A week our leaders will want to forget

When voters walk into polling booths in roughly one million years time, by which I mean on July 2, they will be thinking about their houses, and not just because they may well resent being asked to leave them in order to head down to a polling booth.

As I've already argued on this august website, the choice of housing policies provides an unusually clear contrast between the two major parties on one of the most fundamental and tangible of subjects.

Our houses matter to us. They're the stage on which we live out our lives, and are generally the most important investment we've made for the future.

The same is true for our politicians, except that the houses in which they live at least part of their lives are often owned by their spouses, meaning that the mortgage is helpfully paid off by us taxpayers.

This rule is far from new, but still feels iffy somehow, even though I'm unable to come up with a better system. I did briefly toy with the idea of making our leaders live in residential dorms, like the police ones where Tony Abbott lived as PM. And in fact, our politicians living among law enforcement professionals would come in handy, given the rate at which the AFP seems to investigate them.

Given the focus on housing in this most interminable of campaigns, it's hardly surprising that our would-be leader's own housing choices have been subjected to more scrutiny than the media devotes to Jarryd Hayne's career plans.

(Sure, give competitive tiddlywinks a go if you must, Jarryd - just front up for this year's Origin series, would you? There's a good lad.)

An election this long means even more scrutiny than usual. The press corps were always going to dredge through whatever they could find to augment the dreary, stage-managed choreography of campaign events. And that's why we're starting to see questions about that wellspring of intriguing detail that is the Register of Members' Interests.

I foolishly imagined that anyone running for parliament would assume that the media and their opponents would comb through these declarations, especially seeing as we are constantly being reminded that yes, they do. And yet in the past week, several politicians have been in trouble.

We've all learned that David Feeney has enough houses to accommodate the Federal and Victorian Parliaments, and hasn't been declaring enough of them in the register. (We've also learned that his wife's name is Liberty Sanger, which is definitely going to be the name of my election day sausage sizzle stall.

Feeney himself has been out spruiking Labor's housing affordability plan - but if they get any more affordable, just how many is he likely to buy? And how on earth will he keep his interests register up to date then?

Then again, Feeney's recent difficulties in this department have meant his face has been all over the news, a welcome improvement for a man long believed not to have one.

Of course the PM's own housing situation has been an ongoing subject of conversation, too. Malcolm Turnbull has made the unusual decision to stay in his own digs rather than occupying the other harbourside mansion provided to him by taxpayers, and been dubbed Mr Harbourside Mansion by an erstwhile colleague.

But if the PM is able to keep his enormous register up to date, David Feeney ought to be able to as well.Our leader's list runs to 38 pages, and I've no clue what most of them mean - a bit of Malsplaining wouldn't be unwelcome here, to be honest, even just to inform our own investing strategies. Should we all be getting a "Zebedee Growth Fund"? And what exactly is one?

This week, the leader whose personal financial circumstances have become more of a cause for embarrassment is the Greens' Richard Di Natale. Not only has he been accused of not declaring the family farm, but we have discovered just how little he and his wife have offered the au pairs they invited to mind their children.

Whether or not this was within the letter of the law, given the assumption that rent and board totals $300 per week, feels well shy of the point. Senator Di Natale's ability to muster outrage at other parties' recent equivocation over the minimum wage is surely in jeopardy when he comes across as the Otway Ranges' Scrooge McDuck.

Seriously, can you imagine paying anyone, or a couple, a mere $150 per week to "entertain the lads and help with cooking and general domestic duties"? No matter how fine you were with them crashing at yours and having second helpings of dessert?

Okay, so the package is notionally worth $500/week - but that still means handing over a very small amount of cash in hand. It feels a bit like inviting someone over to babysit, and saying that you can deduct the rent on the sofa they napped on and the ice cream they took from the fridge.

Of course, the Greens' pitch is that he and his colleagues aren't just regular, self-serving politicians. Those bargain basement au pairs - sorry, "package of close to $500 for 25 hours a week including rent, meals and sundries" - may prove very expensive indeed.

Politicians already receive so many allowances and exemptions and benefits in return for doing us the honour of representing us. If they pursued corporate tax avoiders with the same vigour with which they exploited the arrangements on offer to them, the budget bottom line might look very different.

The more we hear about how wealthy people and companies structure their tax arrangements, the more it feels like members of the elite follow different rules. If most of us are expected to travel for work, our spouses don't get to buy an extra house that our employers can pay off. Just as we can't tell the ATO that technically, our income is generated in Ireland, so we don't have to pay more than a couple of cents on the dollar tax on it.

Oh sure, it all complies with the letter of the law - but then, who writes the laws?

Perhaps it's not surprising that polls are tightening and the spectre of a hung parliament is once again on the table. Perhaps the more we learn about how politicians structure their own affairs, the more we feel that we'd really rather be governed by none of the above.

And it strikes me that really, the very least our representatives could do is fill out the paperwork that details precisely what they've been able to buy with the generous salaries we give them. And if that's too much trouble, ask the au pair to do it.

Why's Australia ruining Eurovision?

Today, Australia rejoices, because for the second year in a row, we are in the final of the Eurovision Song Contest. Our contestant, Dami Im, smashed it in the semi-final, and will go on to potential Eurovisual glory later this weekend.

I hope she does well. Her song is ideal - it sounds like she assembled scientists in some high-powered audio lab and asked them to blend Adele with Stock Aitken and Waterman, plus a twist of ABBA. Perfect for Eurovision.

But even more sincerely, I hope that her performance in the final achieves another landmark for our proud, musical land. I hope it's our last-ever appearance in the Song Contest.

We are ruining Europe's most treasured annual spectacle. Both for European contestants and viewers, and for our own, previously arm's-length enjoyment of it. We are like overeager scientists who, in the process of observing a fascinating foreign society, have accidentally infected it, leading to its destruction.

Early this morning, my Twitter feed was full of joy at Dami's triumph. There was pride and delight in abundance, along with a burst of the kind of good ol' Aussie patriotism that we should be saving for the Olympics.

Feelings of pride in antipodean battlers nailing it on the world stage are not something that we should ever feel when watching Eurovision. We're treating it like the America's Cup, instead of a multinational karaoke competition designed by Liberace.

We Australians are supposed to observe these proceedings with a detached sense of amusement, and cheer ironically for the most entertaining contestant. As a nation, we should be getting behind the likes of Mr Lordi, or the Russian grandmothers, or Conchita Wurst, not applauding our own. And worse still, we should not be standing in other, more entertaining candidates' way.

If we must compete, our tendency to select competent representatives is thoroughly inappropriate. I'm glad that SBS, as our multicultural broadcaster, has chosen to showcase artists who represent the changing face of modern Australia. But did they have to choose entrants who are so damnably talented?

Making the final once might have been an amusing fluke, but two years in a row seems downright rude. Icriticised Guy Sebastian last year on the basis of his extraordinary dullness, but if anything Dami Im is a more disturbing entrant, because whereas Guy brought a bit of R&B to the table as a point of difference, her song is a thoroughly chart-friendly piece of Europop worthy of a Scandinavian entrant.

Even the lyrics about Dami's heart beating with the sound of silence suggest a thoroughly mangled metaphor worthy of someone who never learned to speak English - quite unlike Im herself. They also betray a bizarre ignorance of Simon and Garfunkel's similarly-named masterpiece that would be more appropriate for someone who grew up in the Soviet bloc. We are in genuine danger of being like dinner party guests who bring along a dessert that's infinitely better than anything the host has prepared earlier.

Taken together, our three Eurovision singers have been so thoroughly straight that European viewers could be forgiven for concluding that Australia hasn't an inch of outlandish flamboyance to offer. The nation who gave the world Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Catherine Martin's everything ever is letting its reputation for over-the-top exuberance down.

If we win, it will be a terrific achievement, but it will also help make Eurovision just another generic stop in the music industry's endless promotion machine where once there was genuinely unique, bizarre splendour. Our inclusion makes it less likely that some quirky act from Lithuania will make it to the final night, and that cannot be good news for Eurovision. The rumours of America's potential involvement are even more disturbing.

There may be a place in our entertainment landscape for a serious international song contest where excellent performers duke it out, although some might argue that the regular charts are exactly that. But Eurovision has only ever been a legitimate contest in the minds of its organisers and its legions of fans in the irony-free regions of the Continent, which is one of the reasons why so many of us have grown to love it.

Besides, can a Eurovision free of glitter cannons even truly be called Eurovision?

The obvious issue of geographic incongruity aside, it's time we stopped spoiling Eurovision with our dour, tasteful involvement. We can watch talented, slickly-packaged pop stars every other weekend of the year. Eurovision is meant to be better than all of that, because Eurovision is meant to be worse than all of that.

Cheaper houses, or secure investments? We can't have both

We Australians are simple folk. All we ask of this world is a successful cricket team, an internet connection fast enough to pirate Game of Thrones, and a little patch of the earth to call our own. Ideally with a two-car garage, if you're asking; and a rumpus room, backyard pool and maybe water views.

Our enduring dream of home ownership is why so many elections have been fought over the sacred turf of the Aussie backyard. John Howard was most explicit about it, campaigning in 2004 with the emotive slogan "Who do you trust to keep interest rates low?"

The former PM understood that his "battlers" in places like Western Sydney were mortgaged to the hilt and feeling precarious, and even though his opponent was one of them in Liverpool's own Mark Latham, Howard prevailed."

But this campaign is surely the first time that a Liberal prime minister has begun his defence of our precious castles by standing up for the property portfolios of one-year-olds. Malcolm Turnbull's doorstop on Monday with little Addison Mignacca, whose parents are negative gearing an apartment for her, bless, was a curious attempt to undermine Labor's housing affordability policy.

I'm sure little Addison would have thanked the nice man in the nice suit if she'd yet been able to speak in complete sentences. She's probably been worrying about the valuation on her playpen. And every one-year-old responds positively to government-sanctioned pork, just as long as she's called Peppa.

But as much as I'm sure we'd all love to get our kids into the property market, the effect of negative gearing is that every Addison with a property portfolio means that other would-be buyers are trapped in the rental market by ballooning prices. Because Addison isn't just a cute kid - she's a landlord. And can you imagine how it must feel when you can't afford to buy, so instead have to pay rent to a kid three years shy of kindy?

But while the PM has pursued the toddler investor market, Bill Shorten has made a gamble of his own by actually having a detailed policy, a sharp difference from the reactive Opposition playbook that worked so well for Tony Abbott. That's why Turnbull was out in that backyard, campaigning against Labor's plan instead of being forced to back whatever his own platform turns out to be on budget night.

As a result, we're talking about substantive policy differences in an election campaign, which feels thoroughly strange.

The major parties have lined up conveniently along class lines. Labor is for the have-nots, who worry about ever getting into the property market. And the Coalition is there for the haves, defending their property values.

There's been debate this week over whether Labor's negative gearing policy will "take a sledgehammer" to property values, as the PM has suggested. Many criticised Malcolm Turnbull for pointing to common sense when he defended that claim while talking to Leigh Sales on 7.30.

He might have been better off pointing out that this was precisely Labor's intended effect. The negative gearing policy is explicitly supposed to make it harder for the Addisons of this world to buy houses - sorry, baby girl - and make it easier for the less fortunate.

Unless you're one of those weird, rare creatures who believes that policies should benefit others out of some strange notion of common good, your position in this debate will probably reflect your own interests. If you got a property or two, you probably hate your portfolio losing the valuation it's achieved in recent years, even though - let's be honest - for many of us, that value is downright obscene, at least if you live in a major city.

But if you're tired of renting and are desperate for a shoebox to call your own, you'll be hoping the market tanks so you can jump on board for the climb back up. In other words, you'll be standing by to scoop up poor little Addison's apartment if her parents have to sell.

It's like stealing candy from a baby. If you needed the candy to live in, and wanted it to become your major lifelong investment, and besides, the baby's parents had their own candy.

Which policy will ultimately prove more attractive probably comes down to numbers. More of us are property owners than would-be purchasers, so the Coalition ought to be onto a winner, right?

Perhaps, but it's more complicated than that, at least in my case. (Like nearly everyone in this debate, I'm thinking only about how I'm affected.)

Not only am I a property owner, but I'm one of those scammers law-abiding taxpayers who has optimised his arrangements for the current system - in my case via happy accident rather than deliberate strategy.

I have a small apartment which I rent out, and then pay rent on the other apartment that I live in. If I lived in my own place, I'd get no tax benefit, but instead, I get to claim the loss on the other apartment. Basically, I'm a 39-year-old Addison.

But here's the thing - my apartment's a one-bedroom. Which was great when I was living alone, but what if I plan to have kids some day, and would like to buy a house that we could all live in?

In the current market, I have Buckley's. My only chance, unless the market for articles like this explodes, is for the market to drop, so that I can afford the repayments. That would mean that my current apartment drops in value, but I'm fine with that, because bigger properties will drop by proportionally more.

In the long run, I'll be ahead, even irrespective of the property's absolute value fluctuations, because I'll be living in a "forever home", for which I'll be probably be able to afford the repayments.

Sadly, I haven't the mathematical nous to work out which scenario would make me more money in the long run. But like most Australians, the idea of a home appeals beyond the asset column on a spreadsheet. Homes are where we live out our lives, and renting feels inherently less secure than owning.

That's why housing affordability is so important to so many people, and defending property values is so important to so many others. Many people, like me, have a foot in both camps. How many of us there are in each is going to go a long way towards determining which side moves onto the government benches in the big House down on Capitol Hill.

And as for the PM's nascent campaign, the next time he does a doorstop with someone who's also a potent illustration of Labor's argument, the gear he ought to be thinking about is reverse.

Think before you snatch and grab

The would-be abductors have walked free. After several dramatic days of blanket media coverage, Sally Faulkner and the 60 Minutes team have been treated with more civility and process than they intended to utilise themselves with their ill-conceived plan to snatch Faulkner's children from their Lebanese family.

And while they still face charges from the Lebanese state, and have paid bail accordingly, they must be incredibly relieved to be en route back to Australia, presumably just in time for an exclusive presentation this coming Sunday night.

(What happens if they don't return? Besides the forfeiture of the bail, will the Lebanese courts snatch them back from here? It would be hard to object if they did, surely?)

But the fact of their release, of course, is a further demonstration of the central problem with the entire project - contrary to expectation and dare I say stereotype, the Lebanese authorities have, by all appearances, acted reasonably.

Perhaps not in green-lighting the deal where the father gets exclusive custody in return for dropping the charges - but Faulker and 60 Minutes are surely partly to blame for provocation, given their attempt to bypass the Lebanese legal system entirely.

We Australians tend to assume that the justice meted out in other parts of the world, and the Middle East in particular, is inferior to our own. We have become so used to tales of innocent Australians - or, at least, presumed innocent on the basis of passport - abroad being locked in fetid fleapits that whenever we hear a story like this, we fill in the gaps. But not all prisons are "the notorious Kerobokan" in Bali, and not all judicial systems are rigged.

Clearly, the Lebanese family law system is one that gives fathers stronger rights than ours does.Australian-based lawyer Faddy Zouky OAM told SBS that, "The father has very strong rights In Lebanon. He even has the right to prevent the mother from leaving Lebanon, if he wishes - if they were still married that is."

How retrograde and sexist, we might think, seeing as we have a family law system that weighs the interests of parents equally, with a strong bias towards joint custody. But the reality is that a number of notionally more sympatico countries have a similar system. There have been several cases of children being taken to Japan in defiance of court orders, and that country only ratified the Hague Convention in 2014. Would 60 Minutes snatch kids from the streets of Tokyo?

I don't have children, but I can't imagine many things worse than losing access to them, particularly amid all the acrimony of a marriage breakup. But while I can understand that the trauma of the experience would leave a parent eager to have the children returned no matter what, I'm entirely baffled as to why 60 Minutes would have decided to get involved with and, according to Lebanese authorities, funded the abduction. It's not a telemovie or a video game. The consequences are real.

It's also widely agreed, and surely common sense, that child abduction has a detrimental impact on children. The father was the first to subject his children to this, of course - but does that make it permissible for the mother to have them snatched with maximum drama from their grandmother's care? And for the cameras to be rolling throughout adds an extra dimension of moral complexity.

Did nobody at 60 Minutes think of the impact on the children? Or were they simply a prop, their undeniable cuteness a convenient hook to tug the heartstrings of middle Australia?

More disturbing still, was the story of a blonde Caucasian mother tugging back her li'l Aussie battlers from their Lebanese dad red meat for the sectors of the audience who still haven't gotten Cronulla out of their systems?

We are now in a society that does not forget. Once upon a time, those children would have needed to visit a library and leaf through microfilm images to find the reports of what happened to them. They probably wouldn't have bothered. Now, the sad facts of this case will spring up whenever Noah and Lahela put their names into a search engine (hi guys - I'm really sorry).

There are many lessons in all this. Firstly, child abduction is about as hard as - well, about as hard as anyone besides 60 Minutes, with long form in this area, might rationally imagine. If it goes badly, not only is there a risk of all those involved getting locked up, but the children could entirely foreseeably be injured. Can the supposed experts at Child Abduction Recovery International guarantee that in a place like Beirut, nobody will start shooting?

And secondly, the children's wellbeing needs to be put first - not just by the courts, but by TV producers looking for a potent story. And sometimes media organisations need to have the wisdom to turn down a juicy story if it's potentially not in the interests of the people who are offering it to them.

International law is a minefield, and accordingly, there are no easy solutions to these situations. Getting former soldiers to snatch kids is not a sensible way to resolve complex and sensitive disputes. Careful diplomacy is what's required, not cloak and dagger stunts. How much harder has this case made it for the next Australian-raised kids who end up facing the same situation overseas?

And finally, while I realise that expecting a commercial current affairs show to exercise restraint is like demanding that Donald Drumpf display humility, surely any sensible analysis of this situation will conclude that it was a mistake. The Nine employees could well have faced long sentences, and they and their families deserve considerably more care to be exercised by their employer in future. And the cost to the network is not just a huge financial payout, but also a loss of reputation.

Parents in a similar situation here in Australia make their cause worse in court, not better, if they take matters into their own hands in this manner. The same approach should be applied overseas. Sally Faulkner and the 60 Minutes crew are indeed fortunate that the Lebanese judicial system seems to have treated them with considerably more respect and consideration than it received.

A ridiculously slow road to a fast train

For years, I've dreamed of sauntering down to Melbourne's Southern Cross station and sliding into a comfortable seat on board a shiny new Very Fast or even Extremely Fast Train. I'd sit and work on my laptop, or read a book, or recline my seat to take a nap while the landscape whizzed by, faster than a Saudi diplomat being pursued by the AFP.

Occasionally, kind people would come past with coffee and snacks, and perhaps an in-seat massage. And then, less than three hours later, I'd alight at Sydney Central, and get on with my day.

I've loved travelling by train, ever since I lived in Europe as a child and got a taste for the romance of long-distance rail. More recently, travelling by shinkansen in Japan has hooked me on the convenience. There are so many trains between Tokyo and Kyoto, that at off-peak times you can just turn up at the station, confident you'll get on one.

But even if it ends up being slower point-to-point than catching a plane, I think it's still a better option. Just think of all the faffing around you avoid when you take an intercity train - not to mention the extra expense of the airport transfers. From Melbourne, there's the Skybus or taxi queue, then queueing to dump baggage if you have it, then the security scan, then the extra screening I seem to attract whenever I have a beard, then schlepping to the gate, then boarding, then you can't take out your laptop for roughly half the trip, then you wait to get off, then you wait at the baggage carousel, then you wait for a cab or train.

With a plane, you're constantly queuing, shifting, and lugging bags around. Trains are infinitely simpler.

Sure, complaining about this stuff is definitely a first world problem - but then, most of the rest of the first world has fast intercity trains. Australia's the only first world country I've ever visited where intercity trains, with their dedicated traffic-free corridors, are reliably slower than driving.

Just try travelling from Sydney to Newcastle, a route that inexplicably begins the trip to Newcastle, which is north-east of Sydney, by travelling due west to Strathfield, and you'll get a sense of just how absurdly archaic our train network is.

The Sydney-Melbourne air corridor is one of the world's busiest - and incidentally, I don't think a fast train will kill the airline industry, seeing as some of the more popular routes, like Tokyo to Fukuoka, are in Japan.

But with regular trains, just think how many more of us would travel intercity on a regular basis. It would provide competition to airlines, and it'd also provide a way around the Sydney Airport curfew. At last, you could leave Melbourne after dinner, and arrive in Sydney after midnight.

And the benefits to regional communities are surely enormous, too. Newcastle and the Southern Highlands would be transformed by quick connections to Sydney - it would become far more feasible for people to be based there and come to Sydney for meetings with clients, for instance.

Brisbane and the Gold Coast have already seen many benefits thanks to being connected by a relatively slow train, which will eventually connect both airports. How much better would it be for the region to be connected by a rapid line that continued south to the other east coast capitals?

A fast train would also integrate Canberra far more successfully with the most populated corridor in the country. The Acela train that links Washington DC with New York, Boston and Philadelphia is a legendary piece of infrastructure, famously caught by Vice-President Joe Biden so he could remain based in Delaware with his family - and yes, even the car lovin' Americans do intercity trains better than we do.

The Very Fast Train (and please, let's come up with a better name - I'm in favour of Ridiculously Rapid Train) rears its head with amusing regularity come election time, as Michael Koziol pointed out in the Sydney Morning Herald today. Malcolm Turnbull has been floating possible funding models, and Labor's Anthony Albanese has been a long-term booster of rapid rail.

Traditionally, we dream big pre-election, and then discover via a post-election study that it isn't viable, so I'm bracing myself for disappointment.

There's always a chorus of naysayers who point to the cost - and the estimated costs vary so widely, that I simply can't comment on whether it would make economic sense. That's why studies into these things tend to cost millions of dollars themselves.

But I'd point out that in other countries, they don't seem to dither over the cost of major infrastructure projects - they just build them. It's impossible to quantify the potential upside of the economic benefits that would flow from a high-speed train with affordable ticketing, especially for regional areas. Nor can we estimate the impact on our roads of far fewer inter-city drivers - it could reduce expenditure there, potentially - and there's also potential for a significant emissions reduction impact, especially if the trains were powered by renewable energy.

Why is it only Australia that seems unable to stomach major investment in rail infrastructure? France is only 2.5 times larger than Australia in population terms, and yet it's viewed as a given that they'll have high speed rail links. (2,000 kilometres of them, which is more than we need to link Melbourne and Brisbane.)

In Japan, they're extending the shinkansen network to Sapporo, a city of under two million people – much smaller, in other words, than the three state capitals that an East Coast Fast Train would serve. The bill will go into the trillions of yen, 76 per cent of the new line will have to be through tunnels, and it won't open until 2031, but they're just doing it anyway.

With Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane alone, we service a population of well above 10 million, within a 1700km track distance. Add in the Gold Coast, Hunter, Canberra and the Southern Highlands and you're well above half of our population, all in a reasonably straight line. Surely this would have been done years ago in any other wealthy nation with a relatively flat, seismically stable continent and these kinds of population patterns?

If we can afford $2 billion to host the Commonwalth Games in the Gold Coast, and can pay Telstra $1.6 billion to upgrade the network it already sold to taxpayers (and Telstra got $11 billion for selling its HFC and copper wires to NBN Co, incidentally), surely we can afford even upwards of $100 billion for a high speed rail network? Especially when, as Peter Martin has pointed out, debt is unusually cheap.

And if you don't buy into the dream the way I do, ponder this - if our international lawyers can figure out a way to make Saudi diplomat pay their speeding fines, that could go a long way towards funding it.

If our homes are our castles, can we smoke them up?

Every year, it gets a little harder to be a smoker. Successive governments have ratcheted pack prices further upwards - another hike is on the way if Bill Shorten is elected, and the Coalition may follow the same path.

The way things are going, future treasurers and finance ministers will indulge in a decadent puff on a cigarette instead of a cigar before handing down a federal budget.

The places where you're allowed to puff away are constantly being reduced, too. In 2017, Victoria will become the last state to ban smoking in outdoor dining areas, and in NSW, you can't smoke within four metres of the door to any building open to the public.

Smokers are being treated like social outcasts - although not criminals, because if they were in correctional facilities, they'd discover that a number of jurisdictions have banned smoking there, too.

Of course, unlike most endangered species, smokers are being driven from their preferred habitats for their own good. Governments are trying to encourage existing smokers to quit, as well as discouraging anyone else from taking it up. Furthermore, in recent years, it's been recognised that third parties shouldn't have to inhale second-hand smoke, which is why so many workers in pubs and clubs have been spared the thick fogs that used to typify their workplaces.

Quit Victoria has made the news this week with a proposal for the next step of restrictions in that state. The anti-smoking group wants to ban smoking in the home - or at least, in apartment blocks where thebody corporate resolves to create a smoke-free building.

NSW has taken steps towards cracking down on smoke in strata schemes already - the Government has flagged changes to its model by-laws to deal with smoke drift. It's worth noting that this wouldn't restrict a building's power to decide one way or another - it merely provides a guideline unless amended. Nevertheless, it's clear which way the wind is blowing.

Impeding people's rights within their own dwellings is a bold step. Quit Victoria's director, Dr Sarah White, acknowledges that people view their homes as a castle, where they get to control what's going on, but points out that it cuts both ways.

"We need to have mechanisms that will help people who don't smoke make sure their castle remains smoke-free," she says.

I'm not entirely sure how illustrative the castle analogy is, since from my limited understanding of history, castles aren't built besides and on top of one another, don't have common ventilation between one keep and another and tend to experience smoke only when invading armies torch them.

But the word captures the way we feel about our homes, and the pleasure we get from having one little corner of the planet where what we say goes. Our rights over our domains should not be yielded without careful consideration.

If adopted in a building, these new rules would require smokers not just to step onto their balcony for a quick puff, as many do now, but to take the lift down and walk a few steps away, to a position where their smoke can safely dissipate into the atmosphere. I can imagine smokers getting utterly enraged by the inconvenience - after all, their habit makes them irritable to begin with.

While I'm sure very few would seriously argue that the product would be legalised if introduced today, as things stand, cigarettes are allowed to be sold, and there's no serious proposal to change that. And this means that smokers have rights. Their bodies are their own, and if people want to mainline known carcinogens, then the only thing stopping them is common sense and unambiguous medical advice.

Dr White is right, though, that these rights need to be balanced. As an asthmatic, the right not to breathe second-hand smoke is important to me, since the ability to breathe freely is not something I take for granted. It frustrates me that people with normal breathing choose to jeopardise this by boarding the slow train to emphysema, but that's their decision. As countless eyelid piercings have shown, we get the right to make foolish decisions with our bodies.

Australia has long led the world in public policies which combat smoking, and we should be proud of this. Getting to the point where nobody takes it up is a worthy public policy goal. But surely there needs to be some respect for the rights of individuals in their own homes. If your smoke doesn't impact on other residents, I really wonder whether a body corporate has any business telling you otherwise.

This is not an unusual approach within strata schemes. There are all kinds of restrictions on residents, who may not make excessive noise that disturbs other residents, for instance. Interference with other people's "peaceful enjoyment" of their own "castles" is the yardstick used, at least in the NSW legislation.

So while I should have the right to be protected from your smoke, I believe that stopping you from smoking at all seems an interference too far. Perhaps if new buildings are constructed as smoke-free, the units could be sold only to non-smokers, in the same way that certain developments are designated for retirement-age residents only. In existing schemes, though, I suspect that owners' corporations shouldn't interfere with people's quiet, peaceful destructions of their own respiratory systems.

But if I catch so much as a whiff of anybody's second-hand smoke circulating through my apartment, I'll complain so quickly that they'll barely have time to extinguish the ciggie before a sternly-worded form letter from the strata manager arrives on their doorstep.

How I invented the Asiavision Song Contest

Some things are worth waiting for. This week, Barack Obama became the first US president to visit Cuba in 88 years. Scientists saw the shockwave from a supernova for the very first time. And SBS announced plans to host an Asia-Pacific version of Eurovision.

I called for this in the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald way back in 2003, and obviously my wise counsel set the ball rolling, albeit extremely slowly.

And yes, I am taking credit for this; and no, I don't care how many other people suggested it, nor how incredibly obvious it might seem.

Since my game-changing opinion piece, Australia has achieved something far more unlikely than our neighbours in Asia joining together to sing terrible pop songs - something that's done on a nightly basis throughout the region that bequeathed karaoke to the world. We have joined Eurovision ourselves.

I was surprised when Jessica Mauboy was invited to perform at that semi-final a few years ago. I was astonished when Guy Sebastian was allowed to participate in the main competition last year. And I was utterly flabbergasted when Dami Im was invited back this year, with the suggestion that this might become a regular thing.

Perhaps I shouldn't be so shocked. For years, I've watched people build friendships by coming along to other people's parties, being so enthusiastic that they ingratiated their way into the social group. Australia's like that kid who gets begrudgingly invited to the cooler kids' parties, and before anyone realises what's happening, they're the ones bringing out a tray of jelly shots.

YOUTUBE: Thank You, Comrade Kim Jong-il YouTube clip

Apparently no other country outside the region has been so devoted to Eurovision for so long, and if much of our love of the song contest is drenched in more layers of irony than a Sacha Baron Cohen movie, the last people to pick up on this would undoubtedly be the Eurovision organisers themselves.

It's one thing to be amused by Eurovision, or even to take it to the next level by sending our own representative. It's another entirely to stage one for our own region.

Eurovision was one of the first pan-European co-operative events, and as tenuous as the case might seem, it can be argued it lay the groundwork for the extraordinary integration that the region has achieved nowadays, at least until Brexit.

Our region, too, needs a mechanism to release tensions, just as Europe did all those years ago. Passions have been inflamed by China's recent aggressive actions on those contested reefs, and the scars from World War II have never been as successfully healed in Asia as they were in Europe, where Germany's approach to its wartime liberty has been rather a contrast to Japan's denialism over some of its own atrocities.

There are tensions across the Korean border, and if we define Asia more broadly than South-East and North Asia, we include the tensions in the subcontinent and also the ever-problematic Middle East.

Imagine all these countries vying not for geopolitical and economic superiority, but for the honour of producing the best/worst song in the whole of Asia. And, crucially, imagine the notion of a popular vote spreading throughout our many neighbours that don't currently allow that. It could be a revolution more profound than when Beyoncé dropped "Formation".

Peace and harmony are admirable goals - but beyond that, just imagine the sheer amusement on offer! The official press release hints at some of the delights that await us. As Blink TV director Paul Clarke says:

Imagine - the musical virtuosity of Bollywood, the cutting edge of K-pop, and the excitement of Chinese and Japanese artists - now the biggest music consumers in the world.

I do imagine those things, but I imagine so much more. I imagine Vietnamese rappers like SuBoi dropping S1<K beats, and the groovy hypnotic Morlum beats from the Isan region in northern Thailand. And above all, I imagine North Korea's Pochonbo Electronic Ensemble singing "Thank You, Comrade Kim Jong-Il".

They aren't the only excessively patriotic dags in our region, mind you. Check out "Stand Up For Singapore", from the island state whose sense of self-irony has never been quite as potent as its economy.

My only concern is whether Australia can mix it with the kitschy powerhouses of our region. So far, SBS has been choosing credible but bland artists, which I for one have found a little disappointing for a song contest that once handed its trophy to Mr Lordi.

YOUTUBE: Take you to the movies YouTube clip

I'm confident that if we look hard enough, though, we can find artists of sufficient quality for Asiavision. Take, for instance, the Sudanese-Australian rapper "Ur Boy" Bangs, who definitely bested Jimmy Fallon a few months ago after the talk show host included his track "Take U To Da Movies" in a segment mocking the world's worst music.

I want to take this opportunity to nominate Bangs as our first Asiavision representative, and I'm prepared to manipulate any popular vote, Boaty McBoatface style, to make that happen.

So well done, SBS, for giving us not one but two festivals of kitschy pop in which to revel each and every year. Next stop, the Pan-American Song Contest, and then we take things interplanetary.

This article was first published at The Drum

How to avoid tweeting your way to unemployment

Free speech is a fine thing. Unfettered self-expression is a precious gift. Some might say that in a democracy such as ours, it should have no limits whatsoever.

But in this era where we all carry portable publishing devices in our pockets, it should definitely have limits, and even if your employer doesn't impose them on you the way the ABC does on people like me, it makes good sense to impose similar rules on yourself.

So, with that in mind, here's some advice about how not to screw up on Twitter, the premier platform for laying social media landmines that explode beneath you at the most inopportune moments.

Now that I've published this advice, it's 100 per cent likely that I'll get into trouble on Twitter in the next 24 to 48 hours, because we live in a deeply ironic universe. But I'm prepared to risk that inevitability, just so that others may learn. Think of that before you post your own scathing tweet about whatever I'm about to say...

Choose your username carefully

The golden rule here is - don't include your job, or anything else that's subject to change. After Kevin Rudd was deposed as Prime Minister, he remained @kevinruddpm on Twitter for more than a week, which seemed extremely poignant, and also ill-advised. And yet his ex-pal Wayne Swan didn't learn from that, and registered @SwannyDPM shortly afterwards. Now he's @SwannyQLD, which isn't likely to change.

Not only is it humiliating to have to change your name when you lose your job involuntarily, but the earlier you can grab a good username, the better. The ABC's managing director was able to take over a disused@mscott account a few years back when he switched from @abcmarkscott, but not all of us have those kinds of contacts in Twitter HQ.

Tweet for the job you want, not the job you have

That advice is often given in terms of how you dress, but for how you tweet it's even more important. Last year, a relatively unknown comedian called Trevor Noah was given the enormous challenge of taking over The Daily Show after Jon Stewart's departure. Shortly after he was announced, a wonderful moment for him was overwhelmed by the discovery that he had tweeted some extremely off-colour jokes a few years earlier.

They're indefensible jokes, but most comedians push the envelope when they're trying to get noticed. Nowadays, they should probably stay in the comedy cellars. He got through it, but I'm sure it's still one of the first things that comes to mind when some non-regular viewers hear his name. Perhaps if he'd imagined how well things might go for him career-wise, he'd have been more careful...

To clarify - tweet for the job you want, always remembering that the universe is unpredictable.

In today's news, there are a couple of examples of the same kind of thing. The incoming Senator for Victoria, James Paterson, was scathing about the prospect of Malcolm Turnbull returning as leader, calling him "ineffective" in 2012. Perhaps he thought then that there was no way a comeback would happen, or that he himself would be offered a Senate spot so soon - but sometimes unlikely scenarios come to pass, especially in politics, and especially recently. If we learn nothing from the rise of potential-president Donald Drumpf and former-holder-of-the-balance-of-power Clive Palmer, we should learn this.

Similarly implausible, or so he may have thought, was the idea of the Greens and Liberals ever working together - and yet Jim Casey, who is trying to unseat Anthony Albanese in Grayndler, has been criticised for a series of tweets using strong language to refer to "Tory" parties - those very same people whose preferences he may find himself seeking before the election.

Don't try to use a hashtag for marketing

I call this the #qantasluxury effect. Some social media 'guru' at the airline created a competition back in 2011 - to enter, you had to post something using the hashtag #qantasluxury. Cue lots of jokes about terrible food and scheduling problems that quickly overwhelmed any legitimate entries.

And yet social marketers keep trying to do this. Just search for "hashtag backfires" like I did and you'll see there are stacks of examples. #AskTrump, #myNYPD, #NameAHorseRace, even #RespectMyPMin Malaysia. Closer to home, #YourTaxis created the opposite effect to the Victorian Taxi Association's hopes of rallying fans to counter Uber.

So it shouldn't have been all that difficult to predict that many, if not most, of the tweets under the Federal Government's own #ideasboom hashtag would be sarcastic in nature. Never forget that social media is a seething viper's nest of smartarses. (That's why we love it.)

There's too much risk in seeding self-serving hashtags, but if you cater to Twitter users' love of bizarre, timewasting inanity, things can still go viral in moments. That's what a few Australian comedians discovered when mucking around the other day with a deliberately stupid topic called#celebrityhousehats - before long, @Mashable had tweeted about it to their seven million followers.

Imagine your boss reading every tweet

Getting this wrong is one of the fastest ways to lose your job - here's a list of no fewer than 16 people who did, with former Age columnist Catherine Deveny being a well-known example. So is when you tweet a personal comment from a work account - I'm so terrified of doing that that I use a whole different app for work. Which leads me to…

Don't drink and tweet

Same goes for other substances too, of course. To see why, simply refer to any of the dozens of times@KanyeWest has found himself with a few hours to spare and unleashed a highly entertaining stream of consciousness. Recently, he hit Mark Zuckerberg for a billion dollars for "Kanye West ideas" and admitted to being deeply in debt. Kanye's tweets are like he's interrupting Taylor Swift's speech right on your smartphone screen.

Note - I'm not suggesting that Kanye was in any way intoxicated when he did this. As he'll tell you, he's pretty special. I just think that certain substances have been shown to, shall we say, bring out the Kanye in all of us. Take for instance the Australian cricket team.

Understand direct messages

Famous people send each other direct messages. They send them to fans, too. (At least so I've read - obviously I'm not famous enough ever to have been involved in anything like this.) But the problem is, in most Twitter apps, one tab is for totally private messages, while just next to it is the tab for the ones that are 100 per cent public. The risk should be obvious, right?

I'm going to try and be charitable by pointing out that we are all fallible when it comes to technology, but let's just say that former New York congressman Anthony Weiner is more fallible than most. When trying to mount a comeback from Scandal #1, some might have ensured that aides did all the tweeting on their behalf. But, well, let's just say that Weiner - or should I say Carlos Danger - is an enthusiastic, but not proficient, adopter of new technology.

You can't assume you'll remain anonymous

Refer to @RealMarkLatham.

Finally, when things go wrong, remember… deleting won't save you

The internet is like the North in Game of Thrones - it remembers. (And can be utterly brutal.) It's worth being aware of places like the Sunlight Foundation, an archive of US politicians' deleted tweets. If you stuff up, deleting isn't necessarily a bad idea - but you still need to apologise, because someone will have screencapped it. Like life, Twitter doesn't come with an undo button.

So, why would anyone use Twitter at all? It can make careers, too. It and Facebook have enabled Donald Drumpf to become the Republican frontrunner without spending much money (here's an interesting analysis from a marketing perspective). And comedians like Rob Delaney have built careers on consistently excellent (and edgy, as a word of warning) Twitter accounts.

Social media is a potent maker and destroyer of careers - so go out and do your worst, remembering that if you ever get anywhere, you'll definitely have to front a press conference and apologise for it.

This article was first published at The Drum

Say hello to election mania – and I do mean mania

Guessing what's in Malcolm Turnbull's head. That's what anyone with a passing interest in Australian politics will be doing for the next three months or so. In fact, it's recently overtaken Pin The Appropriation On The Responsible Subcommittee as Canberra's favourite parlour game.

No doubt the PM's head contains many things - public transport maps of our major cities, including photogenic selfie locations, and more Thucydides than anybody outside of a university classics department could possibly need. I suspect there are more tasty stories about Kerry Packer in there somewhere, too.

But if you searched long and hard enough, peeling back the layers of legal arcana and shimmying around the complex corporate structures contained therein, you would find an election date.

Speculation about this date has reached fever pitch in certain nerdy circles. It's dominating Insiders and Q&A, and it would probably be dominating the Bolt Report if it hadn't been consigned to the same place Channel Ten stashed Yasmin's Getting Married.

The commentariat is writing of little else, and I'm constantly hearing my fellow politiconerds say "If I were Malcolm Turnbull, I'd...", and coming up with their theory about his best tactical move.

(Personally, if I were Malcolm Turnbull, I'd immediately retire and go back to finessing my tech stocks instead of trying to mould our ramshackle polity into something workable, but that's just me.)

Because the House of Representatives doesn't have fixed terms, we get to play this game at least once every three years. Julia Gillard tried to avoid it by naming her date early - one in a long series of judgements that didn't solve her polling problems. Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott were also denied the chance to pick a date by their nervous colleagues.

In fact - and this astonished me when I realised it - no Prime Minister has been re-elected in their own right since John Howard beat Mark Latham in 2004. So Malcolm Turnbull is trying to do something that's as rare in Australian politics as a civil, constructive Question Time.

Numerous commentators have started to ask questions about what the PM's strategy is, and indeed whether there even is one. And given the lack of sweeping announcements in the past few months, we can only speculate that he's either getting all his ducks in a row as part of a carefully planned strategy reminiscent of the brilliant Athenian general Alcibiades (sorry if you thought we were getting through this without more Thucydides), or forlornly wondering why all his ducks keep flapping off.

But whether or not there is a strategy unspooling slowly before our eyes, or the PM genuinely can't decide what he wants to do, the result is the same: endless speculation.

At every opportunity, the political commentariat speculates about various dates, indulging in the sort of rule-in, rule-out games that politicians keep promising not to play with us. They'll painstakingly explain that because of the difference between the laws governing Senate and House elections, the PM's options are relatively few.

The best man at explaining this, of course, is ABC election analyst Antony Green, and he's gone into several hundred words on the subject. The most realistic option, though, is a normal election (House and half-Senate) between Saturday 6 August and the end of the year.

However - however - there's another possibility, and it's one that gets commentators, prognosticators, analysts, psephologists and approximately zero normal people hugely excited.

We could have...

Wait for it...

A double dissolution!

Yes, folks! An election that's exactly like a normal one for us voters, except that we would be electing the whole of the Senate instead of half of it.

And this possibility has let electoral geeks indulge in a feast of triggers and mandates and joint sitting talk. Let me explain just a little bit.

A double dissolution was, until recently, a completely suicidal move unless you were likely to win a whopping majority. That's because it's a lot easier for microparties to pick up seats in a double dissolution than in a regular election.

You know how last time, several people from the Motoring Enthusiasts and Liberal Democrats got up, along with several Palmer United senators until they weren't United any more? Even more of that kind of thing would happen than usual.

Or, at least, it would had the government not managed to obtain agreement for changes to the Senate ballot which should serve to freeze out most microparties. More on that in a sec.

A double dissolution would mean an earlier election, probably 2 July, after a long campaign. In other words, Christmas in July for election nerds.

And this is where the game gets really fun, in the unlikely event that you're the kind of person who finds this stuff fun. Because double dissolution speculation is, for the terminally geeky among us, even more exciting than regular prognosticating.

Let me try for a bit. The big question is, will the PM be so bold? Ah, but being so bold would mean having to rush through the Budget and a supply bill. And subjecting us to a near two-month campaign which would probably be about the details of that budget, which may contain belt-tightening measures. Very bold indeed.

But if he's passed this new voting legislation, which the cross benches strenuously oppose because it means an end to getting elected with a handful of primary votes, wouldn't he be crazy not to go for it? Since the crossbenchers will be impossible to work with otherwise?

Yes, but what if he cut a deal whereby he wouldn't go to a double dissolution, meaning the crossbenchers would all be guaranteed three more years of their sweet Canberra gig, in return for them playing more nicely in the next term of the Parliament? And so it goes.

This is fun, right? Well, I think it is. It's what I imagine a dinner party at Barrie Cassidy's place would be like if he'd ever invited me to one, or, indeed, even knew who I was.

Truth be told, I suspect the PM hasn't yet made up his mind what to do. After all, Alcibiades was nothing if not flexible.

So, in the meantime, we play the guessing game. A game which can only be interrupted by bombshells emanating from or about Tony Abbott, it seems. But even then, it resumes immediately.

And just think - we could be playing until December!

Some people actually enjoy this stuff - I'm one of them. But then again, some people enjoy running through mudpits filled with live electrical cables - an experience that I imagine is not unlike running for political office.

In any event, it's Game On in Canberra. And if you don't enjoy intense talk about dates (something which most political geeks only get to do before an election), my advice to the vast majority of Australians is not to talk to, listen to, or read any of our nation's small cabal of election nerds until it's over.

If crooks can communicate securely, why can't we?

If we learned one thing from the drama surrounding Edward Snowden and his revelations about the National Security Agency, it's that Russia is still the best place to go if you have US secrets to peddle.

But if we learned another, it's that governments are able to access far more of our personal information than we previously thought.

Even before we heard about PRISM and the rest, we were on notice that what we keep on our phones can be vulnerable. Way back in 2005, Paris Hilton (remember her?) had the contents of her T-Mobile Sidekick (bet you don't remember them) uploaded all over the internet.

It's happened to a litany of celebrities in the years since - Paris always was at the cutting edge of fashion.

Smartphones are portable grenades whose victims are likely to be ourselves. One ironically-named US politician has destroyed his career on multiple occasions using nothing more than the phone in his hand.

To the extent that any of us weigh up the risks at all, we seem to have decided that the fun and convenience of smartphones outweighs the risk. And so, we keep our lives on our phones. They're full of our photos, emails, documents, financial details and passwords. Accessing our smartphones is as close as it's possible to get to accessing our souls. And we trust that our gadgets are as secure as our own inner thoughts.

This is precisely why the FBI is so eager to get Apple's help with accessing an iPhone used in the recentSan Bernardino terrorist attacks. They believe it contains information that will help law enforcement officials uncover the rest of the attackers' network - an admirable goal, surely.

The right balance between privacy and law enforcement is difficult to strike. I suspect most of us would like the police to be able to protect us against "bad guys", but expect innocent citizens to be protected from rampant, speculative snooping.

Of course in practice, it isn't that simple - or so Apple says. CEO Tim Cook has released a public letter arguing that if they create a backdoor of this nature, it will be like opening Pandora's box - by which I mean the mythical figure, not the music streaming service.

It appears that the FBI wants Apple to disable two of the most potent security restrictions that the iPhone and similar devices possess. Firstly, they want to be able to make unlimited attempts to guess the phone's PIN without the phone slowing down between wrong attempts, as it's currently programmed to do in order to prevent "brute force" attacks. Secondly, they want to deactivate the feature whereby the phone gets wiped after 10 wrong attempts.

These changes would be made, it's important to note, only for this one phone, which would have a specially vulnerable version of the operating system uploaded to it. But Apple argues that if this is rendered possible even in one special instance, it will be possible for other hackers too.

On reading Cook's letter, I was sceptical. He suggests that right now, the knowledge about how to do what the FBI wants does not exist, whereas if it's invented, it can't be uninvented, so to speak. All phones will be vulnerable henceforth.

That's an assertion that seems worth querying. I'm no programmer, but surely the restrictions that currently exist in iOS are in a few lines of code that could easily be modified? Instead of wiping the user out after 10 wrong attempts, couldn't that number be changed to 1,000,000? And couldn't the slowdown between incorrect guesses also be modified to be, say, 10 milliseconds instead of 10 minutes?

There are probably complexities I'm missing, but it doesn't at first glance seem to be a request that involves radically re-engineering the phone or inventing some breakthrough. If anything, the FBI's request seems a lot less complicated than what the jail-breaking community routinely does with Apple's operating system. (Perhaps they'll help if Apple won't?)

But while I suspect it might be possible to hack into this one phone without compromising everything, Cook's effort to protect his users' privacy seems admirable in general terms.

Nobody wants to use a hackable phone. I'm sure everyone who buys one of his products would urge him to make them more, not less, secure. And I'm sure that the many members of the law enforcement community who use them feel the same way.

Cook is more convincing about the impossibility of creating a device that can be hacked only by one trusted set of users. If the FBI can get into everyone's smartphones, then others will be able to as well. And indeed, if Apple can theoretically hack the San Bernadino phone today, probably others can too.

More broadly, Apples seems to want to make devices that nobody can get into - not them, and not law enforcement. (Their Touch ID devices are apparently much harder to break into than the San Bernardino one, which is an old model.) If they're secure enough, no subpoena could compel them to breach their users' privacy, just as someone who installs an alarm for you shouldn't retain a code of their own.

As a user, this is extremely reassuring. As a member of the public, let's face it, it's somewhat scary. So where should the balance be struck?

It seems likely that the average terrorist already uses smartphone apps that are far more secure than the hardware itself. Apps like Wickr (used by Malcolm Turnbull) and TOR (funded by the US State Department) already permit what are believed to be completely secure communications, while Osama Bin Laden cleverly evaded the NSA's dragnet for many years by sending couriers with physical USB drives.

So while human error is already a factor and the odd criminal might stuff up and use an insecure smartphone on occasion, the really canny crooks are already using unhackable systems. Otherwise the US would be able to send in their drones about five minutes after the average ISIS lackey sent a text.

And while we know that there are terrorists out there exchanging messages that are a threat to our wellbeing, the reality is that the average person is far more likely to come into contact with hackers who want to steal their personal information. Our email inboxes are full of messages from scammers, and they fool millions of people each year.

So if the average terrorist is already using extremely secure communications platforms that are far less hackable than the devices they run on, and the average non-terrorist is at risk from hackers and identity thieves, I believe it's reasonable for Apple and other tech companies to continue to make devices that are as secure as possible. In terms of threats to the average person, it's probably the lesser of two evils.

There's also the question of whether we can always trust law enforcement agencies to do the right thing. History shows that while the vast majority are of course dedicated, admirable people, any organisation is subject to corruption. Should the dodgiest members of the law enforcement and intelligence communities really be entrusted with a back door to everything sitting on our telephones? And if our spies can get in, can't all spies?

It's tempting to voluntarily yield our civil liberties whenever we hear the word 'terrorism'. But while I'm a little sceptical of Cook's argument that this one exception would irrevocably open the floodgates, our cybersecurity is an extremely precious thing, and it's something that our law enforcement agencies are also supposed to be protecting.

Since criminals already seem to use state-of-the-art encryption that goes far beyond anything built into our day-to-day hardware, it seems reasonable that the rest of us are allowed to use secure devices as well.

My ten favourite thing about the 2016 Oscars

This was surely the first Oscars where more attention was paid to the people who hadn't been nominated than the people who had. Sitting through the 3.5 hour ceremony, it was hard not to notice every set of five nominees was uniformly white - and there were a lot of them.

But in terms of what happened, as opposed to what should have and didn't, here are the things worth talking about.

Mad Max Fury Road

Let's start with the parochial bit, because you can bet the news bulletins will. What an incredible achievement for George Miller's movie, which cleaned up in the categories that related to the look and sound of the film.

Best Film Editing. Best Production Design. Best Costume Design. Best Makeup and Hairstyling. Best Sound Editing. Best Sound Mixing.

Six Oscars in all. Six! The most ever for an Australian film, and it was particularly delightful seeing Margot Robbie present the Makeup and Hairstyling Oscar to another Australian.

Cobbling all of that excellence together arguably deserved Best Director ahead of Alejandro Iñárritu, but it's hard to resent one of the most interesting filmmakers alive today for his back-to-back wins. The bottom line is that The Revenant is billed as a 'serious movie' and Mad Max is a fantasy blockbuster, and while that makes the latter more watchable, it means that the Academy voters were always more likely to support the former.

George Miller can rest on his many, many laurels.

#OscarsSoWhite

In his monologue, Chris Rock immediately went there. Of course he did. Rock has spent decades wittily confronting America with its racial shortcomings, and he spent practically his whole monologue confronting the monochromatic elephant in the room.

Moreover, he did it so well that when he finished and the white people took to the stage to begin handing one another trinkets, you could sense the disappointment in the overwhelmingly white room.

That said, Rock's gag about how women shouldn't mind that they get asked what they're wearing because men all wear the same thing fell horribly flat, and some commentators have observed that his insight into sexism fell somewhat short of his insight into racism - although I liked the Björk swancallback.

But his willingness to mock every aspect of the process - including Will Smith and Jada Pinkett-Smith, the leaders of the boycott - was admirable nevertheless.

His sharpest observation, for my money, came in the form of a sketch inserting African-American actors into some of the Best Picture nominees, ending with Chris Rock being marooned on Mars by Kristen Wiig and Jeff Daniels. This is the bigger, and more challenging, issue behind #OscarsSoWhite. The vast majority of Hollywood movies are stories about white men. Even Straight Out Of Compton was written by white men.

The Oscars often overlook award-worthy non-white actors - I would have handed last year's Best Actor straight to David Oyelowo for Selma last year, but neither he nor the director Ava DuVernay was even nominated.

But the bigger issue surely is that not enough actors of colour get significant roles in the first place. Hollywood has a lot of work to do. And by choosing which movies to watch, the responsibility ultimately falls on all of us.

The scrolling thanks

This innovation was supposed to mean snappier, more meaningful speeches. While a noble idea, it didn't really work. The blathering thanks to profound statement ratio was the same as ever, only more speeches were awkwardly interrupted by 'The Ride Of The Valkyries'. (Does it get any whiter than Wagner, incidentally?) When this happened after less than a minute in many cases, I tended to wish that Odin's winged handmaidens would swoop down and hasten the rude orchestra on to Valhalla.

Stacey Dash

When Chris Rock introduced the Clueless star to wish America a happy Black History Month, nearly everyone watching in Australia said 'Huh?'. When I did so on Twitter, @anythingbutfifi pointed me to this article, which explained that she's a Fox News contributor nowadays, and suggested cancelling Black History Month in response to the #OscarsSoWhite controversy.

I'm pretty sure the whole thing was a joke at her expense that she wasn't in on. She wasn't the only one, but Chris Rock earned the right to amuse himself for a bit. (The other joke on the subject, with Angela Bassett, made me laugh out loud.)

Leonardo DiCaprio

Finally, Hollywood's sport of torturing one of its most earnest leading men is over. The best thing about Leo finally winning Best Actor is that he can stop making Oscar bait movies, and go back to choosing roles for fun - if he still knows how, given his plaintive acceptance speech about climate change.

Jenny Beavan

Stephen Fry likened her to a bag lady at the BAFTAs. But now not only does she have two more Oscars than he does, but she accepted her one for Mad Max: Fury Road wearing an awesome embroidered jacket.

The droids

Cameo of the evening went to C3-PO, R2-D2 and BB8. Although I couldn't help noticing that two in three of the droids were white.

Ennio Morricone:

This was the most moving moment of the night for me. An elderly man who was helped to the stage and also needed a translator, winning at the age of 87 for a score that was probably the best thing about The Hateful Eight. The bonus was that we got to hear what 'Tarantino' sounds like in Italian.

Spotlight wins best picture

This was a surprise to most viewers, with The Revenant or The Big Short tipped by most. And on a day when Cardinal Pell is giving evidence to the Royal Commission, too! Still, Hollywood loves a cause, and this one has, justifiably, been hard to ignore. I haven't seen the movie, but I'm glad that a movie about this subject beat the tale of some guy lost in the wilderness.

Alicia Vikander

Despite having been widely tipped, the winner of Best Supporting Actress (for The Danish Girl) was the most overwhelmed and enthusiastic winner of the night. It was a reminder that while we can be cynical about the awards, and analyse the politics ad infinitum, being recognised by one's peers still means an awful lot to those lucky enough to pick up a little gold statuette.

If only tonight we could sleep...

We don't sleep enough. Our doctors tell us this, assorted lifestyle gurus tell us this, and our bodies tell us this every time we wake up feeling like our heads have been gently bludgeoned with a fence paling.

Modern life stretches us until we're worn out like cheap rubber bands that have grown weak and flabby, no longer fit for purpose because they've become as horribly overextended as this metaphor.

But instead of heeding the message and retreating to slumberland, with earplugs, eye masks and a soothing recording of Dr Ben Carson's stump speech, we struggle on.

Resisting healthy sleep has become our daily norm. We are woken not by the sun at the time that suits our biorhythm, but by the remorseless bleeping of gadgets. On the way to work, caffeinated drinks jolt our sluggish brains into action. On the way home, electronic devices interrupt us with supposedly urgent messages, preventing us from shifting our minds away from the workplace.

Sleep is invariably our lowest priority.

And all the while, there's society's constant pressure to earn, succeed, compete and provide. Making rent or mortgage repayments, balancing budgets, planning for the future - it's stressful and exhausting.

Our sleep debts pile up at casino loan shark rates, and if we don't pay them back, the punishment is no less disturbingly physical. That's the main lesson from a new study by the US Centre for Disease Control which has found that the detrimental impacts of sleep deprivation go well beyond what's commonly understood.

I'm somewhat prone to insomnia, so I've always assumed I had a fairly good handle on the effects of inadequate sleep: that horrible groggy jet-lagged feeling, only without the excitement of visiting a new timezone. The heavy eyelids, the nodding off, the inability to form coherent sentences that transforms us into less perky versions of Sarah Palin. Dumb mistakes creep in, and everything seems just that little bit harder.

But according to the CDC's extensive study, there's more to sleep deprivation than this. Sleeping fewer than seven hours, the CDC says, increases your risk for "obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, stroke, frequent mental distress, and all-cause mortality". And if that's not disturbing enough, it also "impairs cognitive performance, which can increase the likelihood of motor vehicle and other transportation accidents, industrial accidents, medical errors, and loss of work productivity that could affect the wider community".

In other words, it can kill you slowly or quickly. And if you wind up in hospital courtesy of sleep deprivation, you might end up being killed by your doctor's.

We all know that when we haven't slept enough the night before, the following day is going to be a painful one. But clearly, that's not where it ends. "I'll sleep when I'm dead" is all very well, but the CDC is telling us that if we don't start taking sleep seriously, we will be.

As a lifetime non-smoker who has always been quite smug about it, I was shocked by the claim last year that sleep deprivation was as detrimental to health as smoking. The CDC report doesn't make this comparison, but clearly those of us who've given up or never started smoking because of the health benefits need to realise that there are other, equally important lifestyle decisions.

The sad thing is that the future wasn't supposed to work this way. Remember the promise of time-saving devices that would open up our leisure time? I'd hoped that our electronic wizardry would make it so we didn't have to put in more than four or five hours a day, and computers would do the rest.

Instead, of course, we've put in increasingly long hours because most people's work has become less physical, making it possible to do it all day. Cloud computing and portable electronics have also melted away the distinction between work and home.

Not sleeping enough is also a foolish approach to life. I've long been convinced that pulling very long hours is counterproductive - you can survive with very little sleep for 48 hours or so, but if it goes on beyond that, you'll get so much worse at your job that the benefits of pulling extra hours melt away.

It shouldn't be so hard to sleep more hours, given how naturally sleep comes to most of us, but it is. The artificial light from our ubiquitous screens trick our bodies into thinking it's time to be up and about, right when they're supposed to be lulling us off to slumberland. I constantly find myself checking Twitter or Facebook or a messaging app when I'm meant to be dozing off. Every time, I find something that fires up the neurones which are supposed to be slowly powering down, especially in this era when you can't go online without finding something you're supposed to be outraged about.

The temptation to put in a few more hours to get ahead is constant, and even when we have a night off, there's a temptation to stay out a few more hours to blow off some extra steam - although the spread of lockout laws is certainly helping with that!

So we can add sleeping enough hours to eating healthily and exercising regularly, two other things we're constantly told by doctors but never seem to get around to acting on.

But the CDC research makes it clear that many of us have to change. I constantly tell myself that I need to break out of the cycle of making myself so tired that I don't feel like exercising, and instead work out so that I'm sufficiently exhausted to sleep properly.

How precisely I make myself do that is currently beyond me, but I suspect it has something to do with willpower. Perhaps if I sleep more, I'll be able to figure it out?

Sleep deprivation is a form of torture, routinely practiced at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Most of the time, though, we're doing it to ourselves.

Dear Chris Martin, here's why Coldplay are funny

In an interview coinciding with his Super Bowl performance, where his band unwisely invited a contrast with the twin musical forces that are Beyoncé and Bruno Mars, lead singer Chris Martin confesses to not understanding why Coldplay are funny:

"I had a couple of years in the mid-2000s where it was really confusing to me," he said. "I was like, 'Why is our band sometimes a punch line?'"

A member of Coldplay not understanding why Coldplay are funny is, itself, fairly funny.

Well, Chris, I'd explain, but I'm not sure you'd understand. Someone who calls their child "Apple" clearly has limited self-awareness. But for anyone else unconvinced of Coldplay's amusingness, one sentence gleaned from a Guardian review of your performance explains both why your band is funny and why you aren't in a position to appreciate it:

Coldplay perform[ed] three of their biggest hits - Viva La Vida, Paradise and recent single Adventure of a Lifetime - on a flower-shaped stage, their instruments garlanded with flowers and the band's name written in Hindi on the drum kit.

You wrote "Coldplay" ... in Hindi … on the drum kit. Game over.

Or, as they say in Hindi, कहानी खत्म.

Now, the whole embracing flower power and mysticism thing was cool (as opposed to Cold) fifty years ago when the Beatles did it. It's far from cool now, and especially not at a gig sponsored by a cola corporation in the middle of a football match.

Their new song, which they performed at the Super Bowl, is called "Adventure Of A Lifetime", a name that's too clichéd for a self-help author. It comes from an album called "A Head Full Of Dreams", the last word of which should surely be pronounced "Dweams". Because Coldplay are many things - rich, successful, remarkably consistent, and by many accounts really lovely guys - but they are not cool.

Many of their ideas are twee, even some of the ones that are monster hits. That's been the case ever since their second and also head-themed album, A Rush Of Blood To The Head, which describes excitement without generating any of it.

But what that record did generate, in spades, was catchy, radio-friendly hits. I can't hear the arpeggiated keyboard intro to "Clocks" without wanting to punch a wall, or at least a clock, but there's no denying its popularity.

Also, they once released an album called Mylo Xyloto. And with that, the prosecution rests.

The thing is, I like a lot of what Coldplay do. Honestly. I was a massive fan of the first album, Parachutes. And ever since then, every album they've released has had a number of huge, singalong hits. "In My Place", "Speed Of Sound", "Fix You", "Viva La Vida", "Magic", "Paradise". All killers at karaoke, which is, of course, the ultimate test.

I saw them live at Splendour In The Grass a few years ago, and they were excellent. Honestly. Sure, they were selling t-shirts saying "Every Teardrop Is A Waterfall" at the merch tent, but if you set aside the cloying sentimentality of that lyric, they put on an excellent show.

Some musicians are dorks, and like it or not, that's Coldplay's place. Similarly, Bono seems unable to comprehend that after being pretty cool in the 80s and 90s, U2 are now a powerful, stodgy institution quite like the ones he likes to lecture about poverty. His band nowadays has a lot in common with their younger British imitators from across the Irish Sea, except Coldplay don't have to give away their records for free.

Worse things can happen. Even Paul McCartney, became consumed by tweeness as he aged. (Ringo was twee even in The Beatles, bless him.) Sure, it happened to Coldplay after one album, but they're still hugely popular and somehow selling records even in this age of piracy, so why not enjoy it?

The best solution from here, Chris Martin, is not to wonder why your band's funny, but to laugh along. Which, surprisingly, you seem to be extremely good at.

The same Coldplay that once released a song called "Hurts Like Heaven" also produced one of thefunniest videos I've seen in ages for a recent Red Nose Day. In it, they're trying to write a Game of Thrones musical that everyone except the band realises is terrible.

Martin leaps around with manic gusto, and we seeing him writing lots of hilariously terrible yet still-catchy tunes for it – the reggae number "Rastafarian Targaryen" and the incest love ballad "Closer To Home" are particular standouts. The latter features the lyric "Are you thinking about Joffrey, such a spirited lad / I was his uncle, I was also his dad". Then Liam Neeson chimes in with a voiceover – "It's the first romantic ballad about incest in Coldplay's career."

Now, that's funny. So was Chris Martin's episode of Extras, where he tackily tried to work cross-promotion into charitable projects and an excruciating cameo.

I'm not sure Coldplay wrote either of those scripts. But they went along with them, and good on them for it.

There's something endearingly humble about the band, too. In the same interview that Martin confessed to not getting why his creative impulses were hilarious, he admitted that he'd pitched a song to Beyoncé and she'd declined, describing it as "awful". This follows from drummer Will Champion's admission that Bowie declined a pitch, saying "It's not very good, is it?" What other band would have been sincere enough to admit to being dissed by Bey and Bowie?

I'd advise them not to do gigs alongside the ridiculously cool Beyoncé and Bruno Mars in future, and once they've burned the place down, definitely don't return to the stage for a weepy version of "Fix You".

But hey - if you come to Sydney and play another stadium gig full of upbeat but faintly effete power pop and sincere ballads, I'll happily go along. Just don't expect me not to snigger if you write "Coldplay" somewhere in Hindi.

10 things to talk about at a Hottest 100 party

It's January 26, and while the debate over the moral complexity of Australia Day continues, there's one thing today on which we can agree - the Hottest 100 is a musical feast for all!

Well, OK, not all, exactly - it's the youth station. But anyone who knows their triple j playlist as backwards as an Aussie rapper's cap - or anyone like me who will be listening in shamefacedly to catch up on a year's worth of music - is in for a treat.

The Hottest 100 has been part of our summers since I was young enough to sing along with all the songs on the countdown, and the tradition of Hottest 100 parties stretches back just as far.

The songs may have changed, but the conversations in our backyards and pubs on countdown day have stayed the same over the decades.

So I'm pretty confident that this exclusive guide to how to talk about the playlist that stops the nation is as up-to-the-minute as my musical knowledge is stuck in the late 1990s.

1) Who did you vote for?

The obvious place to start. It's hard choosing just 10 songs to sum up a year, isn't it? No doubt you'll want to showcase your good taste by sharing your perfectly composed list with all and sundry, but there is another approach. The real pros, like former triple j Drive host Lindsay 'The Doctor' McDougall, vote multiple times with multiple email addresses. Tricky!

(I don't know whether you're supposed to do this, but far be it from me to disagree with a real doctor...)

2) What'll be number one?

The big question. I think 'Hotline Bling' could be a dark horse, both because Matt and Alex from the breakfast show dressed as its video for the ARIAs, showing just how huge it was, and also because it's one of the very few songs being tipped for the countdown that I've heard of.

Anyway, this is the part of the conversation where I nod and try to look more knowledgeable than I am. But hey, I'm nearly 40.

3) How many Aussies are there?

After many years of concerns about under-representation, Aussies have been smashing it recently.Thirteen of the past 19 number ones have been home and hosed songs (that's triple j-ese for 'Australian'), and once again the number of local entries is likely to be very high - reflecting, in particular, how many great electronic/dance artists this country's produced in recent years.

Go Straya! And go triple j for playing so many sick Aussie tunes, ay!

4) How many women aren't there?

This is a more awkward topic. There's never been a number one by a female artist, and last year, at least according to one count, just over 20 per cent of artists had a prominent female member.

This is not a new issue for triple j to contend with - station manager Chris Scadden crunched the numbers back in 2013, and made the point that the station plays significantly more female artists than feature in these polls. And naturally, a listener-voted countdown like the Hottest 100 diagnoses a problem; it doesn't provide a chance to solve it.

One thing we can be sure of, though, is that triple j will continue to break new artists from a diversity of backgrounds - they do more of this than anyone.

5) ... But how great is Courtney Barnett?

Her unassuming, witty tales of suburban Melbourne life have attracted more hype than the resolutely low-key singer-songwriter would ever have sought. She deserves number one this year, I reckon. 'Depreston' captures the horror of the housing market in a way that must resonate with every Australian below 40 - and it's incredibly catchy, too.

In any case, though, I bet thanks to C Barnett, young women all over Australia are picking up six-strings in much the way Eminem once encouraged scrawny white dudes to enter rap battles. The results will surely be far more listenable.

6) Where's Bieber?

This question is this year's version of #tay4hottest100, except it's somehow not funny when it's Bieber. Plus, 'Sorry' is no 'Shake It Off'.

As with Taylor Swift, the answer is - absolutely everywhere else. While some artists do cross over (hello Drake), there's surely no point in triple j playing the same music we already hear on multiple commercial FM stations.

A broader comparison between the Hottest 100 and the other list of Australia's favourite 100 songs last year, the ARIA singles chart, is interesting - there will probably be at least a dozen songs on both lists. There's lots of Biebs and Tay Tay over on the ARIA chart - but also a lot more women in general. My quick count gave 40 songs with at least one female artist credited. It'll probably be ahead in terms of racial diversity, too.

This may reveal some uncomfortable things about the audience's listening and voting preferences. Or maybe it just says that female artists are conquering the mainstream, and not bothering so much with the alternative sphere. Then again, maybe the triple j playlist focuses more on singer-songwriters, and that world is still far more male-dominated?

Worth pondering while you listen, anyway.

7) Can you believe some guy manually entered 20,000 votes forTepid 100?

No, I really can't.

8) It's sad how nowadays so much music is just some dude with a laptop

I've been whinging about this problem at music festivals for years. But as with every other artform, technology is breaking down barriers and letting anyone have a go, and the results are often spectacular.

Maybe the gigs aren't as interesting, but the elaborate production is often more so.

9) Have you heard the story that inspired 'King Kunta' by Kendrick Lamar?

Which is the hot favourite for #1, on both the Tepid list and at least one betting website I checked. It's a remarkable tale - probably fictional - about a slave whose foot was cut off by slavers after multiple escape attempts, but who eventually triumphs.

If it wins, it'll change up a very white-looking list of #1s. Pretty potent song to play across the country on January 26, too.

10) The countdown isn't as good as it used to be

A few years ago, I heard this chorus at a massive Hottest 100 party where most of the attendees were in their 20s, and it was somehow depressing yet reassuring given my own 90s nostalgia.

I'll defend the 1995 list that reflects my first year at uni against any more recent 100. The truth is surely that the countdown is as good as ever, but we all eventually stop being 19.

So, have an excellent countdown, especially if you are 19 - it'll never get better in the years to come, I promise you.

And may the best song win.

The shocking shock of tennis match fixing

I am shocked by the revelations that have rocked the tennis world on the first day of the Australian Open. I am shocked that highly paid tennis players should be accused of taking extra payments to throw matches, and shocked by the sheer extent of the corruption that has been alleged.

And most of all, I'm shocked that such a dramatic exposé, reflecting months of intensive, data-driven, investigative journalism, has been broken by Buzzfeed.

No, no; Buzzfeed does proper journalism alongside the deluge of cute pet listicles.

Early in his campaign, they published one of the most fascinating long-form articles on Donald Drumpf I've ever read, and only last year, former ABC journo Mark di Stefano uncovered the origins of the finest meme in Australian political history (link contains strong language and even stronger research).

But still, today's "Tennis Racket" piece is probably a high watermark for the website, just as these allegations seem to be a low watermark for a sport which used to consist of gentlemen gently popping the ball over the net with tiny wooden racquets until one of them yielded so both players could stop for restorative gin and tonics.

The investigative effort has demonstrated a level of determination that's positively Hewitt-esque - just getting your head around the number-crunching involved is exhausting. And this kind of intensive analysis surely provides the best path forward for tennis, which, to guard against future allegations of this nature, clearly needs to employ its own team of data watchdogs looking for sudden betting surges which could indicate a fix.

Big data analysis works well to detect dodginess - your bank employs a similar system of constant data analysis to figure out whether your credit card details have been stolen. Perhaps the most disturbing part of the scandal is the apparent refusal of the sport to put a thorough detection process in place for years after the alarm bells first sounded.

Buzzfeed credits Betfair, one of the world's leading sports gambling agencies, with detecting an irregularity in a notorious 2007 match in Poland. Some might view this sophisticated detection system as a guarantee that most sports remain clean. While this may be true, I would cynically point out that the same mathematical geniuses who designed the alert system presumably tweak the odds to ensure that the house is almost always ahead.

But if we learn anything from the tennis allegations, which follow major match-fixing claims in cricket, soccer, basketball and a number of other sports over the years, it should be that gambling on anything involving human beings is fraught with problems. Wherever there are humans, there will also be human frailty, and therefore greed and corruption. Wherever there's big money to be made on the side, there will be what can perhaps be termed Cronje capitalism.

Sports betting has been around for millennia - the Romans used to enjoy a flutter on chariot racing; and for millennia, betting on the outcomes of contests that can be manipulated has been about as foolish as voluntarily becoming a gladiator.

For there to be superstar champions in sport, there has to be a raft of less successful, more poorly compensated players, eking out a living by getting defeated in the first or second round. At some point, these athletes, who train just as hard as the big names, realise that they'll never win lucrative sponsorships or access the major prize pool. Little wonder then that they're apparently susceptible to throwing the odd set here or there to make as much money as they can before they retire. It's heinous, obviously, but it's an inevitable result of how lopsided the financial rewards in sport have become.

And one of the main sources of the deluge of money for successful players has been the gradual legalisation of sports betting. Nowadays, you can't watch overseas soccer matches without being bombarded with animated ads for betting sites along the sidelines, and their logos even feature on the chests of the players themselves. In the decades ahead, presumably, huge global gambling agencies will buy up entire sports and stream them via the internet with feeds that are constantly interrupted by the latest live odds.

Even in relatively regulated Australia, we are moving closer to ubiquitous sports betting ads. This is the first Australian Open where gambling promotions are being allowed on the arena itself, the timing of which now seems ironic to say the least. Tennis regulators are surely as unlikely to be able to halt the enormous growth of online betting in their sport as any other sports administrators. Surely it's only a matter of time until even the Olympics adopts a new logo that turns the five rings into zeroes next to a dollar sign.

The truly sad thing about the obnoxious growth of legal, regulated gambling, though, is that as this scandal reminds us, it's vastly preferable to the kind of unregulated, illegal gambling that seeks to fix matches. As irritating as I find them, huge multinational gambling corporations which constantly monitor sports for irregularities are probably the best guarantee we have that the match itself will be a genuine contest, albeit one that's constantly interrupted by annoying betting ads.

In one sense, these embarrassing accusations come at an excellent time for the 2016 Australian Open. Given the scrutiny that will follow these allegations, surely nobody would dare to throw so much as a point at Melbourne Park over the next fortnight.

The ongoing challenge for tennis will be to ensure that it closely monitors all future matches, especially those away from the grand slam spotlight, to guard against results that are only unexpected to those who aren't in on the scam.

Desperately seeking El Chapo

The actor Sean Penn and the narcotraficante Joaquín 'El Chapo' Guzmán, who recently traded tequila shots in the Mexican jungle, have more in common than might be immediately apparent. They've both had a long association with products that have been blamed for the moral decline of Western civilisation - in Chapo's case, illegal drugs; in Penn's, Hollywood movies and Madonna.

I'm not sure which was the greater challenge, tracking down the Mexican drug kingpin or reading Sean Penn's 10,000 word article about him. The former took six long months, while the latter certainly felt like it did.

But if you wade through the endless paragraphs which betray the author's greater fascination with himself than with his subject, there is an extraordinary story to discover. Penn's tale of burner phones and planes fitted with scramblers feels like a thriller, and his success in reaching Chapo seems so implausible that it's lucky that the two of them took a photo together to prove it really happened.

Despite the contempt many have expressed for Penn, it cannot be denied that while Mexico and America were using every resource they had to find him, a Hollywood actor managed to reach him while armed only with hubris.

Given Penn's stunning success, one can only wonder how many years and lives could have been saved if the hunt for Osama bin Laden had been entrusted to Justin Bieber.

It's possible that Penn's contact led directly to Chapo's capture, and if that's the case, the actor is undoubtedly as brave as he is naive as he is at risk of having an extremely uncomfortable conversation with a blowtorch-wielding member of the Sinaloa cartel.

And while the world generally indulges its film stars, it's unlikely that Chapo's associates will give Penn a free pass because they liked his stoner character in Fast Times At Ridgemont High.

We're only in the second week of January, but I'm confident that Penn's trip to visit Chapo will not be topped in this year's surreal celebrity story sweepstakes. Surely we've already found the 2016 version of Barnaby Joyce's jihad on Johnny Depp's dogs?

There's just so much about this tale that seems implausible, from the involvement of a glamorous Mexican star who has played a narco on-screen, to Penn's assertion that he has no idea whether laptops are still a thing, to his confession that at a pivotal moment in the narrative, he passed wind.

Perhaps the strangest twist in the story is the suggestion that the drug kingpin's desire to produce his own biopic led him to meet with Penn. Despite being the most murderous drug lord in a notoriously brutal country, El Chapo seems no less insecure about his place in history as any tinpot dictator who's ever filled his suffering country with statues of himself.

The drug boss seems to be attempting a more extreme version of the project undertaken by the members of NWA when they airbrushed the darker side of their own pasts out of Straight Out Of Compton. Quite possibly as a result, he's now unlikely to get a triumphant ending, and will instead rot in a US jail.

So El Chapo's motives for meeting the actor were clear enough. But why on earth did Sean Penn want to sit down with the world's most notorious drug trafficker?

His lengthy justification involves the oft-cited argument that the 'War on Drugs' has failed, and that addiction should be treated through the paradigm of healthcare rather than law enforcement:

What of the tens of thousands of sick and suffering chemically addicted Americans, barbarically imprisoned for the crime of their illness? Locked down in facilities where unspeakable acts of dehumanization and violence are inescapable, and murder a looming threat. Are we saying that what's systemic in our culture, and out of our direct hands and view, shares no moral equivalency to those abominations that may rival narco assassinations in Juarez?

This is a critique worth exploring, and even President Obama has been declaring his dissatisfaction with the War on Drugs of late.

And yet you don't need to sit down with one of US drug policy's greatest villains (and, arguably, beneficiaries) to examine the situation's complexities. Regardless of what one might think of the way our society moralises about the product he supplies, El Chapo is undoubtedly a mass-murderer.

Penn's extracurricular 'activist' activities are as passionately conducted as they are widely parodied. Presumably Penn told himself he was provoking some much-needed debate, and got excited about the adventure involved - which, admittedly, was considerable. But just because you're offered access to a fascinating villain doesn't mean you should take it on any terms.

We cannot expect Sean Penn to act judiciously unless he's in front of a camera, but Rolling Stone should not have endorsed his mission. The conflicts involving Mexico's drug cartels have led to the deaths of more than 160,000 people, according to government estimates, and no deals should be cut that might benefit the reputations of anybody involved.

And while the actor's article is certainly not hagiography, Rolling Stone's decision to grant Chapo approval was indefensible. Even if the effort backfired and led to his capture, no self-respecting publication should trade its integrity for even as extraordinary an exclusive as this one.

Rolling Stone's formidable reputation has suffered in the wake of recent scandals, and the magazine that published Hunter S Thompson's brilliant first hand-accounts needs to lift its standards. Penn's piece is not the classic gonzo journalism it purports to be. Rather, it feels more like a stunt pulled by a different kind of Gonzo.

For Penn's sake, I just hope Chapo's henchmen are kinder than the journalism academics will be.

We should look gift cards in the mouth

Dick Smith Electronics, that venerable merchant of gadgetry and geekery, entered receivership this week. It's terrible news for the staff and shareholders, but will presumably make no difference whatsoever to the private equity firm that made a motza out of flipping the business.

That's 21st century capitalism, folks!

The biggest impact for most Australians, though, will be for anyone who scored a DSE gift card for Christmas, or has put down some cash against a lay-by. Whether or not they'll be honoured is unclear -the administrator Ferrier Hodgson says not, but they may not have the last word on it, given various consumer-protection regimes. (Watch this space was the advice when I spoke to NSW Fair Trading about this on the radio this morning.)

Regardless of what happens with the Dick Smith situation, though, it's a reminder of something that's worth bearing in mind whenever Christmas or birthdays come around: gift cards are a terrible idea.

At the risk of seeming like a huge ingrate to anybody who's ever bought me one, the fact is that gift cards exist for one reason and one reason only: because some of us feel crass simply putting money in an envelope.

Gift cards offer a relatively elegantly packaged item that can be placed under the tree on Christmas morning, and handily, you generally don't even need to buy a separate card.

They do, though, prove that you cared enough about the person to go into a brick-and-mortar retailer and hand over your cash to an intermediary instead of handing the cash over directly.

They're convenient for us, and also for the recipients, who buy what they actually want instead of having to pretend we nailed it. They also allow a little control to be exercised - if you give somebody a bookshop gift card, they'll have a degree of difficulty blowing the money on lollies or booze.

Other than that, though, all the benefits would seem to lie with the retailer. They get the cash upfront for a guaranteed sale, as they're generally non-refundable. And often gift cards simply sit in our sock drawers unspent, which means the seller literally makes money for nothing.

Even when we do use them, there's just about always either a tiny remaining balance that we don't bother to spend, which ends up as pure profit to the retailer; otherwise, we can soak the remaining balance up by buying something that costs more, meaning they make extra money. It's a win-win.

What seems most outrageous about these notionally kind gifts, though, is the adoption of expiry dates. In effect, the shop gets to simply forget about its debt if we don't get around to collecting on it quickly enough. Just try that on any other category of debt and see how far that gets you. But no - for some reason, gift card sellers get to impose special, self-serving conditions which mean that at the end of the following year, they just get to keep the money. Merry Christmas, retailers!

This practice is indefensible. Thanks to inflation, a $50 gift card is almost always worth less by the time it's spent than it was when it was bought. And in the meantime, it's been earning interest for the retailer. Why on earth shouldn't they have to honour them for as long as humanly possible?

Given all this, I can certainly see why stores push gift cards so enthusiastically. But for consumers, they seem a dreadful option.

What can be done? At the very least, they should probably be renamed 'unsecured creditor cards', if the Dick Smith administrators' argument prevails. The terms and conditions should perhaps be made much more explicit, and consumer protection legislation may need to be beefed up.

One suggestion doing the rounds on Twitter today would see gift card payments kept in a trust fund so that they were protected from being counted as an asset for the retailer until they had been spent. That seems a reasonable approach, and is probably in line with what we expect when we give money for gift cards - that it'll be treated like cash by that retailer.

Some common conditions even specify that they'll be treated like cash in that they won't be replaced if lost, which surely means they should also be treated like cash in that the money can't magically disappear just because the person you got it from has financial difficulties.

But unless authorities step in and change the rules, or we stop buying gift cards in an effort to exert pressure on retailers, nothing will change.

The best solution may well be for us to stop kidding ourselves that gift cards are any more classy than putting cash in an envelope with a little note saying, "Thought you might want to buy yourself a video game."

Cash isn't the most thoughtful of gifts, I suppose, but any concerns about a perceived lack of effort can, I find, be quickly erased by the fact that you have a bunch of cash sitting in your hands.

Unlike Dick Smith, as we now know. So let the company's woes be a lesson to us all. There's a good chance that when you buy a gift card, it will end up being only a gift for the retailer.

Strong with the force this sequel is, or something like that

Star Wars fans, fear not. Firstly because fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate and hate leads to suffering, etc. And more importantly because JJ Abrams and his team have succeeded in augmenting the original trilogy where even George Lucas could not.

The Force Awakens offers more of the same to a degree that I found surprising. It takes many of the familiar elements of the original trilogy and mashes them up into a new narrative. There are desert and forest worlds, dodgy spaceports and gleaming starships, scary tentacled aliens and tense lightsabre duels, all fuelled by the interpersonal drama that's always been at the heart of the series.

Best of all, there are no convoluted plots about trade negotiations, and nary a Gungan in sight.

The déjà vu is intense - just about every scene feels reminiscent of something that's appeared before, like a series of narrative Force Ghosts. But Abrams breathes an abundance of new life - new hope, even - into the franchise with some engaging young performers alongside the familiar favourites.

It's hard to discuss a movie without revealing a little bit of the plot. It's especially hard when Disney has done such an excellent job of concealing the details of the decade's most anticipated film. Despite watching every trailer, I never had a firm handle on what the story was about, and there are surprises galore in store. Do try and stay away from spoilers.

For the purposes of this review, I'm going to assume you've watched a few clips, at least, but I won't give any more details than appear there.

We rejoin the galaxy far, far away a few decades after the Battle of Endor. There's still a Rebellion, and they're still fighting against stormtroopers, TIE fighters and a black-clad, mask-wearing enforcer who terrifies even his own colleagues with his dark side powers.

One of those stormtroopers, Finn, abandons his fellow shiny goons and joins forces with a young scavenger, Rey, who lives on a desert planet rather like one we've seen before. Accompanied by a new droid, BB-8 (presumably the offspring of R2-D2 and a soccer ball) they meet Han, Chewie and Leia on their travels, among others, and end up getting drawn into the wider conflict.

The new characters are compelling, which is perhaps the greatest achievement of The Force Awakens, seeing as they have to carry the story despite the procession of series legends. Daisy Ridley's prickly smarts and John Boyega's charisma work excellently, especially when they're onscreen together, and despite my fears yesterday, let's just say that Adam Driver gives us something brand new and rather extraordinary as the hooded, masked Kylo Ren.

The whole thing has been done with enormous love and devotion, together with some outstanding special effects. Clearly, we are in the hands of superfan filmmakers.

If anything, they might have been too reverent. Bold new ideas are thinner on the ground than fans of The Phantom Menace. It's JJ Abrams' other star-based franchise that's dedicated to boldly going where nobody has gone before, after all.

At the end of the film, I'd enjoyed myself immensely - there's plenty of action and drama. But I was left with many questions about the characters, and how the galaxy's new order stacked up. Some of these questions are cliffhangers for the next instalment, clearly, but some felt like the results of undue haste in the storytelling.

The Force Awakens is so good that I'm extremely confident in the new creative team. But despite the two hours of Episode VII, it's fair to say that they're only just getting started.

In the end though, the important thing is that the film delivers what we love about Star Wars in spades. Nobody will be unhappy, especially if they see it in 3D. The wonderful dogfights and several scenes where the action looms out at the audience make it well worth the extra bucks for crappy glasses, especially because you get to feel like the mysterious new Maz Kanata.

In what's destined to be one of the film's most famous lines, Han Solo boards his ship and says, "Chewie, we're home". It's hard not to feel the same way. JJ Abrams has navigated his way through an asteroid field no less perilous than anything the Millennium Falcon has had to face, and done so spectacularly. I just hope that now it is awake, the Force is working on a few answers for us.

Five things I want to see in 'The Force Awakens' - and five things I don't

I can't wait to see The Force Awakens, but like any fan, I'm hoping they'll bring back the good stuff and leave out the bad. Here's my take on what that might look like...

Lots of terrible things happened on Naboo, like Jar Jar Binks - but the set design was sensational

Five things I want to see

Amazing sets

The prequels are far worse than the original trilogy in just about every respect - but the settings are an exception. Whereas the first three instalments had to opt for generic sand, ice, swamp and forest environments found on Earth, the prequels gave us the computer-generated gorgeousness of Naboo and the awesome Manhattan-on-crack intensity of Coruscant. CGI has come a long way since the days when Natalie Portman was strangling her vowel sounds as Queen Amidala, and I can't wait to see what the designers have come up with for The Force Awakens.

Yoda

I know he didn't make it out of the original trilogy alive, but I don't care - besides Darth Vader, the little green grand master is the best character in the series. Even if we can't bring him back, surely another wise yet adorable cousin who puts verbs at the end of sentences Yoda has? Do or do not, JJ Abrams. As Star Trek: Into Darkness proves, there is no try.

Female Jedis

There are a few in the Clone Wars cartoon series, apparently. But come on, Lucasfilm - lady Jedis are long overdue in the live action series. The shots of Rey wielding a lightsabre in recent trailers are promising, but if the Jedi Order is being reconstructed, it's high time some gender balance came into the Force. And speaking of which, I hope the series doesn't get too fancy with its weapons - there is nothing like a lightsabre battle - or perhaps a light-sword battle, Kylo Ren?

Dark, or darkish, Luke

We don't yet know what's happened to Luke - he isn't in any of the posters. Has the ageing process done what even the Emperor's lightning bolts couldn't, and turned our boy to the dark side? Probably not, let's face it - I suspect he's taking a soggy leaf out of Yoda's swamp and becoming the new reclusive trainer.

But a bit of character complexity wouldn't go astray for a character who has always been not only kind of short for a stormtrooper, but kind of dorky for the main hero of the greatest sci-fi trilogy ever. I'm not entirely sure that Mark Hamill has the acting chops to pull off a more sophisticated version of Luke, but I hope we get to find out.

Scary villains

Darth Vader's is a tough helmet to fit into - especially now that it's all melted, as seen in the trailer - but in the Emperor, the original series unleashed an even scarier villain. The prequels struggled to match these baddies - Palpatine was just getting started on his nefarious schemes, while Darth Maul was a squib despite his awesome face paint and double lightsabre. And Count Dooku ... was called Count Dooku, c'mon. Even if he was played by the ever-reliable Christopher Lee.

I'm sceptical about just how terrifying Adam Driver's Kylo Ren will be - he seems like the kind of guy whose wrath would extend to sending you to only the second-best craft beer bar in Williamsburg - but we can hope there's some genuinely spine-chilling scenes in store.

And five things I don't want to see

Ethnic stereotypes

For some reason, George Lucas packed The Phantom Menace with enough racial stereotypes for a Bill Leak cartoon. Jar Jar Binks invoked all kinds of jaded, horrible African-American caricatures, while the mendacious merchants of the Trade Federation were a throwback to perceptions of Asians that felt more reminiscent of the Opium Wars than Star Wars. The greedy junk shop owner Watto has also been perceived as anti-Semitic.

While George Lucas denies that these characters have any racial connotations, and it's hard to imagine that it was done intentionally, it doesn't matter - these uncomfortable associations would have gone a long way towards ruining Episode I if the terrible dialogue and cringe-inducing acting hadn't done so already.

This would also mean no Jar Jar, obviously. Good.

Midichlorians

The Star Wars universe was already laden with Force mumbo-jumbo, but that was kind of OK when it meant Jedis could play mind tricks, do athletic leaps and wield those awesome lightsabres.

For some reason, though, the notion of Anakin's elevated midichlorian count really broke the tauntaun's back. What's more, it led to the deeply silly notion of Anakin's immaculate conception. From which we can gather, since Ani's mum Shmi Skywalker is a brunette, that the physical embodiment of the Force is whiny, has blonde hair and is partial to bowl cuts.

Fat-shaming

I know Jabba's not a good guy. Not only is he a crime lord whose foul tentacles extend far beyond Tatooine, he wanted Han Solo encased in carbonite even though Han was well on the way to assembling the credit needed to repay his debt. But please - did he have to be morbidly obese? Why couldn't it have been a coincidence that the Hutt shares his species with an all-you-can-eat pizza place?

Podracing

One of the many reasons Episode I is so terrible is because a great deal of screen time is given to those dumb races where Anakin wins the freedom we all know he was destined to win from the dastardly Watto (see above). We all know he succeeds, so there's no suspense, just crappy special effects as the pods zoom around that boring canyon.

I can only assume that the podracing was included to sell toys and videogames, but since it's an axiom that all Star Wars videogames stink like Chewie after a dip in a trash compactor, I do wish they hadn't bothered.

Another Death Star

The Death Star is a brilliant and truly sinister concept, but come on - they shouldn't have gone back to the same idea for the climax of Return of the Jedi. And while it was foolish of the initial designers to render the first one vulnerable to Luke's proton torpedoes, surely you'd get rid of any such vulnerabilities for #2? If I was Emperor Palpatine's insurer, I would have refused to pay out on the loss of the first Death Star until they came up with a design that was fully Rebel air raid-proof.

When the major difference between the endings of A New Hope and Return of the Jedi is a bunch of ewoks, it's clear they were out of ideas. So they really had better not resort to a third Death Star in any of the new sequels, or I swear I'll breed my very own Sarlaac and feed it JJ Abrams.

Lateral ways to convince punters to quit smoking

Forty bucks for a pack of ciggies? That will happen by 2020 if Bill Shorten gets his way and Labor's proposed increase to cigarette taxes is introduced.

Not everyone agrees with tobacco excise, with NSW's Senator David Leyonhjelm a prominent recent dissenter, but at both state and federal levels, governments of both persuasions have made cigarettes more expensive, covered the packets with horrifying images, and restricted the places where they could be smoked.

Nowadays, smokers huddle outdoors, away from doors and outdoor eating areas, and the long Aussie tradition of bumming cigarettes has become tantamount to asking for a gold coin donation.

But is this the only way of convincing punters to give up their precious ciggies? I've come up with a few more lateral options.

Built-in speakers

We've all seen those cards that you open and they play a little song. What about mandatory cigarette packets that, when opened, let out a loud, hacking cough?

Zinger ciggies

If Bill Shorten is determined to reduce smoking, he might also like to put his famous sense of humour into action. If every cigarette had a Shorten one-liner printed on it, smokers would feel nauseous every time they lit up. On second thought, though, this might require careful testing because if cigarettes had things like "Once upon a time, I thought denial was a river in Egypt" printed on them, some might be tempted to set them on fire immediately.

Scented cigarettes

Back when you used to be able to smoke in pubs, I'd regularly come home reeking of ciggies, even though I've never smoked. It seemed particularly unfair that smokers lose the ability to smell the scent that infests their own clothing.

But there is one aroma powerful enough for the impotent nostrils of smokers could detect - the scent of an ashtray at the end of the night. If all cigarettes were rolled in paper dipped in eau de ashtray, we would surely see a drop in smoking rates immediately.

Ciggie roulette

What if in every box of cigarettes, there was one unmarked filter that delivered a huge hit of wasabi? We all know that smoking has many risks - now there's a new one. Chili and ultrasour filters could also be available.

Point-of-sale boredom

We know that making cigarettes expensive works, but this disproportionately strikes the least wealthy among us. So why not waste the time of everyone wanting to buy cigarettes?

Whether it's watching a mandatory public health video, signing a lengthy contract and initialling every clause, or completing a multiple-choice health impact quiz like the one you have to do to get a learner driver's license, this would hugely reduce the desire to buy a fresh pack.

Freshly shocking packaging

Australia's world-leading plain packaging laws have been credited with reducing smoking rates via a series of disgusting images printed on cigarette boxes. But after a few years of this, I wonder whether they're losing their impact.

Instead of rotting teeth and diseased lungs, we might need a fresh disincentive. Surely nobody would want to buy cigarette packages with images of politicians on them?

Leave penalty

If you think about it, two five-minute smokos per day across the roughly 220 days we all work per year means 2,200 minutes per year which is 36 hours which is approximately one working week. So, what if non-smokers got an extra week of leave? Then again, this logic could also penalise people wasting time on Facebook or watching YouTube cat videos, in which case the modern economy would collapse completely.

Evil product placement

Watch any old movie, and you'll see that the cool dude and the exciting broad generally have cigarettes between their fingers. This kind of thing has been stamped out in subsequent years, but what if we went a step further, and insisted that the movie and TV industries follow in the footsteps of the X-Files, whose mysterious baddie was known only as the Smoking Man?

In the new season of Game of Thrones, the terrifying White Walkers could be depicted holding equally white cigarettes, while the Star Wars movies could be re-edited once again so that the Emperor's maniacal laugh was punctuated by hacking smoker's cough.

Smoking lounges

What if those horrible, depressing little rooms in some airports were everywhere, and became the onlyplace you were allowed to smoke?

Giant fans could extract the thick fug of smoke from the ceiling and then pump it afresh into the room so everyone could benefit from the secondary smoke into the bargain. These rooms could also be designated as the only places where cigarettes could be purchased - from machines, of course, because anyone made to work there would earn millions in the inevitable lawsuit.

Market cigarettes as healthy

I've no idea how you'd accomplish this, but surely the best way to encourage many Australians to give up ciggies would be to somehow convince chronic smokers that cigarettes are healthy. We know that regular exercise and a sensible diet prolongs life - we also know that the vast majority of us totally ignores this message. Fortunately, the tobacco industry has some old marketing material that would be just perfect.