Cricket civility and NYE blasts

Instalment #3 of my columns filling in for Peter Fitzsimons in summer 08/09.

A sporting sporting triumph

Seeking only to capture the experience for Sunday Extra readers, I selflessly attended the last two days of the Sydney Test. The contest between our inexperienced attack and the skilful South Africans was enthralling, and Graeme Smith’s decision to bat remarkable. The entire ground winced pre-emptively as the injured skipper faced every full-paced delivery. I probably wasn’t the only person half-hoping he could hold on for the draw.

Smith and his team have shown throughout this series that it’s possible to be tough and uncompromising and yet gracious and polite. And from the ruin of a first home series defeat in fifteen years has risen a most unfamiliar phoenix: an Australian team which can win a Test match without racial controversy, and so little sledging that Shane Warne sent his mate Smith an SMS to find out why. We should be more proud of our team’s clean-spirited series defeat than if they’d won another gamesmanship-tainted whitewash.

The only disappointing thing about the final day was that a mere 9000-odd people attended, nearly all of them members. The place should have been packed to the rafters, and Cricket Australia should have opened the gates to anyone making a donation to the McGrath Foundation for admission. (And with over $500,000 raised, that pink-tinted charity drive must surely become annual.) The match had more drama and heroism than any one-dayer I’ve seen, and those few kids who turned up are surely now lifetime fans of the long form of the game.

A brand new badge for the Deputy Sheriff

John Howard has been awarded a prize he’ll treasure above all others – another invitation to hang out with George Bush. He’s visiting Washington to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, previously awarded to independence fighters like Nelson Mandela and Vaclav Havel but awarded in this particular case for subserviency.

Our former leader described the award as “a compliment to Australia”, but surely any prize for being mates with George Bush is Howard’s alone.

It may seem somewhat inappropriate for the President to sit around with Howard and Tony Blair – who is supposed to be a Middle East peace envoy – while war rages in the Gaza Strip. But perhaps even George Bush, like the rest of us, is sitting back and waiting for Barack Obama to do something about it.

It’s e-tolls for thee

Today, nearly a decade after Jeff Kennett boldly converted Melbourne’s main roads overnight, the Harbour Bridge has finally gone electronic tag-only. I’m nostalgic for many things from my youth, like Sunny Boy iceblocks and a match-winning spinner in the Australian cricket team, but I won’t miss those lengthy morning queues in front of the tollbooths. Let’s hope the few remaining toll collectors have found less monotonous employment.

The downside of electronic-only tolling that it’s easier to jack up the prices when they don’t need to be a round number. This is why the Cross City Tunnel now costs a diabolical $4.12. I’m in favour of tolls which vary at different times of day, which will be implemented from Jan 27, but changing to $4 and $2.50 for peak and off-peak crossings constitutes a steep price rise for most motorists. It makes me nostalgic for something else from my 1980s childhood – the 20c Bridge toll.

Having a blast on NYE

A few days into each year, I check the news from the Philippines and remember my dullest New Year’s Eve ever. I was stuck in the drab underground ballroom of a hotel in Manila because the organisers of our nerdy debating tournament were worried about their guests getting hurt. And rightly so, because Filipinos celebrate the New Year by playing with fireworks and firing guns randomly into the air. Their belief that it brings good luck is annually disproved by the injury statistics.

This year, the Philippine government banned military personnel from discharging their weapons, and Health Secretary Francisco Duque filmed an evocative ad where he brandished a circular saw to warn against the annual loss of limbs. Nevertheless, 563 people were injured by fireworks and stray bullets this year, with two deaths. Libertarian types often complain about NSW’s fireworks ban, but as the spectacular display on Sydney Harbour demonstrated, they’re best left to the professionals.

The pre-school Picasso

The story that Melbourne’s Brunswick Street Gallery was tricked into exhibiting paintings by two-year-old Aelita Andre is certainly amusing, but it’s revived the old myth that anyone can paint an abstract painting. We disproved this in 2007 by getting kids to paint ABC personalities for the Archibald Prize. Unfortunately all the entries were rejected, so we couldn’t use the segment on TV, but they made a lovely exhibition in the foyer at Ultimo.

Andre’s paintings look impressive to my untrained eye, but I’m just relieved they weren’t self-portraits. The NSW Police would have tried to confiscate them.

Fred Nile and the land of trials

Column #2 filling in for Peter Fitzsimons in summer 08/09

Fred Nile, friend of Islam?

The irrepressible Reverend Nile displayed uncharacteristic concern for Muslim sensibilities this week by advocating a ban on topless bathing on our beaches. The Christian Democrat MLC fears that the brazen baring of breasts might cause offence. “If they've come from a Middle Eastern or Asian country where women never go topless – in fact they usually wear a lot of clothing –- I think it's important to respect all the different cultures that make up Australia," he said.

This constitutes something of a road-to-Damascus conversion for a man whose election platform last year called for a moratorium on Muslim immigration because of the community’s alleged lack of respect for “Aussie values including democratic pluralism and the rights of women”. Nile also spoke against Muslim women covering up, calling for a ban on the chador.

So what’s Nile’s objection to topless bathing? After all, didn’t God initially create Adam and Eve naked before that pesky serpent intervened? Well, the long-serving MP worries that displays of bare flesh might raise the ire of Muslim men, and so enforcing modesty is necessary to prevent “any provocations or disturbances on our public beaches.”

The argument that those who flaunt their bodies are responsible for the misbehaviour of lust-crazed men is a curiously familiar one. So no doubt we’ll soon see Rev Nile forming an alliance with his Muslim fellow traveller, Sheik al-Hilaly, to rid our beaches of the provocative display of “uncovered meat”.

It will be interesting to see whether Nile’s newfound advocacy on behalf of the Muslim community extends to reversing his strident opposition to Islamic schools like the one proposed for Camden. Somehow I suspect not.

Land of trials

As ever, many Aussies have travelled to Thailand over their end-of-year break, and no doubt are having a great time. But one Australian visitor who isn’t bartering for bargains and slurping down Singhas is Harry Nicolaides, a Melbourne writer and academic who has been in a Bangkok prison since September. He has been charged with violating Thailand’s strict lèse-majesté laws, which provide penalties of up to 15 years for insulting the royal family.

His crime? One paragraph about an unnamed prince’s personal life in a 2005 self-published novel, Verisimilitude, which sold a paltry seven copies. While Foreign Affairs Minister, Stephen Smith, has raised the caise with his Thai counterpart, so far Nicolaides’ bids for bail have been denied, and he still faces up to 15 years in jail.

King Bhumibol, the kindly bespectacled monarch who stares down from the wall of every Thai restaurant, is revered with good reason after decades of sensible rule and many charitable works. Nicolaides’ best hope now is that the king will grant him clemency, as he’s done in similar cases. But surely a monarch who said himself in 2005 that he was open to criticism doesn’t need such laws to protect his excellent reputation?

Forget Paris

You won’t have been able to avoid the news that Paris Hilton once again joined us for New Year’s Eve after the Trademark Hotel in Kings Cross reportedly paid her $100,000 to appear at its party. Which I found hard to believe – surely all you need to do to guarantee Paris’ appearance at just any social function to tell her there’ll be cameras. Her visits to our city are becoming concerningly regular, though, which raises a vital question for all Sydneysiders. How much more does she charge to stay away?

Literal Britain

Working for The Chaser means never being sure whom you’re going to offend next. A couple of weeks ago, we received a complaint from Dr Seuss’ representatives about our t-shirt for Mambo depicting The Hat In The Cat, a parody of the famous character whose iconic headgear is in a more uncomfortable position.

Now we’ve upset the Little Britain guys, whose publicist Moira Bellas sent us an email demanding the removal of an news article on our website with the headline “Even stars now sick of Little Britain”. In a subsequent heated phone call with our manager, Bellas said that the show’s two stars were angry about our little piece, and concern was expressed that fans would think it was real.

We were surprised – surely David Walliams and Matt Lucas can identify satire when they see it? Nevertheless, we felt that two performers whose considerable success has been built on parodying pompous transvestites and rural homosexuals can cope with some gentle mockery of their own, so the article’s staying up.

Fatty New Year

Like many Aussies, I was shocked to hear in June that we’d become the most obese nation in the world. So for 2009, I’ve decided to slim down and get into shape. To combat my own chunk of the obesity crisis, I’ve resolved to visit the gym three times a week. I won’t actually do it, of course. But as with all New Year’s resolutions, it’s feeling good about making them that counts, isn’t it?

Small bars and satirical senators

In summer 08/09, I filled in for Peter Fitzsimons' Fitz Files column for six weeks... this is instalment #1

A big boost for small bars

I keep expecting to stumble upon hidden laneways buzzing with impossibly cool holes-in-the-wall, like they have in Melbourne, but six months after the laws changed, I have yet to discover a single one. Apparently the delay is the fault of an absurdly onerous approval process, with the Community Impact Statement requirement forcing bar owners to go door-to-door, begging for approval from every single narky neighbour – an impossible task. Well, the Rees Government has now dramatically simplified the consultation process, with a requirement only to display a notice on the premises for some venues, so with a bit of luck our city will finally get a broader range of drinking options.

Also deserving of a pat on the back is the removal of the requirement for councils to approve public performances, which will either provide a huge shot in the arm for local singer-songwriters, or dramatically increase the number of awful cover bands.

Now the only disincentive to starting up a small bar is a little thing called the global financial crisis, which has slashed everyone’s discretionary spending and made the banks far cagier about offering business loans. Still, let’s hope some plucky entrepreneurs open their doors, and give us a few new venues to drown our sorrows as global capitalism crumbles around us.

It only remains for the Government to dump its self-defeating new curfew requirements, and we’ll have genuinely sensible liquor laws for the first time ever. It took Melbourne only three months to discover that lockouts only increased the violence they were supposed to stop, so stay tuned for the Premier to realise that better policing of the existing laws is the solution, and draconian rules only make drunk people angry.

A satirical Senator?

Some may be surprised to learn that the US election is still going in Minnesota, that charmingly eccentric state that gave Fargo its mangled vowels. Republican Senator Norm Coleman is now a handful of votes behind his Democrat challenger Al Franken, a former Saturday Night Live star who’s responsible for two great books on politics and the media that are well worth an Amazon order. The first, Lies And The Lying Liars Who Tell Them, is naturally about Fox News, while even the title of Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot is deeply satisfying.

While it looks like Franken won’t be producing more amusingly-titled books anytime soon, the idea of a political satirist crossing the line is an intriguing one, as the dull proceedings of the US Senate could certainly use some snappy one-liners. Perhaps we should convince John Clarke to do the same thing here? His interviews would be a lot more entertaining than Kevin Rudd’s.

What summer?

Sitting sniffling after yet another week of icy winds, I was starting to wonder whether summer had been cancelled, and we never got the memo. So I rang the Bureau of Meteorology to find out, and they reckon that while rainfall might be a little higher over the next three months, but that the temperature outlook from January to March should be normal. I’m still sceptical, but given how awful the weather’s been lately, we should probably be thankful it wasn’t a white Christmas.

The folly and the Ivy

This Christmas, the place to be is apparently the pool bar at the Ivy, Justin Hemmes’ new headquarters of hedonism on George St. All the beautiful people go there on Sunday afternoons to frolic in the sun and admire each other’s toned bodies. Or so I hear – I could only sneak in on a rainy Tuesday night after a function downstairs, and despite my best attempts to impress one of the managers, she correctly adjudged that I wasn’t cool enough to score a membership card.

So where can us non-beautiful people head to enjoy a refreshing outdoor dip and a classy beverage? Well, North Sydney Olympic Pool boasts far better views, and its Aqua restaurant serves great cocktails. Plus, pool entry is only $5.80 – less than you’d dare tip for one drink at Hemmes’ watering hole.

A real Test

South Africa’s victory in the First Test was met with much soul-searching about our depleted cricketing stocks, but we should be grateful to the tourists for delivering a suspenseful summer of cricket. For once, our beloved Sydney Test might not be a dead rubber, and while Brett Lee’s career might be coming to an end, he’s always guaranteed a position in the Indian singles charts.

A beef with the snaparazzi

I’ve known Andrew O’Keefe since he was the star of the Sydney Uni law revue and I was a dorky kid trying to look inconspicuous in the corner of the stage. I mention this mainly to impress you with my awesome celebrity connections, but also because he’s a great bloke who didn’t deserve his treatment this week. Now, everyone with a cameraphone and no respect for privacy is going to try to make a quick buck by ruining celebrities’ nights out. This must be stopped, lest people in the TV industry be forced to endure the Logies sober.

A column about Morris Iemma and Nathan Rees

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A column about Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A column about bucks nights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A column about Barack Obama

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A column about babies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A column about the global financial crisis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A column about Sarah Palin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A column about the Marrickville by-election

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A column about Lehman Brothers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Union or no union, our campuses need more cash

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Olympic Games Opening Ceremony did not take place

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Goodbye, Starbucks. Hello, coffee.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These anti-annoyance laws are Papal bull

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never mind the breathing, it's the Olympics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A column about quokkas

Wikipedia tells me that the quokka (Setonix brachyurus), the only member of the genus Setonix, is a small macropod about the size of a large domestic cat. And the only reason I know this is because the poor animal became this week the latest twist in the strange saga of Troy Buswell.

No situation better illustrates the terrible plight in which the Liberal Party finds itself in 2008 than the hapless WA Opposition Leade,. On taking office earlier this year, he was forced to admit to snapping the bra strap of a Labor staffer during a drunken party in Parliament House. Last month, he confessed to having sniffed the chair of a Liberal staffer. This led to a leadership spill, and, in what can only be seen as an indictment on every other MP in his Party, he survived.

How does this lead to the quokka? Well, he was accused of drunkenly playing ‘quokkaball’ along with a bunch of his fellow MPs. It turned out to be a hoax started by a blogger, which was good news for the poor animals, which were endangered enough as it was. And I’d argue that it speaks poorly of Buswell’s reputation, rather than of the journalistic standards of Australian newspapers, that the allegations were printed.

And yet despite all this, Buswell’s approval rating remains higher than Brendan Nelson’s. Really, Nelson must be tearing his hair out in frustration. And that’s probably a good thing – it would only improve it.

There is effectively no political competition anywhere in Australia at the moment. So politics junkies must turn their interest to America, which has conveniently turned on a compelling contest. Sure, it’s about time the campaign shifted gears to being a competition between the two parties that will actually contest the election, instead of between the two leading Democrats. But reflecting on the Obama-Clinton epic has made me reflect on something Troy Buswell would do well to learn. In politics, there is one important principle that virtually no-one gets right. And that is that it’s crucial to know when to leave.

John Howard, the most successful politician of his generation, made a hash of it. He won four elections, and dominated the country for eleven years. But he failed to realise that the tide of public opinion was finally turning irrevocably against him. Much as Troy Buswell has failed to realise that there is no way the voters of Western Australia want to be led by a person for whom a recently-vacated chair represents an irresistible sexual opportunity. There was no way back for Howard, and there’s no way back for Buswell. When you’re gone, you’re gone. And if I may be so bold as to offer a tip to those readers who may be considering a political career, the day you issue a press release denying improperly interfering with a quokka is the day you should be issuing a press release announcing your retirement, effective immediately.

So too, Hillary Clinton is rapidly eroding what little goodwill remains towards her in American politics by refusing to abandon her campaign to tarnish Obama’s reputation. There is now practically no way she can defeat him for the nomination, yet still she refuses to depart gracefully. There was a time when she had a genuine chance of sealing the Vice-Presidency to form the much-vaunted “dream team”, although of course her dreams had the ticket in a somewhat different order. But now even if she gets it, she is guaranteed an icy relationship with her boss. As another strong woman, Gretel Killeen, once said, it’s time to go, Hillary. It’s been great. Actually, it hasn’t. But in any event, vacate the house immediately or we’ll send in the security guards.

There is only one situation in politics when the writing is on the wall, and yet retirement is not the right option. And that is Brendan Nelson’s. Clearly, he will never be Prime Minister. But he can serve as Kevin Rudd’s punching bag for a few years yet, perhaps even through an election, until the next Liberal with any credibility as an alternative Prime Minister emerges. Kevin Rudd needed a Kim Beazley to soak up the blows, and while Nelson won’t win an election on popular vote the way Beazley did in 1998, it’s not yet time for him to leave. Brendan Nelson’s party needs him in the job, and the rest of us do as well. Because while he is Opposition Leader, there is no technical way that Tony Abbott can become Prime Minister. And for that reason alone, he must stay.

A column about this land Australia

I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains and all that. And I’m often heard banging on about how much I miss the Aussie bush when I’m trying to impress foreign women in an overseas bar. But the truth is that like most of the readers of this newspaper, I’d wager, it’s not often I’m willing to leave the comforts of inner-city Sydney.

Sure, I regularly travel to Melbourne – which, like most Sydneysiders, I view a kind of younger brother who’s a bit trendier than me, but ultimately not as important. But that hardly counts. The truth is that there’s a whole country out there that people like us never go to.

Well, this year, all that has changed for me. Because my colleagues from The Chaser and I have travelling to most of Australia’s biggest towns to perform a stage show. Already, we’ve been to North Queensland, Canberra, WA, Ballarat and the Top End, and I’m writing this from Tassie. So, what is the real, outback Australia, the part we city-slicker types never go to, actually like?

I’ve got no idea.

Oh, I thought I’d be donning an Akubra and sifting red earth through my hands as I stared out across the vast expanse that is the Aussie outback. But what I’ve actually been doing is staying in identical hotels in identical towns. Unfortunately, Australia’s smaller cities and bigger towns tend to blur into one, right down to the slightly sad-looking paved, red-brick malls they all built in the centre of town in around 1987.

But I have learned a thing or two out there on the road. Not about how to wrestle crocodiles or anything. But I’ve spoken to some real Australians in the past couple of months, and the first thing I learned is that they are generally bloody friendly. Walk into a café in Newtown or Glebe, and you’ll generally feel that the waiters wish you’d hurry up and vacate your table for someone who’s a bit more trendily dressed. Whereas out of Sydney, I’ve found people incredibly chatty and helpful. One guy in Townsville even ran me and a few friends down to the ferry wharf in his 4WD so we wouldn’t miss the boat to Magnetic Island. He probably would have been doing us a favour if we had missed it, but still, it was a lovely gesture.

I’ve been expected to be treated like the snooty yuppie I am, but instead I’ve been met only with genuine friendliness. Which I’ve reciprocated in kind. For instance, in most of the cafes I’ve visited, I’ve quietly drunk their coffee without explaining the proper way to make a flat white.

Perhaps the most welcome discovery, though, has been that the food really is good everywhere. We like to pride ourselves on the amazing diversity and quality of our inner-city food options, and we should. But we’ve found it’s almost impossible to get a bad meal anywhere. We’ve had plenty of great Indian and Thai meals, and although you’d struggle to get, say, quality yum cha in the Top End, I had one of the best fusion Asian meals I’ve ever had in Darwin. So while some parts of the country still need to work on their racial tolerance, judging from the friendly cabbie in Townsville who told me to beware of “the local indigenous population, especially the ones who come asking for money”, there’s lots of good ethnic eating options out there.

The last lesson I’ve learned is that all Aussies love drinking. This isn’t a huge surprise, of course – like being unimpressed Brendan Nelson, it truly unites all Australians. But I didn’t know just how much some Aussies loved drinking until I’d been to country towns where, after the sun goes down, it’s literally all there is to do. When we spent a Sunday night in Darwin, the entire town shut down by about 9.30. Except for the bars, which raged until 4.30am. I went wandering the streets at night for some food, or a bottle of water from a convenience store, or in fact anything that was open. But the people I asked just laughed. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised in a town that serves its beers in two litre ‘Darwin stubbies’.

This week, we’re back home, at the Enmore Theatre. And I’m really looking forward to it. Because the main thing I’ve learned on our travels is while regional Australia is a lot of fun to visit, I’m bloody glad I live in Sydney.

A column about the 2020 summit

It’s late on Friday afternoon, and my phone is still mysteriously silent. I never thought it’d come to this, but I’m beginning to suspect it’s really true. Apparently Kevin Rudd really is intending to hold his 2020 Summit without any input from me. Which means that, at least in the view of those advising our tireless new Prime Minister, I don’t count as one of the 1000 top minds in the country.

Of course, I don’t need to tell any long-term readers of this column how ridiculous that proposition is. Especially when the list of those who made the cut includes Miranda Devine, for goodness’ sake. Fortunately, I’m not petty enough to hold this outrageous snub against the organisers. (Although next time Kevin Rudd calls asking my advice on how to solve a diplomatic imbroglio involving the Japanese Government, I may make him stew a little before obliging.) No, that’s fine – I’ll quietly tell the operators of the Glebe company LearJet that I won’t be requiring transport to Canberra this weekend – instead, they can take me to Cancun, as usual. And I will instead choose circulate my ideas for 2020 via the pages of this newspaper. Which means that there’s far more a chance they’ll survive into the next decade than if they were printed up in the proceedings of some crummy summit that everyone will have forgotten within days of its conclusion.

In fact, I’ve long had reason to suspect that Rudd’s policy mavens have been shamelessly harvesting the gems I contribute to this newspaper. That whole apology idea? Mine – but who’s counting. And while my innovative concepts are distributed for free to anyone lucky enough to live in The Glebe’s catchment area, that doesn’t make them any less priceless.

So, without any further ado, here are four ideas for Australia in the year 2020. And Kevin, there’s a lot more where they came from if you invite me next time.

1) A viable second political party. A few decades ago, the conservative side of politics was in disarray, so Robert Menzies pulled them all together and founded the Liberal Party. As scholars of Australian political history will know, it worked all too well. But now, the party is saddled with a fate worse than extinction – being led by Brendan Nelson. When the most senior Liberal leader left in the country is the Lord Mayor of Brisbane, it’s time to put your out of its misery. The ALP has remade itself into the mainstream conservative party, so it’s time we had an alternative party from the left – one that’s a bit less impractical and hippie-resistant than the Greens. I might found it myself and become Prime Minister, if I am prepared to give up my present columnist position for one involving somewhat less national influence.

2) The eradication of reality TV. It’s perhaps the most heinous threat confronting our nation. And anyone knows that to rid yourself of a pest, containment is necessary. That massive rabbit-proof fence wasn’t just built so Phillip Noyce could win awards, you know. Currently, they’re blooming across our television networks like blue-green algae, so the first step must be to contain them to their own specific network, so they can’t crop up where they’re not wanted – which is to say, everywhere. Next, the CSIRO must develop some form of myxomatosis-like disease that will eradicate all those involved in producing reality TV shows. There will be many casualties, and they will include Kyle Sandilands, which fact alone is reason enough to do it.

3) Call centres in prison. We must arrest our slow slide into a world where all services are delivered by ineffective computer voice recognition systems, or worse still, offshore call centres. Instead, we should route all support calls into our prisons, where convicts would be made responsible for resolving customer difficulties. This would enable them to put something back into the community by helping others instead of spending all their time working out and designing shivs. Personally, I’d rather talk to a convicted killer than your average hopeless customer support dweeb – at least they know how to get something done. Furthermore, if our prisoners can deal with, say, angry rural Telstra customers without becoming violently enraged themselves, they will have more than proven that they are ready to rejoin society.

4) The Glebe to go daily, and national. I’m just putting it out there. Global distribution along the lines of the Herald-Tribune might be an idea as well. Not just for my ego, you understand. There is a genuine need for people everywhere to read this column.