassic World, Age of Ultron, Furious 7 and Minions already sit in the all-time top ten (without inflation adjustments), while The Force Awakens is on track to nab Avatar’s overall #1 spot.

The movie industry is in rude health, it seems, except creatively. Every one of these high-budget, low-risk blockbusters stopped more original, interesting films from gathering a wider audience. Multiplex screens and attention spans are finite, so anything below a household-name franchise gets choked out.

Even JJ Abrams isn't satisfied by sequels, it seems. He nearly turned down Lucasfilm because he feared being known only as “the sequel guy”, and has sworn off any more, unless perhaps Spaceballs II comes calling.

But you can’t entirely blame Hollywood for rehashing the same stories instead of taking a chance on new ones. When they do, they often get a disaster like the Wachowskis’ Jupiter Ascending, a tuneless space opera which made The Phantom Menace look like Gungan With The Wind.

The fault is mostly ours, because we'd rather watch another Batman flick (Vs Superman is coming in 2016) than take a chance on a great local film like Predestination, which accumulated 84% on Rotten Tomatoes, and about $84 locally.

We'll even reward a terrible addition to a beloved series, which is why I watched Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.

This sequelmania is not limited to our screens. Once, deposed politicians would exit gracefully to boardrooms and embassies. Now they wait to be unleashed, wheezing ominously, upon the galaxy once more.

Kevin Rudd showed us that waiting for sweet revenge can bear fruit, at least temporarily. And hanging back until your rivals stumble is working as well for Malcolm Turnbull as it did for Steven Bradbury – and John Howard.

I presume Tony Abbott is sticking around because he's seen that, to use his evocative if confusing phrase, leaders have to be dead, buried and cremated before they're truly done.

In the US, Clinton II seems a forgone conclusion for the primaries and probably the Presidency, which seemed impossible when Hillary was shoved aside by a young senator from Illinois back in 2008.

On the Republican side, Bush III is in trouble, but Mr Trump Goes To Washington has proven a surprisingly successful sequel to The Apprentice. His appeal surely shows the enduring appeal of devils we know.

That country of 300 million people can't find fresh candidates who aren't billionaires or members of a political dynasty for the same reason as its movie studios keep pumping out sequels: risk aversion. The consumer satisfaction machines in Canberra and Hollywood are delivering what, through polls and ticket sales, we say we want.

Steve Jobs once said that people don’t know what they want until you show it to them. The inflation-adjusted box office records have groundbreaking movies like Gone With The Wind, E.T. and the original Star Wars and Jaws up the top. There isn't a sequel until Return of the Jedi at 12.

But it’s easier to make Jaws 19 than Jaws 1, just as it’s easier to elect someone predictable than somebody from outside the system.

Whether voting or picking a movie, it seems we'd rather risk mild disappointment from the familiar than try a moon shot. All we really aspire to, it seems, is to walk onto the flight deck of the Millennium Falcon and say 'Chewie, we’re home'.

If that's all we seek, there are plenty of competent, uninspired people out there who'll give us sequels. And then a few years later, give them to us all over again.

Are we all Charlie, really?

The team that produced Charlie Hebdo were exceptionally irreverent, frequently hilarious, and relentless in their attacks on France's most powerful institutions. But most of all, they were brave.

When Denmark's Jyllands-Posten published cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad which were met with a wave of violence, Charlie not only republished them, but added its own. And when their Paris office was firebombed in 2011, presumably in response to their special "Charia Hebdo" edition, their response was to depict a Muslim man kissing a male cartoonist with the caption "Love is stronger than hate". They employed bodyguards, but their humour remained as unguarded as ever.

It takes courage to publish a joke that risks making people angry, and perhaps even try to hurt you. I know this because I've discovered that at times, I lack it. The Chaser newspaper published a few controversial front covers, and I still remember the feeling of dread after our more provocative editions went to print.

But to respond to the firebombing of your offices by doubling down with more of the material that had provoked it takes bravery that I suspect very few could muster. Very few of us have our principles truly tested – but when Charlie's editor Stéphane Charbonnier said he'd rather die standing than live on his knees, he knew it was far from a hypothetical scenario.

The response to the murder of 12 people in Paris has been moving – a candlelit outpouring of shock that will no doubt remind Sydneysiders of the recent floral tribute in Martin Place. In both cases, ordinary citizens have taken to the streets to say that this must not be so, that we will cannot tolerate violence in our midst.

It's a feeling succinctly expressed by the words "Je suis Charlie" ("I am Charlie"), which spread across the world on Thursday, online, on placards and everywhere. It's a way of saying that this is an attack on all of us, and that we all feel outraged by what has happened.

The moral calculus of cartoonists versus men with Kalashnikovs is easy to compute. Of course, what happened was absolutely wrong, and reprehensible, and must be condemned. But as we do so, we should question our own reactions to the humour that we dislike. The fearless free speech to which Charlie Hebdo's cartoonists were so resolutely committed is not always so easy to defend.

In recent years, the game of 'stacks-on-a-comedian' is a favourite of those who seek to foster controversies online and on air. The likes of Chris Rock, Joan Rivers and David Letterman have all received death threats, and even someone as universally adored as Magda Szubanski experienced widespread vitriol after making a quip about cyclists on The Project.

I've experienced a little of this, too. A Sydney shock jock once asked his listeners to call in and supply The Chaser team's home addresses for broadcast, presumably not so his listeners could hand-deliver flowers. Another prominent Sydney identity invited us to come and tussle with his motorcycle gang, if we thought we were so brave. (We didn't, since we didn't.)

I've looked at Charlie's more outrageous anti-Islam cartoons, and I don't know that I would have been in favour of publishing some of them – not because they were too outrageous, but because I find them crude rather than funny. But we who say "Je suis Charlie" must defend the right to make those kinds of jokes even when we dislike them. Too often nowadays, people react to questionable material not with the indifference it might well deserve, but with fury.

An audience's recourse should be limited to not laughing, or switching off, or perhaps even walking out. If comedians and cartoonists keep producing jokes that don't make enough people laugh, they won't be in the industry for long. And as any comic will tell you, few things can hurt a joke writer more than a stony response. Sadly, as we saw this week, violence is one of the things that can.

If we are all Charlie today, then we should remember Charlie when humour inspires anger and outrage tomorrow. No matter how much we might dislike a joke, it's never acceptable to answer one with threats, or harassment, or violence. Charlie Hebdo's editors were so brave that they persevered, because to do otherwise in the face of intimidation was utterly unacceptable to them. It should be unacceptable to all of us.

Kanye and the conveyor belt of outrage

At yesterday’s Emmys, Toni Collette won, Simon Baker didn’t, and a galaxy of stars made broadly identical speeches thanking their colleagues, their families and their deities. Was I the only person wondering whether the event might have been a little more entertaining if Kanye West had taken to the stage?

“I’mma letcha finish, Toni,” he might have said. “But Tina Fey gave one of the best portrayals of a disturbed person when she played Sarah Palin. Of all time!”

West’s stunt at the MTV Video Music Awards last week, when he interrupted Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech to talk up Beyoncé’s video, was the subject of jokes throughout last night’s awards, of course. And the reason is simple. In an entertainment industry that’s generally all about plastic platitudes, West did something truly unexpected. I can’t imagine doing anything that foolishly arrogant – nobody can, except perhaps Souja Boy. It was the most fascinating moment at an awards ceremony since that fateful Logies night when Steve Irwin’s snake bit Tim Webster.

But the public reacted as though Kanye derailed the Middle East peace process instead of an award for a music video. Even President Obama called him a “jackass”, perhaps not realising that on MTV that word is a compliment. And that guru of decorum Pink, for instance, described him as the “the biggest piece of shit on earth”, which strikes me as rather unfair to Robert Mugabe.

Kanye didn't realise it – he didn’t realise much, by all appearances – but he was grabbing not only the microphone, but the mantle previously held by Serena Williams as Celebrity Villain of the Week. It’s an award that now carries a familiar timeline. When an entertainer does something shocking, Twitter explodes and bloggers put in the boot. News websites give the story saturation coverage, and traditional media join the party as well. A global jury of anyone with an internet connection reviews the evidence on YouTube, and a worldwide avalanche of Schadenfreude-laced hostility is unleashed upon the star. They apologise, but this is quickly rejected as insincere, and so they disappear to the wilderness to atone.

I’ve always enjoyed playing stacks-on-a-celebrity, but having been consigned to the doghouse this year with my colleagues from The Chaser has made me wonder. Our Make A Realistic Wish Foundation sketch was undoubtedly an error of judgement – a comedy show should make people laugh, not wince. And if you dish it out as much as we do, then you should be able to take it.

But it was surreal to see the Prime Minister taking time out from a press conference about the resignation of his Defence Minister to condemn a comedy sketch. A talkback host offered a bounty for our home addresses, and one of the reasons the ABC suspended the programme was its genuine fear that a studio record would endanger its staff. Even Guy Sebastian wrote on Twitter that he wanted to punch us, although to be fair that cheered us up.

Our scandal blew over – within a few days, the media were picking on Jodi Gordon instead – and fortunately viewers gave us another chance. But since that experience, I’ve noticed how our increasingly frenetic news websites, cable networks and blogs require fresh meat to keep people interested. Because as any Alan Jones listener knows, outrage can be entertaining. And so an endless conveyer belt of entertainers is thrown to the lions, and we watch with perverse fascination as they’re gnawed.

Perhaps in a time of moral relativism and economic uncertainty, it’s comforting to band together and condemn people. We humans have always enjoyed forming an angry mob. But the sudden intensity of our anger seems to have heightened at the same time as its targets have become more irrelevant. Rather than being enraged about Darfur or Guantanamo or climate change, we reserve our harshest condemnation for entertainers who spoil other entertainers’ thankyou speeches.

Kyle Sandilands has been through this wringer twice recently, and while I’m hardly a fan, I can’t help noticing that his audience loved his abrasiveness until he misdirected it. It seems hypocritical to worship Kanye and Kyle for their rapping and ranting, and then react with shock and horror when their overswollen egos carry them across what is always a somewhat arbitrary line.

Of course stars should be reprimanded when they get it wrong, but the flames of public condemnation are threatening to engulf their targets. And if they do, we’ll all be the poorer, because a world where shows like Idol contain only the Marcias of this world is a duller one – as its ratings have demonstrated. More soberingly, I was sad to read that Kanye’s friends are concerned about the potential for suicide. Such is the ease with which celebrities drop from universal adulation to evisceration.

Ultimately, like Picasso, the excellence of Kanye’s art can’t be divorced from his monstrous narcissism. If he didn’t believe in himself so unshakably, he wouldn’t have dropped out of college to become a music producer in the first place. And that would have been a far greater tragedy than a moment of rudeness at an awards show.

This piece was published in the Sydney Morning Herald, but reported as defending Kyle Sandilands because the subs cut a crucial sentence. They also cut my favorite joke, probably because it was just plain unnecessary. So, for posterity, this is the original version.