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.

It's always good to subtract maths

A national alarm resounded across our great land this week. Our Deputy PM and Minister Pretty Much Everything, Julia Gillard, hit the airwaves to talk about a crisis which could threaten Australia's very future. Not interest rates, for a change, but the rate of interest in maths. Our fair nation isn't producing enough highly trained mathematicians, apparently, and as a result, important numbers are apparently remaining uncrunched. The crisis is so bad that I couldn't even find reliable stats on the rate of participation in advanced maths. So Ms Gillard is springing into action, announcing plans to push kids into the dark numerical arts by means of reducing HECS payments for maths students and issuing free pocket protectors for all.

But the growing dearth of mathematicians is not a cause for concern. Rather, we should be popping champagne corks, and not bothering to calculate their trajectory. Because the maths industry is nothing more than a cruel conspiracy by science graduates to give themselves jobs. And so, just so some dork without the social skills to earn a respectable living can put food on the table, Australian kids are forced to endure the misery of mathematics year after year. Forget Abu Ghraib, it's Alge Bra that is the most heinous violation of human rights in our time.

And while that was an absolutely appalling joke, the mere fact I could make it in the first place is because I studied something genuinely useful - the humanities.

This trend brings joy to my heart, because it indicates that my mortal enemy is in decline. It's the greatest news I've heard since that wonderful day in 1993 when my high school told me I didn't have to take maths for the HSC. They still made me suffer through the first part of the 2-Unit course in Year 11 for no discernible reason other than sadism, but, like any victim of post-traumatic stress disorder who has finally learned to let go of the past, I've now succeeded in purging my brain of all that pointless trigonometry.

I'm not opposed to the acquisition of basic mathematical skills. A little numeracy is important. I still use mental arithmetic and my times tables constantly. Weights and measures are pretty useful as well. But once you've left primary school, there's nothing further that mathematics can offer the average person. In the 15 years since I stopped studying maths, I have drawn on the stuff I learned in high school a grand total of zero times. Plus, for anything that's in the least bit complex involving numbers, there's always Microsoft Excel. We should have been able to use it in our school exams, because for the rest of my life, whenever I need to do something with numbers, I'm hardly going to whip out an exercise book and a protractor.

Sure, okay, so there are some people who need to know mathematics. I'm a fan of the people who design buildings I'm likely to enter knowing how to calculate whether it's going to fall over. But it should be a highly specialised trade. We need fewer people studying mathematics, not more, so that the rest of us don't have to burden ourselves with something so boring. What on earth did we bother to invent computers for, if not to outsource the whole of maths to them?

We'd all have been much better off studying economics, which addresses the complex ways that far simpler kinds of numbers can impact on our everyday lives. The addition of 0.25% to interest rates by the Reserve Bank couldn't be simpler mathematically, but the results of that number for our everyday lives is of huge importance.

Mathematicians, as far as I'm concerned, your days are numbered. And no, I don't want to know how they're numbered. I'm just delighted to hear that, as time progresses, the number of you is inching ever closer to zero.

Save Our Cahill Expressway

Clover Moore is a woman of enormous vision. Sure, that vision may occasionally verge on the twee, such as when she dubbed Sydney a "City of Villages". Sydneysiders would rather think of themselves as a city among villages, such as, Melbourne and Brisbane. And, her advocacy of sensible drinking laws was a triumph. But now, following in the Gucci loafer-steps of Paul Keating, she's targeted our city's most magnificent artery, the Cahill Expressway. And, even if I need to chain myself to its drab concrete exterior to prevent it, I say that this latest scheme of our Lord Mayor shall not be borne.

So-called aesthetes have long argued that the Cahill Expressway ruins the view of Circular Quay from the city. Perhaps for some. But what about motorists? No road in Australia, and perhaps even the world, offers a better view. Even the Harbour Bridge can't hold a candle to it, both because you can't actually see the water from the bridge deck and because its view includes the Cahill Expressway. But for those all-too-brief seconds atop the Cahill, a magnificent vista opens out to you, and it's one that's enjoyed by 47,000 cars a day. I can't believe more drivers, overwhelmed by the natural beauty of our harbour, swerve wildly into each other.

When I first learned to drive there was no road I enjoyed more than the Cahill's corkscrewing tunnel cut into the rock. It's a rite of passage for every new driver, and I can't abide the suggestion of replacing it with a more sensible road that doesn't require all of those terrifying lane-changes or frustratingly slow peak-hour merging.

Sure, when newcomers to Sydney wander down towards the Harbour, expecting to be dazzled by the Opera House and Bridge, they are instead confronted by a hideous cement monolith. But are we to have no sense of the dramatic? The Cahill serves as a kind of curtain for the beauty behind it. After passing underneath its shabby colonnade, the impact of the Quay confronts you all at once. It's an exhilarating experience. And, like a grub that magically evolves into a butterfly, the very ugliness of the Cahill only highlights the beauty of the harbour, once you eventually get to see it.

Demolishing the Cahill Expressway won't just destroy a roadway. Oh, no. It'll destroy an entire ecosystem built into the plaza beneath. Without the Cahill, there would be no Rossini, the only restaurant in Sydney where you have to serve yourself your meal and still tip waiters for service. But the loss of Rossini, as much as it would break my heart, pales in comparison to the real victim of Clover Moore's dastardly scheme - City Extra. Without that Circular Quay institution, where would students go after their Year 12 Formals? I've spent many an evening there examining their enormous bread rolls for signs of steroid abuse and wondering why they haven't changed their décor or menu since at least 1982.

City Extra is a place that looms large in the personal histories of many Sydneysiders. Sure, it's usually associated with drunken mistakes, but there's a certain romance in that. So many of the old places where people used to behave badly have been lost forever. The old Bourbon & Beefsteak had genuine atmosphere, and was immortalised by Ricky Ponting's fight with the bouncer. Its replacement is prettier, but sterile. We are in danger of ripping out Sydney's soul and replacing it with blonde wood and white leather banquettes.

There are some aspects of Clover's plan that I applaud. Building over the train tracks at Central is a great idea, and no-one will mourn the Entertainment Centre. But there has to be a place in Sydney for ugliness. Even the Mandarin Club on Goulburn St, which has long been my favourite tacky late night watering-hole, is soon to relocate to shiny new premises that won't have anything like the charm of the bizarre mezzanine that's only ever empty or full of families tunelessly singing Canto-pop.

Admittedly, few people will grieve over the Cahill Expressway. Even the family of the late J. J. Cahill will probably be relieved that he'll no longer associated with an eyesore. But I will mourn the destruction of the places I knew growing up, as hideous as they undoubtedly were. The sites of awkward teenage fumblings, and first dates gone by. Destroy them, and they'll only be replaced by the likes of East Circular Quay, which for all its chicness has about as much soul as Chatswood Chase, or a member of the Iemma Government.

So remodel Sydney by all means, Lord Mayor Moore, but tread softly, because you tread on all of our memories. Oh, and by the way - flattening most of Darling Harbour? Awesome idea, and do let me know if you need help swinging the wrecking ball.

It's time to lose Facebook

Photo: AP
I'm over Facebook. Maybe I'm growing out of it, maybe my standards for ways of wasting time are becoming more discerning, or maybe Kevin Rudd just ruined it for everyone, but I'm officially done with clicking onto the world's trendiest social networking website every hour I'm at my desk. As of today, I'm trying to go cold turkey. So I'm not going to look at it more than once a day, and if I somehow muster a hitherto unforeseen amount of willpower, I may even get it down to once a week.

At first, it was a welcome novelty to catch up with obscure friends from yesteryear. I work by myself quite a lot, so it was almost like having, you know, actual friends there. I found old schoolfriends, uni friends, girls I once had crushes on and people I don't even necessarily like all that much - they're all to be found in the various dark corners of my friend list. Sure, things didn't exactly extend to meaningful conversation - there's only so much quality catching up that can be achieved via a wall post saying "Hey how are you?" - but it was still nice to feel back in touch.

At first it was enthralling to see how everyone had changed, like a school reunion that passed at an extremely slow pace. I enjoyed gawking fascinatedly at photos of people I hadn't seen since the age of 11. Some were married, some divorced. Some had come out, some had babies. I've even been in touch with one or two of the few students from my old primary school in London who didn't beat me up.

But the initial flood of friend requests has now stemmed to a trickle, and I'm lucky these days if I get one new friend a fortnight. (Just to clarify in the wake of the Valentine's blog debacle, this isn't an attempt to solicit a flood of new friend requests - like most people, I only add people I actually know in person. Well, OK, unless their messages are hi-la-rious.) But I'm now at the point at which I can pretty confidently say that more or less everyone I've ever known is in my friend list. So there's nowhere else to go from here but down.

At the same time as the friend requests have dried up, the requests from those irritating applications have swelled into a tsunami. (Compare People, and Texas Hold 'Em Poker, I'm looking at you.) I figured out early on that you can block all requests from those stupid zombies, vampires, pirates and ninjas, which are so annoying that I've seriously considered going and biting a few people to see if they actually do turn into members of the undead, but there are thousands of newer offenders.

Most of the spam backfires and makes me vow never to install it, like when the Sparx application attempted to entice me to sign up by telling me that if I installed it, I could find out the identities of the 0 out of 19 of my friends who found me attractive. Thanks, but uh, no thanks.

The only worthwhile application is Scrabulous, and that's apparently going to be shut down because of the whole violating intellectual property thing. But even that was spoiled because people started cheating - there are sites where you can type in what letters you have, and it will supply the highest scoring word. So my interest in online Scrabble has almost XREIPED - which is worth 100 points at the start of the game, by the way. Oh, and Bingo.
Which leaves me with the built-in features. And without wanting to completely diss the Facebook friends I have, I've also noticed that on the whole there's an inverse proportion between the frequency with which people update their status, and how interesting their lives actually seem to be. And yes, I do update my status too often, and yes, I realise the equation holds true for me.

Sorry, just a sec, I need to update my status - Dominic Knight is henceforth to be regarded as over Facebook. There, that's told 'em.

There are a few things for which I will continue using the site. It's brilliant for organising social events, sharing photos and (I am reliably informed, though rubbish at it personally) flirting. Although even flirting is no longer that easy, because everyone's stopped saying in their status whether they're single, unhelpfully. I think that's because those little broken heart graphics are too embarrassing - it really is tragic in every sense when people announce their break-ups online. And hell, we've even stopped being amused by the Australian meaning of the word "poke". So folks, the show really is over.

I hope the site survives in some form, because it is a great way around the infuriating problem of everyone's email addresses constantly changing. But, really, the site just isn't fun any more. Which leaves me desperate for a new way of filling the enormous amounts of time when I'm supposed to be working. I absolutely despise Facebook's business-oriented competitor, LinkedIn.

So, um, is MySpace somehow retro-cool yet?

Finally, an International Premier League

The Indian Premier League has been putting a lot of traditionalists' noses out of joint. Money is being slung around at a rate unseen since Kerry Packer paid the original World Series cricketers a small fortune to wear those ill-fitting pyjamas. But as the first top-grade cricket competition to remove the increasingly thorny issues of nationality and race from the occasion, the IPL should be welcomed. As with WSC, an avaricious hunt for television dollars may end up benefiting the game immeasurably.

Cricket likes to view itself as being above such tawdry, déclassé concerns as money, of course. Its heritage, supposedly, is of a game played by gentlemen whose only material concern is whether their cups of Earl Grey tea are accompanied by cucumber sandwiches. But we saw in the aftermath of the Sydney Test where the Indian team put enormous pressure on the game's judicial processes to ransom by threatening to return home, those days are finished.
Cricket is the only team sport I can think of where the top players primarily compete at international level. In the likes of football, basketball and baseball, club teams are the day-to-day focus, with occasional breaks for World Cups and other representative contests. But if you're lucky enough to make a Test XI, you'll play pretty much all of your cricket for your country, taking breaks to play for your old club or state team only once in a blue moon. So the contests that matter most are between nations, and given the genuine ethnic diversity of cricket, and the mixed blessings of British colonial heritage, that's a recipe for tensions. Darrell Hair's story shows how easily perceptions of racism can explode in cricket nowadays - it's often forgotten that in the infamous abandoned England-Pakistan Test, the other umpire was West Indian.
And the problem was all too evident in the furious reaction by India to Australia's allegations of racism. The level of anger surely had its antecedents in the days of the Raj, which left Indians with the entirely correct perception that when it comes to racism, they were more sinned against than sinning. And it was not a huge surprise that Australia's holier-than-thou attitude caused so much irritation when it is the major exponent of sledging - sorry, "mental disintegration" in the world game.
But if all goes well, the IPL will deliver, for the first time, cricket that is mercifully free of the lingering resentments created by colonialism. Instead, superstars from different countries will play alongside each other - and harmoniously so, we can only hope. The closest analogy is the European Champions League, a hugely wealthy competition featuring most of the world's best clubs and players. All major European football teams now field teams whose players come from all over the world, and the London club Arsenal regularly fields teams with no English players whatsoever. This leads to criticism from some quarters, but the resulting quality on the field cannot be argued with. If cricket became more of a club-based competition, genuine fans of the game might finally be able to enjoy high-level contests free from the uncomfortable taint of racism and nationalism, and free from the suspicion and resentment that seems to so easily come to head in the modern game.
We've occasionally seen this at club level already, when overseas stars have come to play in first class teams. Warney's exploits in Hampshire are legend, both on and off the field, and Imran Khan played for NSW in 1984/5. But imagine if this was commonplace, and the NSW Blues were full of international stars, and regularly played teams from other countries, each with their own assortment of players from around the world. Australian fans would get a chance to have brilliant players like Sachin Tendulkar playing for their team, rather than always against them. You'd occasionally regroup as nations to play World Cups and Tests, sure, but most cricket would be genuinely free from the baggage of nationality and race. Since Test cricket audiences are dying in much of the world, the longer form of the game could use the excitement of club competition between stars, and this would also solve the huge imbalance of skill between countries like Australia and Zimbabwe. Plus, if cricket became primarily club-based, we'd see a lot less of the Barmy Army, and this alone would make it worth it.
The IPL hasn't even started, and already we've seen the best repudiation of the Andrew Symonds race saga you could hope for. We will probably never know whether Harbhajan actually called him a monkey, or some other unsavoury term in Punjabi. But we do know that the Indian cricket community think he's worth $1.4 million, showing him the respect that ought to be commanded by such an exciting player.
The sheer scale of demographics and an economic boom all point to one thing: the future of cricket lies primarily in India. And the IPL is just an early stage in this. There's potential for conflict with the existing international setup, and scheduling will be an ongoing challenge. But if the BCCI can help to heal cricket by making customary adversaries into teammates, and produce a competition free of the lingering racial tensions that have so harmed the game recently, we should all be thankful.

A day for couples who love lording it over singles

Some couples say they don't buy into Valentine's Day. They announce they're not doing anything special, because they're way too smart to fall for that whole cynical marketing device - and besides, every day should be Valentine's Day, right? They're not gonna give their hard-earned cash to The Man and his Hallmark Cards conspiracy just because they happen to be in love. But they're quite wrong. Because Valentine's Day is not a marketing ploy cynically manufactured by evil greeting card companies. It was cynically manufactured by couples, to give them one special day of the year to lord it over us single people.

The day isn't supposed to be for lovers to do something special that they nauseatingly boast to the rest of us about. That's only come about because they have hijacked it to seek the validation of their single friends' jealousy. It's meant to be a day for surprise declarations of love – for sending a card to someone you admire. And the US Postal Service estimates that a billion love cards are distributed worldwide - and since 85 per cent are purchased by women, we can assume that approximately half of these are directed to Brad Pitt.

But sending cards isn't the Australian way. I've never heard of a couple getting together because one of them declared their feelings on the 14th of February. If anything, getting a card from an unknown, possibly obsessive admirer might feel a little freaky in this day and age, especially as it proves that they know where you live. There is only one approved Australian method for making a declaration of love, and that's getting so maggoted at the pub that you disappear with your paramour for a sneaky pash.

The system has been developed because it preserves total deniability. None of us are ever willing to lay anything on the line, so having the defence of not being fully aware of what you were doing is necessary in case things don't work out. Bold declarations of undying love, sending a dozen red roses, and dispatching a string quartet to serenade your beloved simply aren't done in Sydney in 2008. Your only options, I'm afraid, are drinking, a life of enduring singleness, or worst of all, internet dating.

So in effect, the traditions of Valentine's Day itself are un-Australian. And because no one's sending anonymous cards (I have never received one, and am extraordinarily attractive – therefore, I can logically conclude that no-one must ever have received one), that's left a huge gap for couples to fill with their infuriating smugness.
It's not about the romantic activity itself. Of course not. Why would a dinner with the person you love at a fancy restaurant be any better on Valentine's Day than any other day? It's the same company and the same food – the only difference is that today, they jack up the price with a special menu. No – it's a competition to see who has the best Valentine's event, and therefore has the best relationship.

Just listen for these conversations tomorrow. How many roses, and what colour? Where did you go for dinner? Were there candles? Did a charming Latin man strum an acoustic guitar? Did you sing sweet karaoke duets together? What, you didn't sing Islands In The Stream? We did, therefore we're happier than you.

Even worse are the couples that celebrate ironically. They're just as guilty of one-upmanship (or perhaps the term "two-upmanship" might be more appropriate) as the more genuine couples – they just want to gain additional credit for their hilarious cynicism. So they'll buy each other the most over-the-top awful card they can find, or give one another a giant pink teddy bear that no one over the age of three could possibly like, or send a singing telegram to their partner's workplace to embarrass the hell out of them. Thus rubbing it in to the rest of us even more vigorously, because the two of them have such amazing senses of humour that are just so incredibly in sync.

So couples, I beg you – spare us. By all means, use the day as a pretext for an awesome romantic evening. Just don't tell us what you do. Even if we singles ask, it's out of politeness – we don't actually want to know. Say something like "oh, not much, just a quiet bite to eat", rather than enthralling us with the story about how your boyfriend jumped on the table and performed a spontaneous a capella version of Unchained Melody while the entire restaurant applauded, and unanimously agreed that you have the most wonderful boyfriend in recorded history.

We're happy for you, honestly. Just not today.

Time we had some primaries of our own

As Peter Hartcher wrote in today's Herald, the US primaries are wonderfully entertaining. I had friends round to watch Super Tuesday, and we sat on the couch eating Cheetos. We treated it like it was a blockbuster helmed by a particularly uncharismatic star in the bumbling form of CNN's Wolf Blitzer - never before has such a dull man had such an inappropriately exciting name. The bad guy was vanquished (Romney), and the good guys triumphed (anyone but Romney). And the spectacle made me wonder whether Australians would benefit from some primary pageantry of our own.

I'm not talking about reforming our entire political system to function along American presidential lines, mind you, although there are arguments in favour of that. I'm talking about introducing the system that (don't laugh) the Australian Democrats already have. OK, had.
Few would remember the process, and I do only because I gatecrashed it while filming a Chaser stunt. In the Democrats, leaders are elected by the party's members. Candidates among the existing senators travelled around the country for debates attended by the party faithful (literally a handful at the event I visited in Redfern), and the supporters decide who best reflects their position. They ultimately chose Andrew Bartlett as the leader, which wasn't exactly a brilliant decision. But the important thing is that at that time the party was riven by internal disputes between the left and right wings of the Dems, just as is happening in the Liberal Party today at both federal and state level. And if the members don't decide who gets to set the direction, it's resolved merely by backstabbing.
Imagine if the choice between Malcolm Turnbull and Brendan Nelson had been made by Liberal Party supporters (not members, because that sets the bar too high and implies financial contributions and ongoing involvement - merely those who registered with the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) as supporting one party or an independent, as in the US system.) It's increasingly clear that Nelson was a compromise candidate, selected merely because he wasn't Turnbull. And it's hurting the Liberals, because they are unable to move forward from the Howard legacy.
We've already had the ridiculous uncertainty over the apology, followed by an embarrassing capitulation, and now we have the preposterous suggestion that the Coalition use its control of the Senate (until July) to retain AWAs, when everyone agrees that WorkChoices was the biggest reason for the party's defeat. When Wilson Tuckey feels he's getting input into policy, you've got a leader who's unlikely to win the support of a majority of Australian voters. This is not a party positioning itself to win back government, and Nelson's leadership already seems fatally hobbled.
Turnbull was the obvious candidate to lead the party into a new era. He's considerably to the left of Howard, which means he's more in sympathy with where the electorate is in 2008. His positions on climate change and the apology, for instance, reflect a growing consensus. There's no point in the resentful Howardites trying to cling to their fallen leader's platform - it was comprehensively rejected. Turnbull was the overwhelming favourite before the ballot, and there can be little doubt that if he'd been elected, his party would have a considerably more coherent platform today, and be doing a substantially better job in Opposition. His merit was overwhelming enough for Nelson to appoint him shadow treasurer even though he was an on-going threat.
And if a primary process had been undertaken, with votes in each state on different days over the course of, say, a month, the whole party would have benefited enormously, because the new leader's positions would be well known to the public by the time they took over, and their profile would already be higher. Mark Latham was largely an unknown quantity when he was elected, a problem which hampered his campaign until the end (among other problems such as, for instance, his personality and policies). But if Latham had toured the country trying to convince Labor supporters his ideas were better, he'd have been road-tested before he got to lead the party to an election. The ALP would have had far more success in finding a candidate with half a chance of unseating Howard in 2004.
Who knows, a primary process may even have saved us the disastrous leaderships of Simon Crean, Kim Beazley (the second time), and most spectacularly unsuccessful of all, Alexander Downer.
By contrast, the folly of the current system of the party room appointing leaders was aptly illustrated by the disastrous performance of the NSW state Liberal Party last year. Because the state party was then controlled by conservatives, whose positions on issues like immigration were far to the right of the electorate, they chose a terrible leader in Peter Debnam instead of the far more competent Barry O'Farrell. And they were trounced by a man whose government should have been in terrible trouble then, and is still performing disastrously today.
In fact, Morris Iemma is an even better argument for primaries to choose leaders. No one comes to mind, but there must be someone better in the NSW ALP, surely? Primaries would be a wonderful way to expose dour machine men before they make a mess of governing. And what's more, if they'd had primaries attracting substantial media coverage, the party wouldn't have had to broadcast ads explaining how to pronounce the new premier's name.
The point about primaries is they let the public, not politicians, decide who gets to become leader. If the Democrats had been able to simply appoint their presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton would have romped in - but it seems Barack Obama is better at appealing to uncommitted voters. That means he may be a more attractive candidate in a presidential election, even though he isn't Democratic Party royalty like his opponent. And as politics becomes ever more driven by the personalities of leaders, it becomes all the more important to appoint the right person. Primary voters don't always choose the right candidate (John Kerry, anyone?), but the process gives candidates the chance to road test their ideas and popular appeal on their supporters before they face a general election. It's a way of calibrating parties so that they appeal to the public, so that they don't disappear into irrelevance the way the Liberals have in NSW.
I can't promise that Australian primaries would be as entertaining as the American ones, because there's so much less at stake. Being leader of the free world is somewhat more attractive a prize than getting to pick the Prime Minister's XI. But if we introduced them, we would get considerably better leaders. The Liberal Party is going to dump Brendan Nelson for Malcolm Turnbull at some point during the next three years. We could have saved them the trouble.

When it comes to Britney, gimme less

Much like her music, Britney Spears' life seems to be going from bad to worse. Just about every day, the media breathlessly reports yet another step towards rock bottom. Her career's in enormous trouble, her laughing-stock marriage is in tatters, she's lost custody of her children, and now she's incarcerated in a mental institution. Every day, it seems she climbs further down that ladder, and at this point, there are precious few rungs left.

And I really don't know about this idea of appointing her father to temporarily manage her finances. Having her parents run her life wasn't exactly a humdinger of an idea when Brit was younger.
Today, we have a wacky story about Britney's manager controlling her life, drugging her and running the paparazzi like a general. I don't know whether Sam Lufti is guilty of these terrible allegations, or the strain is making Lynne Spears bizarrely paranoid (and really, who could blame her?) but it's just another in a long, long series of faintly amusing, but mainly depressing Britney stories. We're now at a point where the period when she was only getting wasted with Paris Hilton and being photographed without underwear counts as "the good old days".
Then there's Jamie Lynn. I know it's common for younger sisters to want to emulate their famous siblings - Dannii Minogue, anyone? - but surely anyone observing the Britney train wreck up close would have realised the folly of falling pregnant too early, and to the wrong man. But at the age of 16, to either an irresponsible boyfriend or a rapacious older television executive, depending on which gossip mag you read. It makes the Britney-K.Fed union look downright successful. It's no wonder her mother was forced to pulp her parenting book.
But we are all complicit in Britney's downfall, because we have all contributed to the unrelenting pressure that's driven her over the edge. And it's time we took collective responsibility for her plight. Like every single squad car in LA, apparently, which tagged along as she was taken to hospital in a positively Coreyesque instance of overpolicing, we need to get involved. Not like Dr Phil, who smelled a primetime television special, mounted an intervention and appalled his fans - whose standards, let's face it, were never that high. If something doesn't give, she may end up irreparably harmed.
What we need to do is leave her in peace, before we leave her in pieces. Fortunately, it's not that hard, because when it comes down to it, when we're really honest with ourselves, she just isn't that interesting. So it should be easy to ignore her, really. There are other starlets whose shenanigans can amuse - Lindsay Lohan's been delivering lately - but for the time being, we need to impose a total Britney blackout.
Because, we're the ones who built her up higher than her talent deserved and her personality could deal with. It's to feed our endless appetite for another humiliating image that she's constantly stalked by paparazzi. We should have known something was wrong when she shaved her head that time, but instead we just bayed for more. And now enough is enough.
Don't get me wrong - it's been a hilarious ride, and I for one particularly enjoyed Kevin Federline's 15 minutes of fame. Thinking back on his ridiculous rap career reminds me of a more innocent time, when laughing at Britney was almost as entertaining as laughing at her gal pal Paris. But, like a World Cup qualifier against American Samoa, the game of Britney v The Rest just isn't fun anymore. Now we're just kicking her when she's down. It's not funny anymore. It's just ugly and sad.
So today, just like she's doing in the hospital, I'm going cold turkey. And we all need to. I vow that I will avoid reading every new "Britney hits rock bottom" story that comes down the line. I will deny myself the perverse satisfaction we all get from seeing someone rich and famous behaving like she's at a Year 10 formal. Until she's genuinely better, and successful enough that her mishaps are embarrassing rather than the source of real pathos and genuine concern, I'll be limiting my attention to the exploits of considerably less unbalanced celebrities. Oh, and also Tom Cruise.
The rate at which media attention is genuinely destroying celebrities is starting to become a real concern. Nutty conspiracy theories aside, Princess Diana's death probably wouldn't have happened if the paparazzi had given her a break. And there is a sense in which we all made Heath Ledger's life harder than it should have been, for example. He didn't ask for the celebrity, just for the acting gigs. And though the two go irrevocably together, they shouldn't have to.
It used to be a fair deal. Our stars get to be fabulously rich and famous, and when they used to complain, I felt they were just being spoilt. But now I'm beginning to think I wouldn't wish the sort of life-in-a-bubble we force onto sports stars, actors and musicians on anyone - even someone I genuinely dislike, like Celine Dion.
In the age of 24-hour news channels, in a world where anyone can shoot mobile phone video and upload it to YouTube in moments, our interest has magnified to become completely unrelenting. Paranoia because everyone is watching you all the time is a common symptom of mental illness. But for many celebrities, it's just true. Britney is surely near breaking point, and if she doesn't make it to a tacky comeback tour, we'll all be to blame.

It's time whaling became extinct

I am a huge fan of Japan, and have travelled there many times. I eat sashimi, I watch sumo, and I'm regularly mocked by my friends for pronouncing "karaoke" correctly. But there is one element of Japanese culture that leaves a sour taste in my mouth, and that's whaling. I have to admit, I've never tried whale meat – sorry, I mean, never conducted valuable primary whale research – so I don't know what I'm missing. But then again, I've never eaten human either, for similar moral reasons.

And what's more, the vast majority of Japanese people have never eaten whale either. According to an Asahi Shimbun survey from 2002, 96 per cent of Japanese have never eaten or rarely eat whale. And despite the protestations that it's a vitally important part of their culture, the lack of consumption has resulted in a substantial stockpile. And as a result a lot of the whale meat has started to be used for dog food. The Japanese Government has launched a campaign to try and encourage people to eat it, with a pamphlet series amusingly entitled "Scrumptious Whale Meat!", but it's failing. And no surprise – why bother with boring old whale meat when you now have universal access to the Teriyaki McBurger?
Kazuo Shima, Japan's former delegate to the International Whaling Commission was quoted in the SMH on Saturday as saying that the West had tried to turn the whale into the equivalent of a sacred cow. He's spot on. We want whales to be inviolate because many species are endangered, and the harpooning process is inherently cruel, resulting in a painful death. And we shouldn't apologise for that. There are times when it's important to maintain cultural relativism, and respect different countries' right to devise their own norms, but there are times when, frankly, one particular set of values is purely and simply better – in the case of the death penalty, for instance. Whaling, similarly, is one practice that simply shouldn't be tolerated.
What's more, the cultural argument seems fairly bogus. We aren't talking about a flotilla of small, traditional fishing boats using centuries-old techniques, like the Inuit whalers do. It's a modern, mechanised fleet, hunting thousands of kilometres from Japanese waters with a high-powered, high-tech explosive harpoon that kills more than 1000 whales. So really, the only bit of the cultural practice that is actually alive and well is the killing bit.
Shima accused the West of propagating WWII propaganda in portraying Japan as the villain. And while some uncomfortable memories remain around the region, the bottom line is that people do perceive Japan as the villain here, not because of the history, but because of its present actions. There's no point in arguing really, the simple fact is that whaling tarnishes Japan's reputation, much as nuclear testing tarnished France's in this region, and the only way around that is simply to stop.
Whenever I see footage of the Japanese whaling ships, I'm always amused because, if we're talking about propaganda, Japan's is so transparent. The word "RESEARCH" is painted in massive letters on the side, as if that somehow would reverse our perception that there isn't any scientific justification for slaughtering nearly a thousand minke whales. Honestly, what do you learn about the 935th dead whale that the first 934 didn't tell you?
Besides, scientific advances must always be weighed against ethical considerations. It's perverse to say that to properly research a species, you need to kill large quantities of them year after year. It's not surprising that most people in the West think Japan's whale research is primarily into how delicious they taste when lightly grilled in soy sauce.
Shima admitted that one of Japan's primary motivations was pride. That seems more convincing than the spurious research argument. And that's what needs to change. Of course Japan should be proud of its culture – most of it is wonderful. But Australia and other Western nations will never give ground on this, so it's come to the point where one antiquated practice, which doesn't even cater to modern Japanese culinary tastes, is doing Japan's reputation tremendous damage.
This year's whale hunt, with the now-annual pitched battles between the Japanese vessels and Sea Shepherd has descended into farce. Capturing protesters, the throwing of stink bombs, and the accusation of "terrorist attacks" from the Japanese – it's a whole lot of hassle just for a bunch of whale meat. Which is a brilliant strategy by Sea Shepherd, aboard its amusingly but aptly named ship, the Steve Irwin, which also gets uncomfortably close to its quarry. Personally, I'm probably more comfortable with the less provocative Greenpeace approach, but you have to admire Sea Shepherd's chutzpah. The Japanese have complained today that our Government has given the environmental groups "limousine service". Long may it do so.
Whaling has become purely a matter of principle for Japan, an obsession apparently disproportionate to its importance that even determines Japanese foreign policy, with aid being parcelled out to smaller nations in return for support at the International Whaling Commission. This behaviour, which smacks of bribery, is beneath a nation which is widely respected for its modern-day pacifism in world affairs. What's more, it must be costing Japan a fortune to keep producing this food that virtually no one wants to eat. Is it really worth infuriating the rest of the world and detracting from the reputation of an otherwise magnificent culture just so Japanese dogs can eat leftover whale?
Culture isn't destiny. Just because your country has always done something doesn't mean it needs to keep doing it. The area where I grew up in Sydney, around Neutral Bay, has a rich heritage as a whaling port – in fact, I grew up in Whaling Road. But guess what? We stopped doing it. It isn't that hard. Just as Britain needed to give up its empire, and India needs to continue working towards giving up the caste system, Japan needs to admit it's time it gave up whaling. That way, those like myself who have great affection for Japan need not have our affection so significantly blemished.

We're gonna fight for Corey's right to party

When it comes to news, it's still very much the silly season. Which means that many stories are getting more coverage than they really deserve. And there's no better example of that than the hilarious tale of Corey Delaney, the kid whose party was publicised on MySpace, and got hundreds of gatecrashers, including dozens of police and a helicopter. In a taxi yesterday, I endured some talkback host whingeing about the kid's "uncontrollable" antics for a solid 15 minutes.
But in the midst of the avalanche of words he let loose on poor Corey, he missed perhaps the most important one. And that is "congratulations". Because the wanton destruction, massive police presence, parental fury and massive damage bill tell me one thing. It must have been one heckuva party.

Sure, it was a bit of a naive mistake to put the details on the internet. Especially as the same thing happened only last year, and was reported almost as widely as Coreygate. And you have to ask yourself what kind of loser would turn up to the party of a guy they'd never heard of, just because it was on MySpace. (For one thing, all the cool parties are on Facebook nowadays, don't you know?)
But it's not exactly his fault. The internet is full of things whose importance is amplified by people forwarding them on because they're bored – take those Chuck Norris facts, for instance, whose bizarre popularity was so great that a US presidential candidate tried to cash in on it. Corey's massive social success is just one of those random internet things, like the popularity of Mahir.
So why should the kid have to pay for the police presence, as has been suggested? What are the police for, if not turning up to parties to ruin them? During my university days, which weren't exactly wild, the local constabulary seemed to spend every single Saturday night wandering from terrace to terrace, delighting in spoiling everyone's fun.
It's ridiculous - as far as I'm concerned - that anyone who moves a stone's throw from Sydney University automatically consents to having students playing Cure albums at full volume at 2am. The same applies here. If Corey's neighbours couldn't sleep, for goodness' sake, they should have come and had a warm VB with their neighbours for half an hour or so before they passed out. That way there would have been some adult supervision. And if they really couldn't sleep, I humbly suggest that the police helicopter might have had more to do with it than a bunch of unruly teenagers.
Anyone guilty of vandalism should have to pay to repair the damage, of course. And it should be easy to locate them via their MySpace profiles, shouldn't it? If anyone is going to have to pay for the cops, it should be the people who called them, surely. I don't want to trivialise something that was probably a bit concerning if you lived next door, but for goodness' sake, lighten up. Being irresponsible is what teenagers do.
But if the kid's really going to be left with a bill, then the solution couldn't be simpler. He just needs to sell the movie rights. The story already resembles the plot of a dozen '80s teen comedies. MySpace adds something of a modern twist – well, a 2006 twist to be precise – but otherwise the plot is the same. Kid throws party when he's not allowed to, too many people show up, and he has to try and stop his parents finding out. Of course they do, when it becomes a national media story.
It's like so many ironically wonderful movies – many of them directed by John Hughes, like Sixteen Candles andWeird Science - and the list goes on. And in this real-life situation, so many of the stock characters are there already. There's the cool slacker hero – to cap it off, his name is Corey, for goodness' sake.
Could this story get any more '80s-retro? And Delaney sounds like an invented '80s surname too. What's more, his actual dialogue is already brilliantly reminiscent of Bill and Ted at their finest: "We warned them, we said the party would be finished at like 12(am) and they were like 'sweet, sweet, sweet', but then they called the cops anyway, so we were like 'oh, damn'."
Then we have the long-suffering parents, who pull their hair out and frown a lot. Here's Corey's dad, Steve: "[I] just can't believe what's happened. Our son has gone totally behind our back ... So embarrassed for our neighbourhood. Just can't believe what they must have gone through."
Then you have the killjoy villain, in this case played by Police Commissioner, Christine Nixon: "I have a word [of advice] for young people who are having those kind of parties - don't do it ... It's not a good thing to do at all and it may cost your family or yourself a very substantial amount of money."
I can just hear Commissioner Nixon exasperatedly screaming "FERRIS!".
I don't know exactly what happened at Delaney's place that night. But in keeping from the genre, we can guess a few things. There was a fat guy who took his shirt off, shouted "PARTY!" and downed a beer bong. A hot girl was on the verge of pashing a guy, but at the last minute, spewed all over him instead. There were nerds who weren't supposed to be there, and somehow by the end of the night, one of them made it with a cheerleader. And naturally, the brand new sofa/vase/painting/sports car/entire suburb that Corey's parents specifically told him to look after was smashed at the climax of the party.
Look, we all know that binge drinking is a problem, and can be genuinely dangerous, and I don't want to take away from that in the unlikely event that any impressionable teenager reads this blog and thinks I'm giving them the green light to trash their hood. I just think that, like the dean of any American college campus featured in an '80s comedy, we all need to lighten up. I'm sure Corey won't do it again. At least until the sequel, Corey Goes To Schoolies. And believe me – if I was, let's say, a producer at MTV, I'd be sending along a camera crew. Naturally, I don't condone teenage drinking – in fact, my teenage years were almost entirely free of both alcohol and fun. But, as the creative geniuses behind Weird Science know all too well, they sure can be amusing.

Note - this blog is now closed for comments. Sorry we had to take down the previous ones, thanks to all those who commented.

What can we satirise when John is gone?

It was often said in the lead-up to this year's election that many of those voting for the first time knew no other Prime Minister than John Howard. And even though I was 19 when the Howard government was elected in 1996, I have much the same sensation. I simply can't remember a time when the words "the Prime Minister" referred to someone other than the Hon J.W. Howard, and it's going to be quite an adjustment.

Those of us who work for The Chaser also face a seismic shift in the political landscape. The new territory is still far from familiar. When we started our tiny newspaper in 1999, the Howard government had already been re-elected for the first time a few months earlier. So we simply aren't used to having any other primary target, and it was with surprisingly mixed emotions that I have watched him power-walk off the national stage this week. It will take a long time to adjust to the idea that tracking down the Prime Minister with a silly stunt won't be as easy as simply rocking up to the Kirribilli foreshore before dawn. Kevin Rudd has proven far more inaccessible – I know, who'd have thought he'd tightly control the media? – so it's probably lucky we're finishing making television for the year.
As the outgoing PM departs, we should take a moment to remember that John Howard gave so much to so many, primarily in the advertising industry. But his rule was also a bountiful period for satirists, and this was in part due to his remarkable consistency. The man simply does not change, and in the end this was his undoing – when he tried to appear in touch with issues such as climate change, the electorate simply didn't believe him. But the predictability of Howard, which led to him being trusted as a safe pair of hands at the last two elections, meant that the same jokes that served satirists at the beginning of his government still worked in 2007. The refusal to say sorry, the hatred of unions, the doting regard for George Bush and the Queen, the dorky cricket fandom, the Wallaby tracksuits and above all those glorious, bountiful eyebrows were as constant and immovable as Rudd's hair. And if you don't believe me, check out Casey Bennetto's brilliant Keating The Musical – the anti-Howard jibes seem as fresh in late 2007 as when they were when written nearly three years ago.
Howard was the grandmaster of repetition, beating the electorate about the head with his carefully qualified phrases until we yielded in submission. Who else could win an election with a statement as awkwardly legalistic as "We decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come"? And he could kill the most awkward of leadership tensions with the phrase "I'll stay as long as my colleagues want me to, and it's in the best interests of the party", whose brilliant use was exhaustively categorised by Crikey. And then, most ironically for Peter Costello in hindsight, the suggestion that he would become PM "if I go under a bus ... " Well, it was a public conveyance that got him in the end, and it took both of them out. Nevertheless, in his pomp, Howard's love of playing difficult deliveries with the same straight verbal bat was an absolute gift to satirists.
Now he is gone. So where to now for Australia's satirists? I must confess to having had concerns during previous elections. Kim Beazley provided some fodder for satire, particularly given his inability to use words that the average Australian could actually understand, but the end result was so dull that there was no joy, and little humour, in it. Surely under him, satire would have withered and died as everyone lost interest in politics completely. On the other hand, Mark Latham was a brilliant source of jokes about uncontrollable violence, but other than his fixation with teaching kiddies to read and fierce class hatred of private schools, we saw little that could be properly satirised before he flamed out.
But in electing Rudd, voters have anointed a prime minister who is, on the evidence to date, even more of a gift to satire than John Howard was. Having spoken to friends "right around this country of ours", as Rudd likes to put it, since the win, I know that I am not the only one to have been significantly underwhelmed by our new leader from the very moment he claimed victory. Rather than Howard's trusty "My fellow Australians", the incoming PM chose to start his speech with "OK guys", sounding much like a head prefect unsuccessfully trying to be on the same level as his underlings. And then the rest of the speech became mired in bureaucratese.
There are no memorable words from his speech at all. No "sweetest victory of them all" or "one for the true believers". Instead we had talk of "forging a consensus", of a "mission statement" and "an agenda for work". "We have a job of work to do," he intoned by way of conclusion. The former bureaucrat didn't sound prime ministerial; he sounded Yes Prime Ministerial. Bob Hawke should be urgently called in for training, because this is the first Labor leader in history who doesn't sound convincing when he says the word "mate".
And the cliche count was preposterous. "Without family we are nothing," apparently. "My local community is the rock upon which all other things are built," he told us. We heard repeatedly of a "new page", "sacred trust", "blood, sweat and tears" and "this great nation of ours, Australia". It left me wondering what his marriage proposal to Therese was like. "Therese, this underemployed diplomat who can speak Chinese's heart needs new leadership with fresh ideas. And you know what? I want to put my single life out the back door and establish a working family with you."
Rudd needs a new speechwriter urgently, and he needs to read Don Watson's Death Sentence, in which Keating's former speechwriter explains how cliches and management-speak are leaching meaning from our language. Because, on Saturday night, Rudd made John Howard seem like an inspiring orator.
Rudd's campaign was based on providing all the things the nation liked about Howard, and then a few extras. He will clearly do the same for those who write about politics for a living. In Rudd, Australians have chosen a PM whose unbreakable addiction to management-speak and glib soundbites will deliver great things – perhaps not for working families, but definitely for working satirists.

A dispatch from the booths

It's a cold, rainy morning in Sydney, so much so that when I saw the queue shivering at my local polling booth, I nearly turned away. Compulsory voting claims another victim. While I was waiting for an eternity to exercise my democratic right, I got a chance to check what messages the parties are trying to push on polling day.

After reading this briefing on the messages the campaigns are trying to ram down your throat, you'll be safe to keep your eyes firmly closed or even put a paper bag over your head so none of the annoying volunteers can bother you as you walk into your booth

Climate Change Coalition: If a photo of a confused-looking Dr Karl wearing a Hawaiian shirt is enough to convince you to elect him to the Senate, you may find one or two hiding at the outer reaches of your booth. Except that Dr Karl isn't even first on the ticket - it's Patrice Newell, Phillip Adams' wife, using his profile to try and get in to the Senate. As we all know, Dr Karl understands almost everything, but I fear he may not quite have understood just how slim his chances were before resigning his ABC job.

Democrats: A noble ambition, but a slogan to fire up the troops. And of course there are lots of ways of bringing back balance to the Senate - voting Labor for one. The original slogan tapped into most Australians' feelings about politics, namely that those involved are "bastards" who need to be "kept honest". This worthy yet limp approach perfectly encapsulates Lyn Allison's slow, steady hand steering the party into the ground. And would you believe, they didn't have anyone handing out how-to-vote cards at my booth for some time?
Eventually one lone Democrat showed up as I was leaving. He was wearing a fetching orange "Lyn to Win" t-shirt. I was surprised by this, since Lyn Allison is from Victoria. But then I realised the genius of the Democrats' plan. The NSW candidate is Lyn Shumack. That spelling is almost as rare as a Dems supporter these days, so to find someone who ticks both boxes is a remarkable campaign coup. At first I was hailing the brilliant strategy which would deliver the Dems a purely Lyn-based recovery. But then I realised it's probably because that they can only afford one set of t-shirts.

Family First: It'll surprise no one when I tell you that in Darlinghurst, they didn't bother campaigning. It seems the rights of gay families aren't among those being put first. I'll update this when I've actually seen some of their supporters elsewhere in Sydney.

Greens: They're got lots of pictures of Bob Brown everywhere. Which seems strange, since he isn't running in NSW, and unlike the Lower House where your vote does actually help elect the leader, those voting Green today aren't giving Bob Brown anything more than friends. Still, no one's heard of anyone else from the Greens, and their campaign staff are wearing spunky green t-shirts, and they want to do something or other about the environment, which is as much as anyone voting green ever knows about their party's plans.

Labor: Kevin07 t-shirts are everywhere - a clever bit of branding, except that they've been around for a few months now and are sooo August. And "Kevin" isn't exactly Prime Ministerial, compared to the serene gaze of John Howard that has appeared everywhere on election day since I was a toddler; or at least it seems that way. I was in Wentworth this morning, and was surprised to see that not only has George Newhouse's team got the election date right, but they've managed to deliver the appropriate how-to-vote cards in the right places. The first signs of competence yet from the Newhouse campaign.
The election day poster is the same one we've seen all campaign of Rudd in an open-necked shirt, smiling beatifically against rolling hills on that day he briefly returned to the country he so successfully left behind. The slogan is "new leadership". Which is something Julia Gillard will be endorsing if Rudd loses.

Liberals:Not a lot of posters of John Howard to be seen at my booth. Instead they've opted for huge signs, bigger than anyone else's. They warn that when Labor gets in "they'll just change it all", on the basis that when Peter Garrett had his "short, jocular conversation", he was actually formulating policy. And really, if you were a Labor candidate at the left-wing end of the spectrum, is there anyone you'd rather trust with the masterplan for three years of office than Steve Price? The problem with these signs is that a lot of voters will be delighted at the idea of everything changing, and be only too happy to vote Labor. And since they're in traditional Labor red, they look like an official policy. This could backfire badly.

The poster features images of Garrett, Gillard and Swan with question marks on their faces. I was confused by this - where was Rudd? Then I realised everyone knows what he stands for - continuity with Howard. Peter Costello's more of a question-mark than Rudd nowadays.

Nationals: Sorry, I live too far into the inner-city for them even to bother campaigning here, but I'll update this page once I've had a chance.

Unions: The Coalition has been presenting the ALP as a coalition between Labor and the unions, calling it "Union-Labor" wherever possible. Of course that's not actually true. The unions have far more power than, say, the Nationals. But you'll see evidence of a campaigning coalition at the booths, with separate ACTU campaigners and signs from Labors, in cheerful orange. They've continued the "Your rights at work, worth fighting and voting for" theme, oblivious to the problem that it also covers bosses' new rights at work, which they'll certainly be voting for. They should probably just have come out and said "Screw WorkChoices". Still, it's good to see the union movement still actually has people in it - there have been grave doubts about that lately. Presumably all the people handing out just want a favoured passage to the Labor frontbench.

Ten ways John Howard can win

With only eight days to go, John Howard still can't even up those pesky polls. He needs, as Kevin Rudd would put it in around 600 consecutive sound bites, "fresh ideas" to retain office, or his long innings will very shortly come to an end. Here are ten easy options the PM might consider using to win back voters.
(Note; if the Coalition actually uses any of these ideas to pull off an unlikely win next Saturday, the price for licensing my intellectual property will be an ambassadorship to somewhere with lots of sunny tropical islands. That's how it works, isn't it?)

1) Sack Tony Abbott
After a gaffe-filled campaign, Abbott has now embarrassed the Government by conceding that workers had lost some protection, and that where there were problems the best solution was for the employee to simply find a new job. Well, Tony's been performing very badly, and it's time he was moving on. With one swoop of his pen, John Howard can make voters grateful that it's now so easy to sack people.
2) Promise not to retire
The uncertainty of the Prime Minister's departure is a major plus for Labor. He's sought to clarify this by saying he could leave in 18 months. But he'd be more in line with what voters were thinking if he promised not to hand power to Peter Costello for at least 18 years.
3) Cash handouts
The PM has handed out more than $50 billion so far this election, but his message of largesse still isn't really cutting through. He should take a leaf out of the FM radio playbook, and simply send out street teams to distribute cold, hard cash. Icy cold cans of Coke wouldn't go astray either.
4) Stop hugging everyone
It's good to see that the PM has belatedly discovered his emotional side, but the hugging is getting more than a little freaky. His YouTube video with cerebral palsy sufferer Daniel Clark had more hugs in it than an episode of Oprah. John Howard's like the great-uncle we only see at Christmas - sure, we're happy to receive handouts from him, but we definitely don't want him to touch us.
5) Ratify Kyoto
Malcolm Turnbull was right - the Coalition's refusal to do this is only hurting itself, and exemplifies the worst of John Howard's stubbornness. At this point, the only thing Kyoto actually means for the Government is providing a convenient symbol of its inaction on climate change, because although we've all heard endlessly what Kyoto means, no one actually understands what it involves. Australia's going to meet its targets anyway, and the only person who would be put out by it is George Bush, who can hardly help Howard any more. We don't care about signing up China and other polluters, we care about token statements that make us feel less guilty about the environment without having to really do anything. Ratifying Kyoto is the national equivalent of buying a Prius.
6) Take on the Reserve Bank
Every time it raises interest rates, the central bank has been warning the Government not to spend so much. The Government insists that its spending isn't driving inflation. So why not put it to the test by promising to compensate every single mortgage holder for any extra repayments they have to make because of interest rates? Better still, why not give them double so that a rate rise means we all pay less, not more? Then we'll really see if profligate government spending is linked to interest rates.
7) Give regional grants to every seat
The latest big story is that the auditors have found considerable bias towards Coalition seats in the distribution of funds under the Regional Partnerships Programme. It's being reported as something of a scandal, but it isn't hard for John Howard to fix it up by simply matching the funding everywhere it wasn't applied. All he needs to do is acknowledge that in fact every seat in Australia is part of some region or another, and therefore deserving of more cash. Urban regions are actually just as "regional" as the bush, if you think about it. Australians are outraged when irresponsible cash handouts are applied unfairly in favour of others, but delighted when they come to us.
8) No more walks
Several moments in the campaign have given the impression that John Howard is presiding over a circus, most of them involving Tony Abbott. But when he goes on his fabled morning walks, John Howard actually is presiding over a menagerie of bizarrely-dressed activists, cantankerous old people and The Chaser. Maybe it's time he bought a treadmill.
9) Silence Alexander Downer, in both languages
The Foreign Minister is embarrassing enough when he speaks English, let alone trying his hand at French. His clumsy attempt to do so when compared to Kevin Rudd's remarkably accomplished - yet nevertheless quite glib - Mandarin illustrates why the Government is so far behind in this campaign. As with Amanda Vanstone, it might be time to send Downer off to become ambassador, somewhere he can speak the language. So not Paris. Or anywhere else, come to think of it.
10) Give the people what they want - Rudd
Rudd's tried to give the people a slightly newer version of Howard, and that's worked a treat. So why doesn't Howard deliver them a more experienced version of Rudd? The Opposition Leader's hair looks plastic already, so Howard could quite convincingly adopt a toupee. And it's not like the PM would have to dramatically rewrite his policies.
Photo: Andrew Meares

The children's toy drug scourge

I'm glad that the world has finally woken up to the narcotic properties of children's toys. The manufacturers of Bindeez beads say "with a little spray of water join them together to create works of art". But we now know that as well as art, you also create a substance that is similar to the date-rape drug known as liquid ecstasy, fantasy or GHB. Meaning that the kids who were given them may end up a great deal happier than their parents intended.

Several children have ended up in comas after swallowing the beads - which makes me wonder what kind of parent buys young children beads as a present in the first place? Surely the danger is considerable even when they don't contain narcotics. So it's not surprising that the toys have been recalled the world over. We can assume that the US DEA is preparing a counterproductive helicopter gunship raid on the Melbourne headquarters even as we speak, as Moose Enterprises becomes the latest target in the War On Drugs.
It's not all bad news, though. They were the Toy Of The Year, and you can presume that a lot of parents have a few packs stashed away, and are now celebrating the motza they'll make thanks to the dramatic increase in Bindeez's street price. I expect skanky-looking guys are already pushing kiddie playtime beads up in Roslyn Street. You can't even buy them on eBay anymore, so they must be really dodgy.
I'm prepared to admit there's a difference of degree, since not all children's toys literally transform into toxic substances when you merely add water. But surely all popular children's toys can technically be classed as dangerous drugs. Take Pokémon for instance. They were highly addictive, had detrimental lifestyle effects and addled the brain, encouraging users to squeak "Pika, Pikachu!" in a high-pitched voice. In other words, the effects were identical to many party drugs.
During the heyday of this inexplicably popular toy, kids themselves were being recruited as pushers by the manufacturer, Nintendo, which encouraged our children swapping Pokémon cards freely in the playground. And, like many drugs, they were inappropriately glamorised in the movies; or at least in Pokémon The Movie. Children in the midst of severe Pokémon addiction imagined themselves as the trainers of an imaginary magical menagerie, which is an effect also reported by many LSD users.
In hindsight, many of the toys of my youth posed drug-like dangers aspects as well. Is there any wonder that our nation is suffering from an obesity crisis when so many Australians played with Cabbage Patch Kids as children? After supposedly appearing in the cabbage patch - leading, incidentally, many kids to be severely misguided about the reproductive process - they literally did nothing except sit there and look chubby. Appropriately, given their origins, they were literally vegetables. Like the pot smokers their owners went on to become, they sat lifelessly in their cabbage patchism, greening out in keeping with their logo. Even the story behind them creates severe nausea - although to be fair it probably won't put anyone in a coma.
The childhood toy whose appeal I find most difficult to fathom, though, is He-Man. I'm proud to say that I never much rated him, which probably accounts for my highly un-He-Mannish appearance to this day. But I remember many of my primary school friends were obsessed with Him. Now, his battles against Skeletor may be perceived as a metaphor for combating anorexia, and I think that's admirable. But his absurdly muscular appearance was almost as damaging for the male body image as Barbie surely is for girls. If you can't achieve a He-Man like appearance through exercise - and really, who can? - there's one easy way to get there, and that's anabolic steroids. We don't all look like Dolph Lundgren, who portrayed him in the 1987 classic Masters Of The Universe (and has a chemical engineering degree from Sydney Uni, strangely!). And I wonder how many kids who grew up idolising muscle-bound action figures ended up injecting themselves with the chemical equivalent of the Power Of Greyskull(TM) to look like He-Man themselves?
There is a strong argument for banning pretty much all children's toys. They're addictive, highly expensive and ultimately harmful. As many drug users will tell you, once hooked on something like Bob the Builder or My Little Pony, it can become a vicious cycle. The only escape is simply to grow up, and hope that you don't succumb to the next craze. As I found in my youth, even Lego can be dangerously addictive - although the manufacturers figured out how to bond their pieces together without using GHB.
So I am considering simply not buying toys for my own offspring - not just because they are dangerous, but also because I am cheap. My children, when I have them someday, will be given miscellaneous lumps of wood and perhaps the odd pebble or two, and told to use their imaginations. And that is perhaps the greatest gift I could give to them, and also my bank balance. In the end, I figure it's safer to encourage the kind of fantasy that doesn't come in liquid form.

Rudd and Howard: spot the difference

In a bid to avoid the sort of wedge campaigns that have been used against it in previous years, Labor has simply echoed many of the Coalition's policies, or made minor modifications. So are there any differences between John Howard and Kevin Rudd? After extensive examinations I could find only 10.

1. Education revolution: While both are avowed conservatives, Rudd thinks "revolution" sounds cool.
2. Age: Howard is a 68-year-old grandfather, whereas 50-year-old Rudd merely acts like he's 68.
3. Unions: Though neither man is a great friend of trade unions, Rudd is a great friend to trade unionists – his front bench is full of them. Howard has done a great deal in his career to frustrate unions in an effort to increase flexibility and reduce workers' pay. Rudd, however, has left this task to his wife.

4. Language skills: The Labor leader will most likely develop a close relationship with Chinese President Hu Jintao, based on Rudd's ability to speak his language, Mandarin. Howard's closest relationship, with US President George Bush, has blossomed despite Bush being barely competent in English.
5. Environment: Both men are being undermined by their multi-millionaire Sydneysider environment ministers. However, Howard's has hair.
6. Housing affordability: Rudd has talked a lot about housing affordability during this campaign in an attempt to reach ordinary Australians. He and his wife have recent insight into the issue, having decided not to bid $5 million for a beach house. Howard's major concern in this area, however, is how much money he has to throw to voters so he can avert his own housing crisis and stay in Kirribilli.
7. Peter Costello: Obviously neither man likes the Treasurer nor would dream of having him over for dinner, but Howard is stuck with him as the anointed successor for another three weeks.
8. Interest rates: Howard says that the interest rates rises are not his fault, but that rates will always be lower under the Coalition than Labor. Rudd says that the rate rises are entirely Howard's fault, but that he isn't going to be able to control them. So both leaders say that interest rates are largely beyond their control, and yet that the other one cannot be trusted. And the difference? Only that this worked for Howard last time, and won't this time.
9. Scare campaigns: The Coalition has run a negative campaign, warning the public that, if Labor wins, unions will run rampant over the entire country, there will be a "financial tsunami" and life as we know it will effectively end. Whereas Rudd disapproves of scare campaigns, tut-tutting that "Mr Howard always claims that the sky will fall in". Instead he has focused on positive, visionary campaign messages, such as how Costello would extend WorkChoices and the Coalition would build nuclear power plants.
10. The polls: Three weeks out, opinion polls still have the two leaders far further apart than they are on any one issue. This may well be the only area where the two leaders are ultimately all that different.

Ten ways to entertain yourself during the campaign

Well, we're only a week and a half into the election campaign, and I'm already bored to tears. I have to follow this stuff intimately for work, unfortunately. If, like me, you don't have the capacity to simply switch off the television like most Australians, why not adopt one of my patented methods of entertaining yourself during Campaign 2007?

1) Heckle John Howard: He may be down in the polls, but our indefatigable PM is still power walking every morning, giving joggers the perfect opportunity to give John Howard a piece of their mind. If Kevin Rudd becomes PM, he won't do anything as spontaneous and non-media managed as walking through a public place every morning, so take advantage while Howard is still around. Democracy has never been so direct.
2) Play the Kevin Rudd drinking game: It's easy! Every time Kevin07's speaking and his dextrous tongue darts out to wet those silvery lips of his, you have to wet your own lips with a sip of your drink. Be thankful there are no more 90-minute debates, or you'd be drunker than a night out at Scores with Col Allan. Note the optional, quite gross rule: like the infamous YouTube video, the loser in the game has to pick their ear and eat it.
3) Marvel at the Steve Fielding video blog: All the parties are trying to embrace Web 2.0, and Steve Fielding has done his bit with a range of fascinating videos. Although I don't know that forcing your family to appear in your embarrassing clips necessarily counts as putting them first, you can watch enthralled as Steve's daughter wins Best & Fairest for her soccer club, and his son wins a swimming race. Yep, as the videos prove, Fielding really is a fair dinkum ordinary Australia. With emphasis on the ordinary.
4) Bet on the election: Aussies love to gamble even when it isn't good for them, and the election's a much simpler field than the Melbourne Cup. Rudd's miles ahead - is it an easy profit, or does John Howard represent the chance to win a motza? The good news is that anything you wager you'll get back in tax cuts.
5) Remember Paul Keating: This campaign could desperately use a bit less spin and a bit more Keatingesque wit. Kevin Rudd has never, in his entire political career, said anything as entertaining as these quotes, more's the pity. He's also the only person who's really taken on the Liberals over the unions. Then again, Mark Latham was a dab hand with the insults, and look where it got him.
6) Recalculate your mortgage repayments: This isn't exactly fun, but it'll certainly wake you up a bit if the latest glib Kmail has put you to sleep. When you've worked out how exactly much a 0.25 per cent rise will hurt you, why not calculate the impact of the 0.5 per cent and 0.75 per cent that will inevitably follow as the cash handouts from both parties drive up inflation?
7) Find embarrassing Peter Garrett lyrics: This is one of the Coalition's favourite pastimes. Pull out those old Oil LPs and find the lyric that is most at odds with the new, meek, spin-controlled Garrett. For me, given Labor's recent awkwardness over the US alliance, it's hard to go past "US forces give the nod, it's a setback for your country".
8) Play "Where's Ally?": Every day, why not skim the newspapers and see if you can find any mention of Democrats leader Lynn Allison? Caution - while every page of the Where's Wally? books features Wally somewhere, most pages of the newspaper do not.
9) Sing along with Pauline Hanson: Pauline's never been only about the race-baiting - she's also big on the flag-draping. So why not enjoy her song The Australian Way Of Life here? Recorded with boyfriend Chris Callaghan, it's a little clunkier than I am, you are, we are Australian. But it definitely owes a certain intellectual debt to fellow guitar-wieldin' politician Bob Roberts.
10) Start a worm farm: Pay tribute to the most interesting story of the campaign so far (which isn't saying much) by raising some controversial worms of your own. You can order everything you need from WormMan's worm farm store. Then settle the question once and for all by seeing whether the Liberal Party, National Press Club or ABC tries to stop you.