LinkedIn is the worst
Even LinkedIn's slogan, "Connect to opportunity", is nauseating. But it's now worth so much that if everybody in Australia tipped in $1000, we'd still be $10 billion short.
If you haven't used LinkedIn, imagine Facebook if every user had their boss looking over their shoulder the entire time, so that instead of sharing amusing distractions, they instead raved about their passion for generating shareholder value.
LinkedIn is like a school reunion with only the people you didn't want to keep in touch with, boasting about their career accomplishments to try and make you feel inferior. It reads like the fake employee testimonials in a recruiting brochure.
Today I logged into my LinkedIn account to try and understand how it can possibly be worth all that money. The site was up to its usual irritating tricks – before I got to the feed that displayed my contacts' most recent workplace 'accomplishments', it served up the usual series of nag screens, demanding I tell it what my interests are, then insisting that I add people I would gladly expunge permanently from my life, then asked me to grant it total access to my email account so it could hunt down more of them.
And then it demanded I buy a premium account!
I'm told that LinkedIn is handy for "networking", which I think means strategically accumulating faux-friends. And if you're looking for work, it's supposed to be invaluable. Recruiters apparently comb its listings looking for talent to prise away from the current jobs in which everyone claims they're doing so well. (I can't attest to this, never having been offered so much as a floor-scrubbing role on LinkedIn.)
Having a work-based social network makes some degree of sense when our contacts change their work email addresses with every new role, so there's definitely a role for a digital Rolodex out there. And it's true that we are a different version of ourselves at the office from what we are at home, and the division is probably a useful thing.
What's more, the site certainly seems to be popular – most of the people I know seem to have LinkedIn accounts. But I wonder how often they use it. My feed rarely contains anything worth clicking on. Instead, there are links to unengaging webinars, articles about the content strategies of companies whose content I've no interest in consuming, and above all, humblebrags
Whereas Facebook unerringly knows me to a frightening degree, the top article that LinkedIn's algorithm served up for me had the headline "Aurecon's Giam Swiegers brings Big Four thinking to engineering". I've never heard of Aurecon, Giam Swiegers or the Big Four, and all I know about engineering is that I don't know anything about it, and don't especially care to know more.
I'm willing to believe there are people out there that find LinkedIn's offering less tedious than I do, but I very much doubt that there are enough of them to justify a US$26 billion valuation.
What's particularly galling about the inflated value of social media sites like LinkedIn is what those numbers mean for traditional media. As Media Watch pointed out this week, they're devouring the ad revenue that once went to media organisations that pay people to produce quality content. Instead, social sites cash in on the content that we users produce for free.
You could probably buy most of the major news publications in the English-speaking world for $26 billion these days. Sadly, though, our economy values the lily-gilding of LinkedIn's corporate narcissists more than the hard-won facts and informed analysis offered by traditional media.
I can understand why Microsoft bought LinkedIn. It produces the software that still powers most businesses, but free business applications produced by Google and Apple are cutting into its profits. If they can integrate LinkedIn into their increasingly cloud-based Office suite, they may be able to milk healthy profits from the corporate sector for a while yet before the cloud wipes out the market for expensive productivity apps.
But when I log onto Twitter or Facebook or even LinkedIn, the most popular things being shared are content from news websites. When they're dead and gone, will we be left with a world in which the only content consists of press releases and cat videos?
Yes, we definitely will, so I'm going to have to grit my teeth and embrace LinkedIn. "Writer" means nothing in that environment, so I'm going to rebrand myself an "Executive Content Generation Specialist". Would you mind logging on and endorsing my "Content Strategy" skills? In return, I'll gladly give a thumbs up to whatever you pretend you do.
Dare I say it... I don't like beer
When you’re an Australian male, beer is the only socially acceptable drink. We talk about going for a beer, not a wine, and certainly not a soft drink. And we only admit any desire for an evening of fancy cocktails to close, trusted friends who won’t mock a beverage that arrives adorned by a maraschino cherry and a pink umbrella.
Aussie blokes are supposed to operate under the working assumption that any time we drink a beverage that isn’t beer, we wish it was, even if we’re sipping a coffee at work or downing an energy drink after pumping iron. (Come to think of it, anyone who can invent an electrolyte-restoring beer is going to make a fortune.) If Jesus had been Australian, we know very well what he would have turned that water into.
When blokes are out with mates, and go up to the bar to get a round, it’s beer unless specified otherwise. And if otherwise is specified, there’s often a need to justify it. So I’ll say something like “beer doesn’t always agree with me”, or “I’m a bit hung over so I’d better stick to the mineral water", implying that beer was the culprit the night before.
But, at nearly forty, it’s time I confessed to the truth – I don’t like beer all that much.
On a particularly hot day, I’ll sometimes enjoy one, if served extremely cold. Rarely will I have two, and once I get to three, I generally begin to feel queasy. That doesn’t happen with other kinds of alcohol – it seems that even my digestive system doesn’t care for the stuff.
Even more embarrassingly, my preference is for mass-produced, standard lager. I avoid anything that can in any way be described as “craft”. Although I’m often drawn to artisanal (aka pretentious) options, I end up wondering why the beers those aficionados so carefully concoct couldn’t taste a little less, well, beery. I’ve tried at least a dozen different IPAs, but never finished a single one.
But while craft beer is supposed to be about variety and interesting tastes, it’s surprisingly hard to convince your mates that the unique flavour experience you’re looking for is not to have a beer at all.
Back when I was too young to drink it, I loved the idea of a manly beer. It was what cricket and footy heroes shared to celebrate a triumph, apparently. The Romans paraded down the Via Appia when they’d done something impressive, but our boys just smashed tinnies. Especially Boonie, who smashed enough tinnies on that legendary flight to London to down any other country’s entire cricket team, and Hawkie, who in his Oxford days could scull faster than the men’s rowing eight. Legends!
I’d be very surprised if there were many Aussie blokes who could put their hand on their hearts and honestly say that when they first drank beer, they thought it delicious, and were converts for life. Beer-loving blokes, I suspect, come to love the stuff through a combination of peer pressure and sheer willpower.
In my teenage years, I didn’t much like what beer did at the rare parties I went to. Watching people being transformed into uglier, messier versions of themselves wasn’t exactly an attractive advertisement for the amber liquid. Ultimately I didn’t drink much before the age of 18.
But while I can readily admit this now, I’d find it quite a bit harder at the cricket, for instance, to be the guy who sits out rounds, or asks for a soft drink instead.
So in recent years, I’ve taken to ordering harder drinks. It’s less easy to question somebody’s card-carrying good-blokehood when they’re declining lager for a whisky. And if I think you are, I’ll order it neat.
Stuart MacGill was known for drinking wine when he bowled that brilliant legspin for Australia. It can’t have been easier turning down the endless supply of the sponsor’s product and uncorking a quality cab sav instead. I can’t imagine Warnie drinking any red-coloured liquid that wasn’t tomato sauce, and I wonder whether that difference in their beverage preferences was part of the reason MacGill was seen as less of a team player.
But peer pressure can be overcome, and the tastes of the majority can be changed over time. It wasn’t long ago that cigarettes were part of the norm for Australian men, and watching Don’s Party is a reminder of the way things were. Compared to those days, we’ve become less obnoxiously predatory, and the ciggies are very much on their way out. And our love of beer has switched to an appreciation of quality as much of quantity.
But we Australian men are still like Williamson’s brilliant creation in that play, Mal, wandering around with a beer mug on a chain around our neck, hoping other blokes will be impressed.
I only have so many thousand drinks left on this planet, and I’m determined to make very few of them beer. And if that makes me less of a proper male, then that’s too bad. I refuse to buy into our macho drinking culture any longer.
Oh, and did I mention I drink whisky? Neat whisky.
Rocking out in Thainatown
Once upon a time, the pubs of inner-city Australia were full of music. Or so we’re told by those lucky enough to have lived through those halcyon days. Global names like Midnight Oil, INXS and Cold Chisel blazed a trail for local heroes like Regurgitator, the Whitlams and, for all I know, Frenté (hey, they were big when I was in high school). And they packed out many a local from the Seventies through to the Nineties.
Then the pokies came. Publicans decided that live music and the beer its audiences consumed weren’t lucrative enough, and cordoned off part of their establishments to become windowless dens full of banknote-devouring ‘gaming’ machines.
In a pokie room, the only original compositions you’ll hear are the dinky electronic bleeps played on the rare occasions when players defy the heavily-stacked odds and win something. But nobody ever took home an ARIA Award for a pokie jingle.
The profits were so great that there was no need to lure in the public with live entertainment, and the hotel business changed so that serving alcoholic drinks became merely a means of getting a pokie license. The opportunities for new bands shrank away, and nowadays live music in a hotel is an occasional indulgence.
But there’s one place where live music is still a drawcard. Any night of the week, you can hear five or six-piece bands performing until the wee hours of the morning. And even at 1.30am on a Tuesday, the fans are out in force to enjoy it.
You won’t see these bands on the Australian charts or touring the world, and I don’t feel I’m being uncharitable if I suggest that they won’t become household names, at least in this country. Because the bands, most of the audiences and much of the music that they play are Thai.
What’s surely now Sydney’s liveliest music scene can be found in the Thainatown region of Sydney, along Pitt and Campbell Sts in Sydney, between World Square and the Capitol Theatre, and to a non-Thai like myself, it’s an incredible thing to perceive.
There are roughly a dozen bars and restaurants where bands chug away each night in a range of genres from the power ballad to the crooned ballad – and sometimes with a power-chord rocker thrown in the mix as well. The bands play long sets of covers, reading the chord charts and lyrics off iPads. The songs are mostly in Thai, but there’s an occasional English-language track too.
A couple of weeks ago, my wife, brother and sister-in-law went for a late meal on a Thursday night. Despite it being 11.30pm, At Bangkok, a restaurant in the food court adjoining the Capitol Theatre, was still packed full of customers enjoying stir fries and noodle soups.
Bands play here more or less nightly, and when we were sitting a table away from them, tonight’s troupe of six musicians were kind enough to vary the Thai pop with a few songs we knew, including a version of ‘Fix You’ by Coldplay so heartfelt that it would have had Gwyneth Paltrow consciously recoupling. They even gave Crowded House a crack, in honour of their and the band’s mutual adopted country.
I particularly enjoyed the wholehearted Guitar Hero soloing moves from the lead guitarist, who deserved to be playing his axe behind his back in some packed stadium somewhere instead of pumping out the jams while people slurped tom yum goong. There was a sense of playfulness which meant that the musos really added to the dining experience, and it wasn’t so loud that we couldn’t chat as well.
We walked back past similar groups playing in the Chamberlain Hotel, Mr B’s Hotel, Khao San and a few other eateries along the strip. It was about half-past midnight, and every venue was full of customers.
Thai pop probably isn’t for everybody, given the prevalence of ballads whose delivery is roughly as sugar-laden as a sticky rice and mango dessert. But it’s heartening to see that at least within Sydney’s Thai community, performing live is still valued, and musicians are finding work.
The crowds these bands pack in late on weeknights is a reminder of what used to be commonplace elsewhere in our cities. And perhaps if café and restaurant proprietors visited Thainatown and saw these bands in action, they’d be inspired to bring back live music as a drawcard for their own establishments?
This area was the stomping ground of some legendary Australian bands – the Civic Hotel was a famous rock’n’roll venue in its previous incarnation, regularly featuring the likes of INXS and Chisel, and the ABC recorded Midnight Oil’s gig at the Capitol in 1982, next door to where we saw that Thai band play.
Maybe if more venues took a plunge on live musicians, it’d help develop the next generation of Australian bands? The way things are looking, there’s every chance that some of our next wave of rock gods will have built up their chops playing Thai covers.
I'm disorganised. Pity me
In Year Seven, I went to a high school where I didn't know a soul, so had to make a name for myself from scratch. I was like Rabbit, Eminem's character in 8 Mile when he first goes to the rhyme battles, only instead of baseball caps and baggy jeans, everyone was wearing a tie and what Scott Morrison would call an ill-fitting suit.
I'm proud to say that it took me just a few weeks to establish the identity that stayed with me until the end of the year. I was the Kid With The Messy Desk.
I was also the Kid Who Looked Ridiculous While Singing In The Choir Because He Opened His Mouth Too Widely, as some kind older kids were delighted to tell me, but the Messy Desk brand proved to be the enduring one.
My desk was a genuine hazard - at times, also a biohazard. The authorities had given me the only desk in the room with storage on a shelf underneath, instead of concealed under a flip-up lid, and somehow in just a few short weeks, it was overflowing with junk. The surface, too, was festooned with random paraphernalia, to the point where my deskmate got a texta and ruled a red demarcation line along the halfway point, just to stop my bits of flotsam from overflowing into his space. (He moved to Canada shortly afterwards. The record does not show whether it was partly, or entirely, to escape my desk.)
I can't recall how things disintegrated so quickly, or what all the mess was besides textbooks, or why I somehow had so much more of it than anybody else. But I instantaneously transformed my new desk into a junk shop for one crucial reason: I'm chronically disorganised.
This means that I'm regularly confounded by tasks that ordinary grown-ups manage easily. Tasks like renewing my driver's license.
In 2011, I obtained a new license, two weeks after my previous one had expired. After a fortnight of walking, catching public transport and being unable to get into pubs and bars, I finally dragged myself down to the motor registry and sort it out. I chose the five-year option, vowing that next time around, in far-off 2016, things would be different.
Well, I renewed my license a few weeks ago, and I'm happy to report that things were indeed better. This time it only took me twelve days after the renewal date. At this rate, I'll be renewing my license on time by roughly the point when I'm no longer allowed to drive.
Being late with a renewal causes you minor inconvenience. The same thing can't be said for tax.
Most of us manage to file returns on time, either through general law-abiding competence or courtesy of the incentive of a refund. Your disorganised person, though, will catch up every few years after the ATO makes repeated threats, generally via phone after the letters they sent weren't acted on. Then it all becomes a terrible rush, and we, I mean, 'they' don't have time to claim many of the deductions to which they may be entitled.
If owed money by the ATO, you'll get less interest than you would have received by banking it, but that's a modest price to pay for financial hopelessness compared to what happens if you're someone who's meant to "Pay As You Go". To that money, the ATO often applies a General Interest Charge, currently a little over 9 per cent - this can add up very quickly.
Worse still, if you don't do your accounts properly, there's a temptation to spend money that you don't really have, because it belongs to the tax office.
The ATO are generally fairly reasonable if you chat to them, and can apply payment plans and so on - but the price for being disorganised is still generally a hefty one.
In recent years I've paid for help with this stuff because it was getting entirely out of control - it's obviously cheaper to do it yourself, but outsourcing tax stuff is certainly cheaper than not doing it yourself.
We disorganised folk end up paying more in other ways, too. Nothing good happens to unpaid parking tickets, or cars that haven't been serviced, or teeth that haven't seen a dentist. Unopened mail can contain a multitude of ticking financial time bombs, and medical problems that disorganised people let slide can even kill us.
As frustrating as we disorganised people can be - and I'm told that's "very" - the people who end up getting most frustrated is us. We exasperate ourselves every time we have to pay a late fee, or to replace something we can't find under our piles of mess, or have to talk our way out of the inevitable consequences of being a bit hopeless. It's not a great way to live.
Modern society is constantly punishing us for not quite having figured out how to survive it. If we got our acts together, we might be able to organise for the condition of chronic disorganisation to be recognised as a legitimate source of the occasional fee rebate, or other varieties of institutional pity. But there's no chance whatsoever of that.
Furthermore, we're harmless people. No disorganised person ever masterminded an invasion, and clearly there is no place for us within the world of organised crime. In fact if we commit any crime, we're likely to have failed to prepare properly and get caught instantly. Once in jail, guess who's getting the penalties for a messy cell?
We can't start businesses whose success drives others to the wall, and instead just bumble through life, hoping that there isn't anything we should have known about that is going to cost us lots of extra money, but powerless to check.
So next time somebody inconveniences you with their disorganisation, please either have pity on them or help them out. Because nobody will appreciate a feat of successful organisation more than us. I remember walking through the Sydney 2000 Olympics fascinated that we'd managed to pull it off.
But then, I'm equally impressed whenever I see a well-organised workspace. Because nowadays, of course, I'm the Grown-Up With A Messy Desk.
You need to eat idli
I once thought I knew a bit about Indian food. Back at uni, I regularly dined at those North Indian bain marie joints, and not just on butter chicken – although I have to admit that I always got butter chicken as one of the three selections.
Sometimes I even got lentils. Which I knew were called ‘daal’, because I was a man of the world. Or so I thought.
On other occasions, I even went out for proper, fancy Indian at restaurants where they serve the curries in little metal bowls and there are unlimited pappadams and various pickles on the side.
Years later, I went to India for the first time, and feasted on Goan fish curry, as well as the thali meals, a selection of lots of little curries and other delights on a metal plate, each in its own slot. I even had a favourite vegetarian dish, aloo gobi, which is cauliflower with potatoes. I know now that it’s about the most unsophisticated thing you can order, tantamount to asking for mac and cheese – but back then, I proudly proclaimed it as my thing.
Nowadays, I’m officially Indian by marriage, and a mere 18 months away from getting an Overseas Citizen of India card that will allow me to come and go to that wonderful country whenever I please. So I’ve learned a little more about the many cuisines of the subcontinent. And while I've still got a great deal to learn, I know one thing for sure: Australians of every background should eat more idli.
Idli are steamed cakes made with flour that's a blend of rice and dehusked, fermented lentils. (Aka daal.) They're somewhat like the steamed white buns you get at yum cha, only savoury and with a less fluffy texture. There's something of the pancake about them too, and they're eaten for breakfast in South India, and then subsequently throughout the day as you see fit.
In Chennai, where most of my in-laws live, they're usually served with a selection of chutneys and a delicious peppery dip known as gunpowder. The idli are delicious even without condiments – with them, they're sensational.
I’ll never forget the first time my mother-in-law served me idli. We were sitting around in their lounge room, playing with my now-nephew, when they were brought out. And they just kept coming, freshly steamed each time, and I just kept eating them.
By the end of the meal, I must have been approaching 30 per cent idli by body mass. From one perspective, I was being polite and eating what I was served, but from another, I was gorging myself on my new favourite food. It’s rare that manners and absolute greed align so deliciously.
What I've belatedly learned is that what most Australians think of as “Indian” food, with curries and basmati rice, hails from the north. In the south, it’s more about breads – from the incredible thin pancakes known as dosai, to the slightly thicker pizza/pancake-like uttapam to idli’s doughnut-like fried cousin, the vada. Roti, as also featured in Indonesian and Malaysian cuisine, is also very common, and they’re all served with far more dip options than you could ever exhaust.
Unfortunately, while every food court has a joint that sells tandoori chicken, the delights of South Indian cuisine are hard to find in Australia. The global powerhouse of Chennai-style food is called Hotel Saravana Bhavan (I’m not sure where the ‘Hotel’ comes from), which has 85 outlets around the world, all of them vegetarian. It opened in Parramatta in 2014, while a Victorian outpost is on the way too – I fully expect them to cover Australia within a decade. I’ve been to branches in Chennai, Kuala Lumpur and here, and can report that the global standardisation of their menu is as consistent as any burger chain.
There are other restaurants serving idli in the Indian restaurant strip in Harris Park, which my wife and I plan to explore soon, while I’ve heard tales of excellent options in Melbourne as well. And while I suspect that idli might be the South Indian version of mac and cheese in terms of the degree of culinary complexity – well, mac and cheese is popular for a reason.
I highly advise everyone to try one of the tastiest all-day breakfast options I’ve ever sampled (or you could trymaking your own). But if you don’t go to seek out idli, rest assured that idli will come to you sometime soon. I’ve no doubt that before much longer, they’ll be found in shopping malls, hotel breakfast buffets and elsewhere in our increasingly globalised culture. Because idli are too delicious not to conquer the world. And did I mention that they’re supposed to be healthy?
The promising debate that nobody watched
This election campaign still has five weeks to go. More than a month left, and we’ve already slumped into the contemptuous torpor of Johnny Depp in a quarantine apology video.
And to give you an idea of how long we still have to endure, that video was posted six weeks ago. Depp’s marriage to Amber Heard didn’t survive as long as we’ve still got to go in this campaign, and I’m beginning to wonder whether we will, either.
In an election where even the leader of the supposedly irreproachable Greens has been accused of paying people peanuts – or in peanuts; I don’t know what food they serve at the Di Natale Ranch – it’s no wonder that the opinion polls have been registering dead heats. Presumably everyone hangs up when they hear the word “election”, and stomps on their phone so it can’t happen again.
It’s not that we don’t care, because that would suggest indifference. Rather, we actively despise this campaign, like toddlers being dragged around the Museum of Australian Democracy. Without compulsory voting and the sausage sizzle, even the candidates probably wouldn’t bother to turn up on election day.
The only way this contest could be more dispiriting is if Donald Trump could win it, which is why I know you won’t believe what I’m about to tell you. Both potential prime ministers are articulate, clever men, with an excellent handle on policy detail, and both seem to be attuned to the needs of voters.
Honestly. I’ve seen it. Because unlike just about everybody, I watched the first debate.
It was a perverse thing to do, especially when I reveal that I was a) on holidays in London, b) it was hard work finding a stream, and c) I hadn’t been chained to anything.
It screened at 7pm on Friday 13th (seriously) on Sky News, and as someone who used to host a phone-in quiz on digital radio at that time, I can guarantee that nobody’s listening to hard-to-find media platforms when it’s two hours past beer o’clock and the footy’s on. It’s such a challenging timeslot that I almost feel sorry for its usual occupant, Andrew Bolt.
I can’t get enough of the moderator, David Speers, so I’m glad that he apparently lives at Sky News during election campaigns. But it was the questions that were truly extraordinary. Looking back over Katharine Murphy’s live blog (it’s not impossible that she and Mike Bowers were the only viewers beside me), I’m reminded of just how many key policy areas were touched on.
Here’s the complete list: housing affordability, education and childcare availability, super, the banks, privatisation, offshoring, multinational tax arrangements, GP co-payments, arts funding the burgeoning budget surplus, and most crucially of all, extradition treaties with Serbia.
But a rate of only one self-indulgent hobby horse question in an hour would leave any writers’ festival for dead, and what’s more, the leaders genuinely answered most of the questions. Yes – they actually spoke like human beings, to human beings, without relying purely on dull, focus-grouped phrases.
As an ex-barrister, Malcolm Turnbull is generally as comfortable on his feet as he is at the opera or on board any given train, but he spoke concisely, with charisma and charm. He realised it wasn’t a debating tournament, but a chance to empathise and connect, and he did so impressively.
The real revelation, though, was Bill Shorten, who benefited from lower expectations. After an ignominious beginning where he regurgitated a line about “positive policies” so often that I began to wonder whether the “vomit principle” was going to lead to vomiting from the audience, he quickly warmed up.
Shorten had an impressive grasp of policy detail, and spoke with passion that at least appeared genuine, which shows either that there’s an actual human being underneath somewhere, or that his media trainers deserve a bonus.
It was a genuine contest of ideas, where both leaders outlined competing visions for how Australia should work, and for the most part connected their policies with voters’ genuine concerns. It was a conversation about our lives and how the people we pay to run our country might be able to improve them, which is presumably why it was languishing on cable when everyone was either out or watching footy.
The next debate is on Sunday night in prime time, when the nation will find it easier to watch, if it can be bothered. It will probably be excruciating, now that we’re a few more weeks into the campaign, the boatmongering has resumed, and we’ve spent much of the last few weeks talking about gaffes.
But anyone brave enough to go back and watch the Friday 13th People’s Forum can reassure themselves that either leader would be someone who’s a strong communicator who will be able to govern the country on the basis of common sense and evidence, rather than a worn collection of prefabricated ideologies.
I don’t say this lightly – especially when they’ve still got five weeks left to crash and burn – but on the evidence of the first debate, the next PM might even be worth keeping in the job for three whole years.
A week our leaders will want to forget
When voters walk into polling booths in roughly one million years time, by which I mean on July 2, they will be thinking about their houses, and not just because they may well resent being asked to leave them in order to head down to a polling booth.
As I've already argued on this august website, the choice of housing policies provides an unusually clear contrast between the two major parties on one of the most fundamental and tangible of subjects.
Our houses matter to us. They're the stage on which we live out our lives, and are generally the most important investment we've made for the future.
The same is true for our politicians, except that the houses in which they live at least part of their lives are often owned by their spouses, meaning that the mortgage is helpfully paid off by us taxpayers.
This rule is far from new, but still feels iffy somehow, even though I'm unable to come up with a better system. I did briefly toy with the idea of making our leaders live in residential dorms, like the police ones where Tony Abbott lived as PM. And in fact, our politicians living among law enforcement professionals would come in handy, given the rate at which the AFP seems to investigate them.
Given the focus on housing in this most interminable of campaigns, it's hardly surprising that our would-be leader's own housing choices have been subjected to more scrutiny than the media devotes to Jarryd Hayne's career plans.
(Sure, give competitive tiddlywinks a go if you must, Jarryd - just front up for this year's Origin series, would you? There's a good lad.)
An election this long means even more scrutiny than usual. The press corps were always going to dredge through whatever they could find to augment the dreary, stage-managed choreography of campaign events. And that's why we're starting to see questions about that wellspring of intriguing detail that is the Register of Members' Interests.
I foolishly imagined that anyone running for parliament would assume that the media and their opponents would comb through these declarations, especially seeing as we are constantly being reminded that yes, they do. And yet in the past week, several politicians have been in trouble.
We've all learned that David Feeney has enough houses to accommodate the Federal and Victorian Parliaments, and hasn't been declaring enough of them in the register. (We've also learned that his wife's name is Liberty Sanger, which is definitely going to be the name of my election day sausage sizzle stall.
Feeney himself has been out spruiking Labor's housing affordability plan - but if they get any more affordable, just how many is he likely to buy? And how on earth will he keep his interests register up to date then?
Then again, Feeney's recent difficulties in this department have meant his face has been all over the news, a welcome improvement for a man long believed not to have one.
Of course the PM's own housing situation has been an ongoing subject of conversation, too. Malcolm Turnbull has made the unusual decision to stay in his own digs rather than occupying the other harbourside mansion provided to him by taxpayers, and been dubbed Mr Harbourside Mansion by an erstwhile colleague.
But if the PM is able to keep his enormous register up to date, David Feeney ought to be able to as well.Our leader's list runs to 38 pages, and I've no clue what most of them mean - a bit of Malsplaining wouldn't be unwelcome here, to be honest, even just to inform our own investing strategies. Should we all be getting a "Zebedee Growth Fund"? And what exactly is one?
This week, the leader whose personal financial circumstances have become more of a cause for embarrassment is the Greens' Richard Di Natale. Not only has he been accused of not declaring the family farm, but we have discovered just how little he and his wife have offered the au pairs they invited to mind their children.
Whether or not this was within the letter of the law, given the assumption that rent and board totals $300 per week, feels well shy of the point. Senator Di Natale's ability to muster outrage at other parties' recent equivocation over the minimum wage is surely in jeopardy when he comes across as the Otway Ranges' Scrooge McDuck.
Seriously, can you imagine paying anyone, or a couple, a mere $150 per week to "entertain the lads and help with cooking and general domestic duties"? No matter how fine you were with them crashing at yours and having second helpings of dessert?
Okay, so the package is notionally worth $500/week - but that still means handing over a very small amount of cash in hand. It feels a bit like inviting someone over to babysit, and saying that you can deduct the rent on the sofa they napped on and the ice cream they took from the fridge.
Of course, the Greens' pitch is that he and his colleagues aren't just regular, self-serving politicians. Those bargain basement au pairs - sorry, "package of close to $500 for 25 hours a week including rent, meals and sundries" - may prove very expensive indeed.
Politicians already receive so many allowances and exemptions and benefits in return for doing us the honour of representing us. If they pursued corporate tax avoiders with the same vigour with which they exploited the arrangements on offer to them, the budget bottom line might look very different.
The more we hear about how wealthy people and companies structure their tax arrangements, the more it feels like members of the elite follow different rules. If most of us are expected to travel for work, our spouses don't get to buy an extra house that our employers can pay off. Just as we can't tell the ATO that technically, our income is generated in Ireland, so we don't have to pay more than a couple of cents on the dollar tax on it.
Oh sure, it all complies with the letter of the law - but then, who writes the laws?
Perhaps it's not surprising that polls are tightening and the spectre of a hung parliament is once again on the table. Perhaps the more we learn about how politicians structure their own affairs, the more we feel that we'd really rather be governed by none of the above.
And it strikes me that really, the very least our representatives could do is fill out the paperwork that details precisely what they've been able to buy with the generous salaries we give them. And if that's too much trouble, ask the au pair to do it.
Why's Australia ruining Eurovision?
Today, Australia rejoices, because for the second year in a row, we are in the final of the Eurovision Song Contest. Our contestant, Dami Im, smashed it in the semi-final, and will go on to potential Eurovisual glory later this weekend.
I hope she does well. Her song is ideal - it sounds like she assembled scientists in some high-powered audio lab and asked them to blend Adele with Stock Aitken and Waterman, plus a twist of ABBA. Perfect for Eurovision.
But even more sincerely, I hope that her performance in the final achieves another landmark for our proud, musical land. I hope it's our last-ever appearance in the Song Contest.
We are ruining Europe's most treasured annual spectacle. Both for European contestants and viewers, and for our own, previously arm's-length enjoyment of it. We are like overeager scientists who, in the process of observing a fascinating foreign society, have accidentally infected it, leading to its destruction.
Early this morning, my Twitter feed was full of joy at Dami's triumph. There was pride and delight in abundance, along with a burst of the kind of good ol' Aussie patriotism that we should be saving for the Olympics.
Feelings of pride in antipodean battlers nailing it on the world stage are not something that we should ever feel when watching Eurovision. We're treating it like the America's Cup, instead of a multinational karaoke competition designed by Liberace.
We Australians are supposed to observe these proceedings with a detached sense of amusement, and cheer ironically for the most entertaining contestant. As a nation, we should be getting behind the likes of Mr Lordi, or the Russian grandmothers, or Conchita Wurst, not applauding our own. And worse still, we should not be standing in other, more entertaining candidates' way.
If we must compete, our tendency to select competent representatives is thoroughly inappropriate. I'm glad that SBS, as our multicultural broadcaster, has chosen to showcase artists who represent the changing face of modern Australia. But did they have to choose entrants who are so damnably talented?
Making the final once might have been an amusing fluke, but two years in a row seems downright rude. Icriticised Guy Sebastian last year on the basis of his extraordinary dullness, but if anything Dami Im is a more disturbing entrant, because whereas Guy brought a bit of R&B to the table as a point of difference, her song is a thoroughly chart-friendly piece of Europop worthy of a Scandinavian entrant.
Even the lyrics about Dami's heart beating with the sound of silence suggest a thoroughly mangled metaphor worthy of someone who never learned to speak English - quite unlike Im herself. They also betray a bizarre ignorance of Simon and Garfunkel's similarly-named masterpiece that would be more appropriate for someone who grew up in the Soviet bloc. We are in genuine danger of being like dinner party guests who bring along a dessert that's infinitely better than anything the host has prepared earlier.
Taken together, our three Eurovision singers have been so thoroughly straight that European viewers could be forgiven for concluding that Australia hasn't an inch of outlandish flamboyance to offer. The nation who gave the world Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Catherine Martin's everything ever is letting its reputation for over-the-top exuberance down.
If we win, it will be a terrific achievement, but it will also help make Eurovision just another generic stop in the music industry's endless promotion machine where once there was genuinely unique, bizarre splendour. Our inclusion makes it less likely that some quirky act from Lithuania will make it to the final night, and that cannot be good news for Eurovision. The rumours of America's potential involvement are even more disturbing.
There may be a place in our entertainment landscape for a serious international song contest where excellent performers duke it out, although some might argue that the regular charts are exactly that. But Eurovision has only ever been a legitimate contest in the minds of its organisers and its legions of fans in the irony-free regions of the Continent, which is one of the reasons why so many of us have grown to love it.
Besides, can a Eurovision free of glitter cannons even truly be called Eurovision?
The obvious issue of geographic incongruity aside, it's time we stopped spoiling Eurovision with our dour, tasteful involvement. We can watch talented, slickly-packaged pop stars every other weekend of the year. Eurovision is meant to be better than all of that, because Eurovision is meant to be worse than all of that.
What I learned getting naked in public
I was 20 the first time I was invited to get naked in the company of other men. I was in Fukuoka, Japan, accompanying my parents to a conference, and we had been invited to a fancy dinner by the professor who was hosting us.
Before the formal kaiseki meal, our host and his colleagues – nearly all of whom were men – planned to bathe together before changing into bathrobes for the meal. Apparently it’s customary to chillax in the hot tub before an umpteen-course meal, and donning a yukata (a thin robe) afterwards means it’s easier to loosen than your pants as your stomach distends.
But when we were asked to arrive early for a dip, my father and I exchanged a quick glance of terror. We hadn’t shared a bath since I was a toddler, and it definitely didn't seem the ideal time to start, let alone strip off in front of a dozen or so strangers.
Dad made his excuses on behalf of both of us. They were accepted with good grace, and probably put down to foreign eccentricity.
On the night, we arrived to find the bathers lobster-pink and rather jolly, probably thanks to bath beers. I vividly remember how delicious the food was, and how extremely comfortable I wasn’t as I tried to sit cross-legged for several hours – another skill we Westerners tend to lose as we grow older, like communal bathing.
At the time, I was relieved to skip the bath, but in hindsight, it was a mistake. Because I’ve subsequently learned that immersing oneself in steaming hot water is a delightful thing, whether or not you’re in the company of friends – or even substantially older Japanese men, many of whom have limited English.
A decade later, on another trip to Japan, the opportunity presented itself again. We were near Kyoto, staying at a traditional inn called a ryokan – think futons, tatami mats and paper screens. The attendants told us it was time to bathe before dinner, and so we split up, divided by genders. Three gentlemen and I found ourselves disrobing and sinking into the hot spring water for what turned out to be a long and very pleasant chat.
While it was odd at first, bathing dos and don'ts were clear and commonsense: no splashing, no pushing. What was not clear, though, was whether you’re supposed to look, avoid looking, or simply try to ignore the whole nudity thing, which was my approach – it soon seemed unremarkable. We ended up staying in there for well over an hour, until our fingertips and toes grew crinkly and we dragged our bodies out of the water, as red they’d be after a bad sunburn.
I later explored some of the onsen and sento (non-hot spring baths that used to be the only option before modern plumbing) in Tokyo, and came to realise that in Japan, Korea and the other parts of Asia that share this bathing culture, it must be a normal thing to know what all of your same-sex friends – and, more bizarrely, your work colleagues – look like naked.
You’ve all been at the bathhouse together, squatting on those little plastic stools as you rinse yourself with a shower nozzle in preparation to enter the tub. And you’ve noted your friends’ various imperfections, but you have different ones yourself, because really, who among us doesn’t look ridiculous when naked?
In my experience, once your gear is off, other social barriers drop, as well.
By missing out on this, Australians often miss out on not only a brilliant way to relax, especially during winter, but on a quality bonding experience. I’ve never been to Scandinavia, but over there it is common, apparently. It’s not surprising that there, and in the colder parts of Asia, there’s a culture of regularly spending time in an extremely hot space. And here in Australia, we’re only used to changing together for high school sport. It doesn’t have to be weird.
Don’t get me wrong – it is weird, at least at first, but it doesn’t have to be.
A few years ago, a few dozen friends and I went to Sydney’s now-defunct Ginseng Korean bathhouse for a buck’s night. It had several different pools, including a freezing plunge pool, and both a sauna and steam room. Again, it was strange at first, but as a stopover between lawn bowls and the pub, it was a beautiful moment of male bonding. I vowed to become a regular, but unfortunately it closed shortly afterwards.
I’m no exhibitionist, but I wonder whether the Puritan prudishness that’s so common in the West has deprived many Australians of an experience that many of us would come to enjoy. Because in my experience, once your gear is off, other social barriers drop, as well.
Court throws Manus overboard, so what's next?
As someone who was briefly detained after the botched execution of a Chaser prank, I'm a fan of the rule that people shouldn't be locked up without a good reason. This notion, which goes back to the Roman principle of habeas corpus, is the crux of the Papua New Guinea Supreme Court's recent decision overturning the detention of asylum-seekers on Manus Island.
Reading section 42 of the PNG constitution, I wonder why we ever thought it would permit the detention of people who have committed no crime. It prevents detention except under specific circumstances – although it's unclear whether that covers pranks involving public nudity.
Shouldn't arbitrary detention bother Australians, too? We often throw up our hands when an Aussie's locked up overseas even after being convicted, but we're fine with locking up non-Australians who've dared to seek asylum. Which is not only no crime, but protected by a treaty to which we're a signatory.
We've blithely embraced Guantanamo logic, where it doesn't matter what your government does as long as it happens on a remote island. Whereas I suspect that if our government set up its razor wire in the middle of Martin Place, the public would tear it down in a day.
The Pacific Solution, Malaysia Solution, PNG, Cambodia – over the past decade, we've had almost as many Solutions as prime ministers. Even Nauru's now mostly an "open centre", and when your most loyal client state has moral qualms, you're on perilous ground.
Like the ground in Nauru, in fact. Perhaps the Nauruans remembered that they might need resettlement themselves someday?
Our government responded with the usual tough talk. Immigration Minister Peter Dutton promised that the 900 men won't be settled in Australia, although it's hard to see where else we can send them. Non-convict hulks, perhaps?
Or maybe we'll lease a newly made Chinese island? It'd surely be cheaper than paying Cambodia $55 million to resettle a mere two people.
The news of Manus' closure has upset the current gentlemen's agreement not to talk about boats in the campaign. Bill Shorten doesn't want to – the issue plays badly for Labor, even though it devised the PNG policy. Malcolm Turnbull doesn't want to either, as part of his ongoing effort not to sound like Tony Abbott.
But the PNG Supreme Court wanted to talk about boats. And we all must, yet again. We need a solution that doesn't simply park desperate people in incubators for mental illness.
Some say "let them stay", which is sweet, but ultimately as simplistic a three-word mantra as "stop the boats". It seems indisputable that offering a legal advantage to those who reach our shores creates more danger for vulnerable people.
The independent Australian Border Deaths Database puts the toll under Labor at over 1100 – which is only the cases we know about. (Hundreds also died under the Coalition.) We cannot allow those numbers to climb further.
This problem is too big for any domestic politician to solve, because it reflects a flaw in the international system. Despite being designed for safety, the rules now encourage this deadly nautical gamble, because obligations are triggered only when entering a signatory territory.
This approach made sense for post-WWII mass displacements, which predominantly involved land borders. But in today's Europe, as here, maritime borders are proving deadly. We must start again.
It needs to be easier to reach safety. The international community should assist asylum-seekers to escape, whether via maritime rescues, organising flights or even negotiating with regimes to allow people to leave.
If the international community facilitates a departure, it can choose the processing site. The destinations may predominantly be developing countries, but asylum seekers could live in safe community housing while waiting for permanent resettlement. The costs would largely borne by wealthier nations, but the foreign assets of repressive regimes could also be seized to help their victims.
Anyone landing in Australia would be transferred to an international centre, and the UNHCR would choose the ultimate country of resettlement without reference to the entry point. Seeking asylum should not short-circuit regular migration processes.
But Australia should take more refugees who have entered the system at other points. We accommodate 1 per cent of the UNHCR pool, but that's a tiny proportion of refugees worldwide – and it's not like we don't have room.
Besides, immigration has enriched Australia in countless ways, and many of our greatest citizens arrived as refugees.
We must not only close down the much-discussed "business models" of people-smugglers, but take Australia out of the business of offshore prison camps for those we've promised to protect.
I don't have all the answers, but surely Australia will need to contribute a lot of money to solve the problem, as we already do, provide a lot of spaces, and conduct diplomacy on this issue more successfully than we have lately.
Domestically, we need constructive discussions that acknowledge asylum-seekers as a collective responsibility. And we need to rediscover the empathy that originally led us to sign up to the system. After all, who among us would not try to leave a place where our lives were threatened?
The last thing we need is more sloganeering in this campaign. Instead, we must try to fuse the humane with the pragmatic. Anything less is unworthy of a nation that should serve as a beacon of compassion. And we can start by finding a safe home for the people on Manus.
Originally published in the Sydney Morning Herald
Cheaper houses, or secure investments? We can't have both
We Australians are simple folk. All we ask of this world is a successful cricket team, an internet connection fast enough to pirate Game of Thrones, and a little patch of the earth to call our own. Ideally with a two-car garage, if you're asking; and a rumpus room, backyard pool and maybe water views.
Our enduring dream of home ownership is why so many elections have been fought over the sacred turf of the Aussie backyard. John Howard was most explicit about it, campaigning in 2004 with the emotive slogan "Who do you trust to keep interest rates low?"
The former PM understood that his "battlers" in places like Western Sydney were mortgaged to the hilt and feeling precarious, and even though his opponent was one of them in Liverpool's own Mark Latham, Howard prevailed."
But this campaign is surely the first time that a Liberal prime minister has begun his defence of our precious castles by standing up for the property portfolios of one-year-olds. Malcolm Turnbull's doorstop on Monday with little Addison Mignacca, whose parents are negative gearing an apartment for her, bless, was a curious attempt to undermine Labor's housing affordability policy.
I'm sure little Addison would have thanked the nice man in the nice suit if she'd yet been able to speak in complete sentences. She's probably been worrying about the valuation on her playpen. And every one-year-old responds positively to government-sanctioned pork, just as long as she's called Peppa.
But as much as I'm sure we'd all love to get our kids into the property market, the effect of negative gearing is that every Addison with a property portfolio means that other would-be buyers are trapped in the rental market by ballooning prices. Because Addison isn't just a cute kid - she's a landlord. And can you imagine how it must feel when you can't afford to buy, so instead have to pay rent to a kid three years shy of kindy?
But while the PM has pursued the toddler investor market, Bill Shorten has made a gamble of his own by actually having a detailed policy, a sharp difference from the reactive Opposition playbook that worked so well for Tony Abbott. That's why Turnbull was out in that backyard, campaigning against Labor's plan instead of being forced to back whatever his own platform turns out to be on budget night.
As a result, we're talking about substantive policy differences in an election campaign, which feels thoroughly strange.
The major parties have lined up conveniently along class lines. Labor is for the have-nots, who worry about ever getting into the property market. And the Coalition is there for the haves, defending their property values.
There's been debate this week over whether Labor's negative gearing policy will "take a sledgehammer" to property values, as the PM has suggested. Many criticised Malcolm Turnbull for pointing to common sense when he defended that claim while talking to Leigh Sales on 7.30.
He might have been better off pointing out that this was precisely Labor's intended effect. The negative gearing policy is explicitly supposed to make it harder for the Addisons of this world to buy houses - sorry, baby girl - and make it easier for the less fortunate.
Unless you're one of those weird, rare creatures who believes that policies should benefit others out of some strange notion of common good, your position in this debate will probably reflect your own interests. If you got a property or two, you probably hate your portfolio losing the valuation it's achieved in recent years, even though - let's be honest - for many of us, that value is downright obscene, at least if you live in a major city.
But if you're tired of renting and are desperate for a shoebox to call your own, you'll be hoping the market tanks so you can jump on board for the climb back up. In other words, you'll be standing by to scoop up poor little Addison's apartment if her parents have to sell.
It's like stealing candy from a baby. If you needed the candy to live in, and wanted it to become your major lifelong investment, and besides, the baby's parents had their own candy.
Which policy will ultimately prove more attractive probably comes down to numbers. More of us are property owners than would-be purchasers, so the Coalition ought to be onto a winner, right?
Perhaps, but it's more complicated than that, at least in my case. (Like nearly everyone in this debate, I'm thinking only about how I'm affected.)
Not only am I a property owner, but I'm one of those scammers law-abiding taxpayers who has optimised his arrangements for the current system - in my case via happy accident rather than deliberate strategy.
I have a small apartment which I rent out, and then pay rent on the other apartment that I live in. If I lived in my own place, I'd get no tax benefit, but instead, I get to claim the loss on the other apartment. Basically, I'm a 39-year-old Addison.
But here's the thing - my apartment's a one-bedroom. Which was great when I was living alone, but what if I plan to have kids some day, and would like to buy a house that we could all live in?
In the current market, I have Buckley's. My only chance, unless the market for articles like this explodes, is for the market to drop, so that I can afford the repayments. That would mean that my current apartment drops in value, but I'm fine with that, because bigger properties will drop by proportionally more.
In the long run, I'll be ahead, even irrespective of the property's absolute value fluctuations, because I'll be living in a "forever home", for which I'll be probably be able to afford the repayments.
Sadly, I haven't the mathematical nous to work out which scenario would make me more money in the long run. But like most Australians, the idea of a home appeals beyond the asset column on a spreadsheet. Homes are where we live out our lives, and renting feels inherently less secure than owning.
That's why housing affordability is so important to so many people, and defending property values is so important to so many others. Many people, like me, have a foot in both camps. How many of us there are in each is going to go a long way towards determining which side moves onto the government benches in the big House down on Capitol Hill.
And as for the PM's nascent campaign, the next time he does a doorstop with someone who's also a potent illustration of Labor's argument, the gear he ought to be thinking about is reverse.
How to survive Election 2016
Brace yourself, Australia. The 2016 federal election is roughly seventy days away, and if you want to know how long that is, it's several weeks longer than your longest holidays in high school - even if you went to a private school.
It's going to be gruelling even if you adore politics - even junkies can overdose. Several respected political reporters will be reduced to gibbering heaps by campaign's end, and several commentators will be transformed from gibbering heaps into reasonable people.
If you aren't into politics - that is, if you're normal - it will be like being slowly having your teeth pulled, without anaesthetic, while the world's most boring person reads statistical manuals to you. And because the Commonwealth for some reason doesn't fund dental care, you'll have to pay for the pleasure.
The only possible way to survive is by following this guide.
Leave
If you can, do. And if you can't afford to travel for the next 70 days, it's entirely possible that the agony of this campaign will qualify you for refugee status on the basis of avoiding physical suffering. The great thing is that wherever you go in the world, nobody cares about Australian politics, so except for the minor news item when the result is known, you'll be completely insulated.
Go to jail
I'm not condoning you committing a crime and getting locked up - indeed, it would be a crime for me to do so, and I'm hoping to exercise the previous option. I'm just noting that if you were on the inside, you wouldn't hear much about the election, especially in solitary confinement.
Is it worth it so you can avoid Election 2016? Only you can judge. Along with the actual judge in your trial, obviously.
Become an expert
In this era of 24-hour news and endless websites full of insta-analysis, the need for pundits exceeds the number of people who are willing to pay attention to Australian politics, let alone who can discuss it competently.
Just speak confidently about 'reduced quotas' and 'preference exhaustion' whether you understand them or not - the chances of getting busted are very slim - and you could find yourself on The Drum, Australian Agenda, any number of radio stations and websites or even election night. Just don't think it'll make you a celebrity.
Offer to test virtual reality headsets
The other day I got to test some virtual reality headsets that take you to the bottom of the Great Barrier Reef. That was stunningly beautiful in its own right, but the added bonus is that with those luscious images near your eyeballs and David Attenborough's voice in your ears, there's absolutely no way that anyone will be able to talk to you about negative gearing. It's almost worth getting it permanently attached.
Become a very fast voiceover artist
Very few people can talk quickly enough to deliver a line like "written and authorised by Brian Loughnane, Liberal Party Canberra" in roughly one second (see the end of this now charmingly retro video for an example). If you can do this, you'll have an abundance of work every three years.
Get involved in polling
They tend to need extra staff over the election period - but when entertainment is in short supply during a long and arduous campaign, you can also prank them. Tell them that you plan to vote Pastafarian, and that your preferred prime minister is Supreme Leader Snook. Or maybe boost Ricky Muir's primary vote so he feels good about his popularity, even if it means he might come crashing back down to earth on election day.
Become a campaign supplier
There's one group in our community who lick their lips especially lasciviously whenever an election's called - corflute manufacturers. Two-and-a-half years in every three, they do it tough, but whenever election time comes around, they get a cash bonanza.
Sausage manufacturers also do well, as do makers of bunting and tiny pencils. And if there's a change of government, or just of prime minister as is more common nowadays, it's easy to make a quick buck selling shredders in the ministerial wing. Suppliers of marble tables should also stand by.
Run
I don't mean run screaming, although that's certainly an option. I mean run for office.
But only if you run for the Senate. Not only is this election (probably) a double dissolution which makes getting elected twice as likely, there's a brand new electoral system that nobody except Antony Green understands. (Indeed, he's argued that a DD will leave the government worse off in the Senate, which may show that the government themselves haven't quite figured out the sums.) And that means everyone else will suck up to you, just in case you're elected.
Just pick a party name that's likely to lure at least some identifiable bloc of the electorate to vote for you, like the Free Nachos For All Party or the Make Pirating Game Of Thrones Legal Alliance or the Death Penalty For Turtleneck Wearers Team, and you'll be courted for weeks, except by the Greens in the latter example.
The numbercrunchers will worry that you'll get the balance of power, because who knows how things will work out? Not certain incumbent crossbenchers, it seems, several of whom probably just voted to put themselves out of a job.
Take a genuine interest in the governance of this great nation
This is of course the best way to cope, and involves the minimum inconvenience, because you can go about your life while devouring much of the deluge of daily content, analysing the policies and personalities that make our democracy tick and deriving satisfaction from the contest of ideas in Canberra. Unfortunately of all the options listed here, this is the hardest to achieve.
Think before you snatch and grab
The would-be abductors have walked free. After several dramatic days of blanket media coverage, Sally Faulkner and the 60 Minutes team have been treated with more civility and process than they intended to utilise themselves with their ill-conceived plan to snatch Faulkner's children from their Lebanese family.
And while they still face charges from the Lebanese state, and have paid bail accordingly, they must be incredibly relieved to be en route back to Australia, presumably just in time for an exclusive presentation this coming Sunday night.
(What happens if they don't return? Besides the forfeiture of the bail, will the Lebanese courts snatch them back from here? It would be hard to object if they did, surely?)
But the fact of their release, of course, is a further demonstration of the central problem with the entire project - contrary to expectation and dare I say stereotype, the Lebanese authorities have, by all appearances, acted reasonably.
Perhaps not in green-lighting the deal where the father gets exclusive custody in return for dropping the charges - but Faulker and 60 Minutes are surely partly to blame for provocation, given their attempt to bypass the Lebanese legal system entirely.
We Australians tend to assume that the justice meted out in other parts of the world, and the Middle East in particular, is inferior to our own. We have become so used to tales of innocent Australians - or, at least, presumed innocent on the basis of passport - abroad being locked in fetid fleapits that whenever we hear a story like this, we fill in the gaps. But not all prisons are "the notorious Kerobokan" in Bali, and not all judicial systems are rigged.
Clearly, the Lebanese family law system is one that gives fathers stronger rights than ours does.Australian-based lawyer Faddy Zouky OAM told SBS that, "The father has very strong rights In Lebanon. He even has the right to prevent the mother from leaving Lebanon, if he wishes - if they were still married that is."
How retrograde and sexist, we might think, seeing as we have a family law system that weighs the interests of parents equally, with a strong bias towards joint custody. But the reality is that a number of notionally more sympatico countries have a similar system. There have been several cases of children being taken to Japan in defiance of court orders, and that country only ratified the Hague Convention in 2014. Would 60 Minutes snatch kids from the streets of Tokyo?
I don't have children, but I can't imagine many things worse than losing access to them, particularly amid all the acrimony of a marriage breakup. But while I can understand that the trauma of the experience would leave a parent eager to have the children returned no matter what, I'm entirely baffled as to why 60 Minutes would have decided to get involved with and, according to Lebanese authorities, funded the abduction. It's not a telemovie or a video game. The consequences are real.
It's also widely agreed, and surely common sense, that child abduction has a detrimental impact on children. The father was the first to subject his children to this, of course - but does that make it permissible for the mother to have them snatched with maximum drama from their grandmother's care? And for the cameras to be rolling throughout adds an extra dimension of moral complexity.
Did nobody at 60 Minutes think of the impact on the children? Or were they simply a prop, their undeniable cuteness a convenient hook to tug the heartstrings of middle Australia?
More disturbing still, was the story of a blonde Caucasian mother tugging back her li'l Aussie battlers from their Lebanese dad red meat for the sectors of the audience who still haven't gotten Cronulla out of their systems?
We are now in a society that does not forget. Once upon a time, those children would have needed to visit a library and leaf through microfilm images to find the reports of what happened to them. They probably wouldn't have bothered. Now, the sad facts of this case will spring up whenever Noah and Lahela put their names into a search engine (hi guys - I'm really sorry).
There are many lessons in all this. Firstly, child abduction is about as hard as - well, about as hard as anyone besides 60 Minutes, with long form in this area, might rationally imagine. If it goes badly, not only is there a risk of all those involved getting locked up, but the children could entirely foreseeably be injured. Can the supposed experts at Child Abduction Recovery International guarantee that in a place like Beirut, nobody will start shooting?
And secondly, the children's wellbeing needs to be put first - not just by the courts, but by TV producers looking for a potent story. And sometimes media organisations need to have the wisdom to turn down a juicy story if it's potentially not in the interests of the people who are offering it to them.
International law is a minefield, and accordingly, there are no easy solutions to these situations. Getting former soldiers to snatch kids is not a sensible way to resolve complex and sensitive disputes. Careful diplomacy is what's required, not cloak and dagger stunts. How much harder has this case made it for the next Australian-raised kids who end up facing the same situation overseas?
And finally, while I realise that expecting a commercial current affairs show to exercise restraint is like demanding that Donald Drumpf display humility, surely any sensible analysis of this situation will conclude that it was a mistake. The Nine employees could well have faced long sentences, and they and their families deserve considerably more care to be exercised by their employer in future. And the cost to the network is not just a huge financial payout, but also a loss of reputation.
Parents in a similar situation here in Australia make their cause worse in court, not better, if they take matters into their own hands in this manner. The same approach should be applied overseas. Sally Faulkner and the 60 Minutes crew are indeed fortunate that the Lebanese judicial system seems to have treated them with considerably more respect and consideration than it received.
Why are we still paying for stuff with pieces of plastic?
Cash is king, the old saying goes. Well, it's time that particular monarch was overthrown. How is it that in 2016, when we carry the internet in our pockets, we still conduct transactions by exchanging brightly-coloured pieces of plastic with numbers written on them? And how is carrying a jangling bunch of metal coins around in any way efficient?
Coins and notes were useful instruments in their day, but that day is over. Increasing numbers of us no longer carry notepads and pencils wherever we go, or look at the mechanical hands of a wristwatch when we want to know the time, and it's time for the practice of carrying cash to follow these devices into the dustbin of history.
But it's coins that irritate me most. They're heavy and bulky, and they accumulate so quickly. Retailers are still playing those silly games where things cost $4.95 instead of $5, so we're constantly getting pointless 5 cent pieces. After an average day, my pockets are full of those bulky 20c and 50c coins. I've got a jar at home that I lug to the bank a couple of times per year – the whole thing is just annoying.
Admittedly, I've never been good with cash. For some reason, I'm incapable of getting more out of the ATM before I've exhausted my current supply. And I'm so irritated by ATM fees that I'll often do without a refresh until I happen to pass one of my bank's machines. For days on end, I'll try to get by via tapping my credit card for sub-$100 transactions. Which is getting easier and easier – I often go four or five days without a cent on me. So any muggers are likely to be very disappointed.
Australians have been some of the world's most enthusiastic adopters of tap-and-go credit cards. Our banks are putting Paypass and PayWave machines everywhere, and it's increasingly possible to pay for everyday transactions without them. Not only is tap-and-go incredibly convenient, but everything's already logged for accounting purposes. Sure, that means that big multinational credit card providers get to clip every ticket, but it will ultimately mean that taxpayers have to spend less money minting banknotes and coins.
The founder of Pablo and Rusty's café, Saxon Wright, is opening a cashless café in Brisbane where people will be able to pay with tap card or cups with embedded chips in them. As Wright points out, it's hard to imagine why small businesses would want to handle cash instead of dealing with tap-based payments unless they're paying their staff cash in hand. Doing without cash frees up time spent on accounting and visiting the branch to bank your takings. And you can already go cashless in many cafés, in fact – not just because they support tap and go, but many places let you order via a phone app like Hey You instead of paying up front.
Cash dates back to Venice, apparently, where instead of exchanging actual bars of silver, merchants instead swapped pieces of paper instructing their bankers to make payment on demand. As time went by, it seemed easier to simply swap these promissory notes than having to bother with the actual silver bars.
That quaint tradition lives on today in a visible form in Hong Kong, where banknotes are issued by three different banks, each of which says something like "HSBC promises to pay the bearer at its office here". I've never been able to understand in which form the bank would pay a bearer, since you're already holding a banknote, but then again, I don't get why you'd have three different types of $100 note, either.
But Hong Kong is leading the world in getting rid of cash, too. The Octopus system, originally invented as a public transport smartcard like our own Opal and Myki, now permeates many aspects of life in the city. Every convenience store lets you pay via Octopus, every vending machine does too, and you can even use it in McDonald's. Jointcredit/Octopus cards are available from all major banks, and they automatically refill out of your account. Increasingly, there's no need for Hongkongers to carry cash at all.
The HK authorities also sell Octopus SIM cards for phones, which allow users to simply tap their phones to catch public transport or perform common cash transactions. Apple, Samsung and others have also developed systems that let us tap our phones to pay, and this will allow a limit higher than the Paypass/PayWave $100. Before long, we won't even need to carry credit cards for many transactions.
Personally, I can't wait until I only need to carry my phone and keys, and no cash or cards whatsoever. My wallet currently contains just shy of 20 different cards, very few of which I ever need. I don't even need my Medicare card when I go to my GP nowadays. Why can't my phone just contain a scan of it, or something?
But it's cash that needs to go first. Experts say that except on those rare occasions when computers are down, the only people who really need to use banknotes in this era of electronic transfers are tax evaders and criminals. Think about the last time you had a $100 note. ATMs don't issue them, and I reckon I haven't had one in my wallet since I last took out money over the counter three years ago.
And yet the RBA says that there are 300 million $100 notes in circulation – about a dozen per citizen. No wonder experts have suggested getting rid of the higher-denomination bills as a means of choking funds for organised crime and terrorism.
I never want to have to go hunting for an ATM again, because cash, the king, is dead, or nearly as good as. Long live our new tapping-based overlords, I say. And if anyone's planning to mug me, it's all good – I'll just take out my phone and transfer you a few bucks.
How would Australia deal with President Trump?
Somewhere in Canberra, in a bunker that requires a retina scan for entry and is swept hourly for bugs, experts from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Australian Defence Force and the Advanced Hair Studio are undoubtedly war-gaming a scenario that was once unthinkable, but is now looking increasingly likely: President Trump.
Once best known for fake-sacking fake employees and writing his name on garish buildings, the billionaire's candidacy has gone from enacting a joke from The Simpsons to becoming the Republican frontrunner, while remaining no less amusing.
His policies consist exclusively of "captain's calls", he has offended just about every demographic group besides white men, and his platform's as confusing as our new $5 note. But still The Donald marches on to what will soon be known as the Trump White House Resort And Casino.
So Australia needs to start thinking about how to deal with a man who combines Jacqui Lambie's maverick unpredictability with Kanye West's love of a Twitter outburst.
While we've traditionally enjoyed a close relationship with the US, we could be in trouble if Trump takes up residence on Pennsylvania Avenue, because we've done very little to ingratiate ourselves with his business interests.
The most obvious problem is that there are no Trump properties anywhere in Australia. We would be wise to approve a few shiny towers as a gesture of goodwill, ideally on the Gold Coast. To celebrate the new Trump Surfers Paradise, we could present him with a pair of white sandshoes featuring the presidential seal.
There are also some markets where we dare to compete with the Trump Organisation. We run our own universities and produce our own wines, and we continue to export our own beef despite him making it very clear that Trump steaks are the best in the world, regardless of whether they're actually on sale.
We even screened a local version of The Apprentice, in which we replaced The Donald with a guy you just know he'd call Borin' Mark Bouris. Sad!
Most impertinently of all, we've got a competing billionaire politician in Clive Palmer. Like Trump, he gets media coverage for every bizarre whim, thanks to a fascinating lack of filter between brain and mouth. And like Trump, Palmer has owned resorts featuring golf courses, and has a – well, let's say an interesting business record, because he's as litigious as his American counterpart.
Given our cheek in competing with the Trumpire, it might be time for some displays of obeisance. Ambassador Joe Hockey could be sent to stand awkwardly on one side during a news conference, and since Trump appreciates endorsements from former politicians with a unique approach to the English language, we should deploy Pauline Hanson as a special envoy.
Australia will want to align itself with President Trump's policies, but they aren't always easy to discern, even for Trump himself. It is clear, though, that he wants to "bomb the (expletive) out of ISIS", – presumably in keeping with our usual approach, we'll simply go along with him on all this.
We could appeal to his love of walls by offering our rabbit-proof fence expertise, and no doubt he'd also approve of our habit of making special policies for casinos. In fact, it might be prudent to appoint James Packer as a special cultural attaché, just as long as Trump has forgiven him for building the hotel he once wanted to construct in Barangaroo. The potential president might still go for a joint venture, especially if it was called Crowned Trump.
The former Apprentice presenter has taken a strong position against American companies' overseas manufacturing, preferring that the US makes things such as iPhones on its own soil. This will suit us, seeing as we have practically no manufacturing industry. What we can offer is iron ore for future skyscrapers, which we should begin marketing as "casino-grade".
There are some points of difference, however. He's opposed to gun control, wants to take on China at the trade table, and has released a more comprehensive tax reform plan than any major Australian party has dared to put out.
While President Trump would be our most sensitive diplomatic relationship since Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman split, the good news is that we have the right leader in place. Malcolm Turnbull knows how to handle irascible billionaires, as he was Kerry Packer's lawyer. Like Trump, he's also a prolific tweeter with a fondness for waterside mansions. In fact, since the PM isn't using it, Kirribilli House might make an excellent Sydney Mar-a-Lago.
If Trump wins the election, Australians can be confident of one unique advantage. The usual rules and restraints of political conduct simply won't apply, meaning that anything could happen at any time. After the bizarre unpredictability of the past six years in Australian politics, we will be well prepared to handle President Trump.
Originally published in the Sydney Morning Herald
A ridiculously slow road to a fast train
For years, I've dreamed of sauntering down to Melbourne's Southern Cross station and sliding into a comfortable seat on board a shiny new Very Fast or even Extremely Fast Train. I'd sit and work on my laptop, or read a book, or recline my seat to take a nap while the landscape whizzed by, faster than a Saudi diplomat being pursued by the AFP.
Occasionally, kind people would come past with coffee and snacks, and perhaps an in-seat massage. And then, less than three hours later, I'd alight at Sydney Central, and get on with my day.
I've loved travelling by train, ever since I lived in Europe as a child and got a taste for the romance of long-distance rail. More recently, travelling by shinkansen in Japan has hooked me on the convenience. There are so many trains between Tokyo and Kyoto, that at off-peak times you can just turn up at the station, confident you'll get on one.
But even if it ends up being slower point-to-point than catching a plane, I think it's still a better option. Just think of all the faffing around you avoid when you take an intercity train - not to mention the extra expense of the airport transfers. From Melbourne, there's the Skybus or taxi queue, then queueing to dump baggage if you have it, then the security scan, then the extra screening I seem to attract whenever I have a beard, then schlepping to the gate, then boarding, then you can't take out your laptop for roughly half the trip, then you wait to get off, then you wait at the baggage carousel, then you wait for a cab or train.
With a plane, you're constantly queuing, shifting, and lugging bags around. Trains are infinitely simpler.
Sure, complaining about this stuff is definitely a first world problem - but then, most of the rest of the first world has fast intercity trains. Australia's the only first world country I've ever visited where intercity trains, with their dedicated traffic-free corridors, are reliably slower than driving.
Just try travelling from Sydney to Newcastle, a route that inexplicably begins the trip to Newcastle, which is north-east of Sydney, by travelling due west to Strathfield, and you'll get a sense of just how absurdly archaic our train network is.
The Sydney-Melbourne air corridor is one of the world's busiest - and incidentally, I don't think a fast train will kill the airline industry, seeing as some of the more popular routes, like Tokyo to Fukuoka, are in Japan.
But with regular trains, just think how many more of us would travel intercity on a regular basis. It would provide competition to airlines, and it'd also provide a way around the Sydney Airport curfew. At last, you could leave Melbourne after dinner, and arrive in Sydney after midnight.
And the benefits to regional communities are surely enormous, too. Newcastle and the Southern Highlands would be transformed by quick connections to Sydney - it would become far more feasible for people to be based there and come to Sydney for meetings with clients, for instance.
Brisbane and the Gold Coast have already seen many benefits thanks to being connected by a relatively slow train, which will eventually connect both airports. How much better would it be for the region to be connected by a rapid line that continued south to the other east coast capitals?
A fast train would also integrate Canberra far more successfully with the most populated corridor in the country. The Acela train that links Washington DC with New York, Boston and Philadelphia is a legendary piece of infrastructure, famously caught by Vice-President Joe Biden so he could remain based in Delaware with his family - and yes, even the car lovin' Americans do intercity trains better than we do.
The Very Fast Train (and please, let's come up with a better name - I'm in favour of Ridiculously Rapid Train) rears its head with amusing regularity come election time, as Michael Koziol pointed out in the Sydney Morning Herald today. Malcolm Turnbull has been floating possible funding models, and Labor's Anthony Albanese has been a long-term booster of rapid rail.
Traditionally, we dream big pre-election, and then discover via a post-election study that it isn't viable, so I'm bracing myself for disappointment.
There's always a chorus of naysayers who point to the cost - and the estimated costs vary so widely, that I simply can't comment on whether it would make economic sense. That's why studies into these things tend to cost millions of dollars themselves.
But I'd point out that in other countries, they don't seem to dither over the cost of major infrastructure projects - they just build them. It's impossible to quantify the potential upside of the economic benefits that would flow from a high-speed train with affordable ticketing, especially for regional areas. Nor can we estimate the impact on our roads of far fewer inter-city drivers - it could reduce expenditure there, potentially - and there's also potential for a significant emissions reduction impact, especially if the trains were powered by renewable energy.
Why is it only Australia that seems unable to stomach major investment in rail infrastructure? France is only 2.5 times larger than Australia in population terms, and yet it's viewed as a given that they'll have high speed rail links. (2,000 kilometres of them, which is more than we need to link Melbourne and Brisbane.)
In Japan, they're extending the shinkansen network to Sapporo, a city of under two million people – much smaller, in other words, than the three state capitals that an East Coast Fast Train would serve. The bill will go into the trillions of yen, 76 per cent of the new line will have to be through tunnels, and it won't open until 2031, but they're just doing it anyway.
With Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane alone, we service a population of well above 10 million, within a 1700km track distance. Add in the Gold Coast, Hunter, Canberra and the Southern Highlands and you're well above half of our population, all in a reasonably straight line. Surely this would have been done years ago in any other wealthy nation with a relatively flat, seismically stable continent and these kinds of population patterns?
If we can afford $2 billion to host the Commonwalth Games in the Gold Coast, and can pay Telstra $1.6 billion to upgrade the network it already sold to taxpayers (and Telstra got $11 billion for selling its HFC and copper wires to NBN Co, incidentally), surely we can afford even upwards of $100 billion for a high speed rail network? Especially when, as Peter Martin has pointed out, debt is unusually cheap.
And if you don't buy into the dream the way I do, ponder this - if our international lawyers can figure out a way to make Saudi diplomat pay their speeding fines, that could go a long way towards funding it.
Why Waleed Aly should not not win a Gold Logie
In RendezView today, Victoria Hannaford wrote an article today listing six reasons why Waleed Aly should not win the Gold Logie. I tend to disagree. Here's a response to each of her arguments.
1) We need better programming on commercial TV.
Her argument, as best as I can understand it, goes like this:
We need commercial TV of excellent quality, and Waleed is excellent, whereas The Verdict on Channel Nine could have been excellent, but wasn’t because it was rushed, but they should have spent more time on it, whereas Waleed has gravitas, unlike this other show that I’m mentioning just because, also Ten has stuck with The Project which is a refreshing contrast with crappy reality TV unlike Nine with The Verdict although, wait, that wasn’t all that good anyway, so we should discourage Nine from not sticking with The Verdict by not rewarding Waleed from The Project.
Right.
And she says this even though one of The Project’s other stars, Carrie Bickmore, won the Gold Logie last year, before The Verdict was even broadcast, so whatever impact giving a Gold Logie to someone from that show would have had on other channels has already been experienced, and… and…
I’d have thought that rewarding smart analysis with a Gold Logie might be a sensible way to encourage more of that kind of thing, but then again, I haven’t the insight into the highly relevant inner machinations behind The Verdict that Hannaford appears to have.
2) There’s more worthy talent in his field on SBS and ABC.
Yeah look, the national broadcasters are awesome. But this is the Gold Logie. A popularly-voted popularity contest. The ABC and SBS can, and will, clean up in the Most Outstanding news and current affairs categories like they usually do.
(We also tend to clean up in the Most Outstanding Comedy category, an award that we at The Chaser have won, but no biggie, not boasting or anything, mentioned it by total accident.)
The reason why Leigh Sales isn’t nominated for the Gold Logie is why our finest journalists never are (sorry Ray) – because, again, it’s a popularity contest voted for by people who care about the Gold Logie. It’s called the “Gold Logie Gold Logie Award for Best Personality on Australian Television”. Not the “Gold Logie For Devastating Interviews Of Prime Ministers”.
It’s also worth noting that it’s voted for by people who like the idea of hijacking the Gold Logie vote, a tradition that goes all the way back to Norman Gunston – the only ABC personality ever to win. The ‘fun’ vote gave Hamish Blake his win, and Ray Meagher and John Wood, too – this year it’s Lee Lin Chin’s turn.
3) Aly’s biased – but that’s not his fault.
She doesn’t give any evidence of bias whatsoever, she merely makes the point that he has an opinion. She suggests he contradicts himself when he is a “journalist” interviewing Shane Warne, and then editorialises about terrorism.
No. His role on The Project is to be Waleed Aly, a serious academic who also has a great sense of humour and has a gun knowledge of pop culture. It's all opinion. And it's in no way contradictory. It's the format of that show.
“Sure, he’s smart and tenacious enough to pivot between perspectives, but is he there as a journalist, analyst or a TV host?” she asks.
All three of these elements are part of simply being Waleed Aly, which is his job. And the fact that he does them all so well is, dare I say, why he’s been nominated.
But how kind to say that the “bias” it isn’t his fault!
4) Diversity needs to become the norm.
And. What. Better. Way. To. Demonstrate. That. This. Is. Already. Happening. Than. By. A. Guy. Called. Waleed. Getting. A. Gold. Logie?
“The fact that he’s an Australian of Egyptian background and a Muslim should be incidental, not remarkable”, she says. Even if this bald assertion is true, again, surely this nomination proves that it's becoming incidental. He’s not “the Muslim guy” on The Project. He’s Waleed. You know, the smart guy.
How offensive to suggest that he's been nominated because of his background, instead of because people like him!
Also, white people issuing pronouncements about what diversity ‘needs’ - awks.
5) Aly needs to be truly popular to win.
Eh? If he wins, then he is truly popular, isn’t he? At least according to the dubious imprimatur of the Gold Logie?
The argument here seems to be that he needs to host a ‘big’ show like Sunrise to be worthy. For one thing, The Project gets hundreds of thousands more viewers than breakfast shows, for another – we’re talking abou the Gold Logie. Was Ray Meagher truly popular, or did people think it was an amusing idea for Alf from Home and Away to win?
One thing I’m certain of is that the most frequently shared clips I’ve seen on social media over the past year are editorials from one W. Aly. Victoria Hannaford could have read this article by her news.com.au colleague Liz Burke to explain why.
If social media shares don’t indicate popularity in 2016, then all of our news websites seriously need to rethink the articles they give prominence on their homepages.
6) He’s not on social media
Yeah, he is. He doesn’t have a Twitter account, sure. But Waleed is all over social media, all the time, through shares.
But really, how much credence can you give an argument that includes this paragraph:
Aly is going to be hard pressed to compete with Lin Chin and her social media sass. Almost a year ago she tweeted “Just decided to win the gold next year, I deserve it #TVWEEKLogies”. Touché
Without acknowledging that Lee Lin Chin isn’t, in fact, on Twitter, and didn’t write that. Her (admittedly very popular) tweets are written by the team from The Feed, who have cultivated her social media status with great aplomb. But it ain't her.
And in conclusion
What troubles me most about Victoria Hannaford’s article is not that arguments 1, 3, 4 and 6 actually constitute reasons for giving him the thing. Nor is it that the majority of these arguments, namely 1, 2, 3 and 5, could also apply to his colleague Carrie Bickmore. Who, again, won last year.
It’s that her piece seems to have started as an effort to try to find reasons why Waleed shouldn’t win. That she didn’t do a great job of this only goes to show what a worthy recipient it should be. And even if each point wasn't eminently rebuttable, the enormous, and ironic, respect and admiration she seems to have for Aly throughout her article is an excellent counter to all of her points.
But why would anyone set out to write an article arguing against someone whose victory would represent considerable progress towards a television industry whose diversity reflects modern Australia’s? Maybe because of all the comments they’ve gotten. Was that the point? (My favourite was the one that said they were a “taxpayer funded waste of time”.)
Waleed Aly’s ethnicity and religion are an important part of what he brings to the table, but they’re not why he’s sitting at it. He’s the smartest guy in the room, ridiculously dapper, and he plays incredible rock guitar. In fact, I’m deeply jealous of the guy.
For what it’s worth, I’m sure Waleed would rather win an ARIA or a Walkley than a Gold Logie. Sorry, I mean another Walkley. And in the unlikely event that I vote, I'll be backing Lee Lin Chin, both for her long career and because it's the most amusing option on the table.
But it’s a fine thing nevertheless that Waleed Aly has been nominated. Obviously.
If our homes are our castles, can we smoke them up?
Every year, it gets a little harder to be a smoker. Successive governments have ratcheted pack prices further upwards - another hike is on the way if Bill Shorten is elected, and the Coalition may follow the same path.
The way things are going, future treasurers and finance ministers will indulge in a decadent puff on a cigarette instead of a cigar before handing down a federal budget.
The places where you're allowed to puff away are constantly being reduced, too. In 2017, Victoria will become the last state to ban smoking in outdoor dining areas, and in NSW, you can't smoke within four metres of the door to any building open to the public.
Smokers are being treated like social outcasts - although not criminals, because if they were in correctional facilities, they'd discover that a number of jurisdictions have banned smoking there, too.
Of course, unlike most endangered species, smokers are being driven from their preferred habitats for their own good. Governments are trying to encourage existing smokers to quit, as well as discouraging anyone else from taking it up. Furthermore, in recent years, it's been recognised that third parties shouldn't have to inhale second-hand smoke, which is why so many workers in pubs and clubs have been spared the thick fogs that used to typify their workplaces.
Quit Victoria has made the news this week with a proposal for the next step of restrictions in that state. The anti-smoking group wants to ban smoking in the home - or at least, in apartment blocks where thebody corporate resolves to create a smoke-free building.
NSW has taken steps towards cracking down on smoke in strata schemes already - the Government has flagged changes to its model by-laws to deal with smoke drift. It's worth noting that this wouldn't restrict a building's power to decide one way or another - it merely provides a guideline unless amended. Nevertheless, it's clear which way the wind is blowing.
Impeding people's rights within their own dwellings is a bold step. Quit Victoria's director, Dr Sarah White, acknowledges that people view their homes as a castle, where they get to control what's going on, but points out that it cuts both ways.
"We need to have mechanisms that will help people who don't smoke make sure their castle remains smoke-free," she says.
I'm not entirely sure how illustrative the castle analogy is, since from my limited understanding of history, castles aren't built besides and on top of one another, don't have common ventilation between one keep and another and tend to experience smoke only when invading armies torch them.
But the word captures the way we feel about our homes, and the pleasure we get from having one little corner of the planet where what we say goes. Our rights over our domains should not be yielded without careful consideration.
If adopted in a building, these new rules would require smokers not just to step onto their balcony for a quick puff, as many do now, but to take the lift down and walk a few steps away, to a position where their smoke can safely dissipate into the atmosphere. I can imagine smokers getting utterly enraged by the inconvenience - after all, their habit makes them irritable to begin with.
While I'm sure very few would seriously argue that the product would be legalised if introduced today, as things stand, cigarettes are allowed to be sold, and there's no serious proposal to change that. And this means that smokers have rights. Their bodies are their own, and if people want to mainline known carcinogens, then the only thing stopping them is common sense and unambiguous medical advice.
Dr White is right, though, that these rights need to be balanced. As an asthmatic, the right not to breathe second-hand smoke is important to me, since the ability to breathe freely is not something I take for granted. It frustrates me that people with normal breathing choose to jeopardise this by boarding the slow train to emphysema, but that's their decision. As countless eyelid piercings have shown, we get the right to make foolish decisions with our bodies.
Australia has long led the world in public policies which combat smoking, and we should be proud of this. Getting to the point where nobody takes it up is a worthy public policy goal. But surely there needs to be some respect for the rights of individuals in their own homes. If your smoke doesn't impact on other residents, I really wonder whether a body corporate has any business telling you otherwise.
This is not an unusual approach within strata schemes. There are all kinds of restrictions on residents, who may not make excessive noise that disturbs other residents, for instance. Interference with other people's "peaceful enjoyment" of their own "castles" is the yardstick used, at least in the NSW legislation.
So while I should have the right to be protected from your smoke, I believe that stopping you from smoking at all seems an interference too far. Perhaps if new buildings are constructed as smoke-free, the units could be sold only to non-smokers, in the same way that certain developments are designated for retirement-age residents only. In existing schemes, though, I suspect that owners' corporations shouldn't interfere with people's quiet, peaceful destructions of their own respiratory systems.
But if I catch so much as a whiff of anybody's second-hand smoke circulating through my apartment, I'll complain so quickly that they'll barely have time to extinguish the ciggie before a sternly-worded form letter from the strata manager arrives on their doorstep.
The piece on procrastination I've always meant to write
I've always been a procrastinator. I've been meaning to write about this problem for a while, but never quite got around to it. And then, out of the blue, Daily Life suggested it - presumably after several years' experience with my work habits.
And yes, it's true - my approach to any task is to work out how late before the deadline I have to start, and then start considerably later.
At uni, I got to the point where my standard approach to any essay was to start the night before - even the 6000-word ones. As the years passed, I began them later and later, until I wasn't starting until dawn on the due date.
From the outset, let me be clear - this is a really bad idea.
My honours thesis was a particularly painful exercise. Given a year to write 15,000 words, I somehow found myself writing the final 10,000 the weekend before it was due at 5pm on Monday night. I narrowly avoided disaster, and got it in - albeit a few hours late, meaning that I missed the slap-up dinner that the department had thrown students to celebrate their thesis submissions.
My procrastination can take any form. Friends, Friends, family, Modern Family, reading, playing guitar, planning out the inevitably terrible concept hip hop album I've been meaning to record since I was 16 - anything. My favourite diversion in recent weeks has been the New York Times crossword, a distraction that helpfully resets every single day.
But I think the most reliable means of procrastinating is Wikipedia, which is a distraction in a useful research tool's clothing. You consult it entirely legitimately about the subject matter, but then start clicking links, and before you know it you're satisfying the curiosity you never knew you had about what John Stamos was up to between Full House andFuller House.
The most satisfying thing about being a procrastinator is that you can imagine how well you hypothetically would have done if you hadn't left a task until the last minute.
My thesis didn't set the academic world on fire, but people were at least surprised that I'd managed to get the thing done in such a short time. Which I now realise is somewhat like giving an uncoordinated child an award simply for turning up to sport. (I have one of those somewhere, too.)
But as a former flatmate of mine observed when we were both meant to be studying for exams but instead were playing elaborate computer games (Civilisation on his part, someStar Wars thing on mine), assuming you'd have done better with more time is a false assumption if it's something you've never, ever managed to do. It's as empty a boast as saying you can bench press a lot for someone who never trains. Yeah, sure, great - but so what? In the end you're still not lifting very much. And of course the appropriate response isn't to be impressed, but ask why on earth you won't train more consistently.
There have been times when being a last-minute specialist has been hugely useful, like a couple of years ago when I was asked to host a two-hour radio programme with 20 minutes' notice. (The first segment was, 'When have you ever been asked to do anything at incredibly short notice?')
But on the whole, it's something I'd gladly change about myself. I don't want to be maniacally planned and methodical, but if I could somehow wind my sense of the latest point at which I could feasibly start a task back by a few weeks, I'd save myself an enormous amount of stress, and sleep.
So, given my lifelong involuntary membership to the Procrastinators' Club that nobody ever quite got their act sufficiently together to set up, I was astonished to read an article in the New York Times by somebody who taught himself to procrastinate.
I know I'm not the only one out there - otherwise the market for that esteemed publication's fine crosswords would plummet - but I couldn't quite believe that somebody organised would choose to join us.
But, although I can barely imagine it, it turns out that there is such a thing as a 'precrastinator'. The author, Adam Grant, is one.
Just as I put myself through anguish throughout my six-year uni course by starting essays as late as possible, he says that precrastinators' lives become unbearable as soon as there's an incomplete task on the horizon. Grant is the opposite of me, a self-control shaman who submitted his dissertation two years early.
Two. Years. Early.
To me, that feels roughly as achievable as getting selected in the Olympic hurdling team - for the Rio Olympics.
But avoiding incompletion angst isn't the only reason why Adam Grant wanted to become a procrastinator.
He cites studies that say procrastinators achieve more creative outcomes. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright, according to Grant, produced his greatest design only when his client drove over and forced him to sit down and draw. It's not just that procrastinators do surprisingly good work for the minimal time that they've put in, it's that they often do their best work ever.
I have to say that this accords with my own experience. When a deadline looms, my brain somehow switches into hyperdrive and ideas somehow reveal themselves through sheer urgency, perhaps due to all that sloshing adrenaline.
In fact, I experimented with this article by writing it a day before it was due. It was very dull until I edited it close to the deadline - I'm not going to admit how much. If you think it's still dull, let's say I left it that way deliberately.
So there's a benefit to putting off until tomorrow what you can achieve today. Not only will you probably nail it in the end, but you'll get to spend some precious hours filling crosswords, too.
But please don't start those last-minute essays at dawn on the day they're due. Not only is it unnecessarily agonising, but the more people who can do it, the less proud I'll feel of my extremely trivial academic achievements.
Is it too hard to be prime minister in 2016?
In the future, Andy Warhol said, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes. In Australia's future, everyone will be prime minister for 15 minutes, before being brutally rolled.
We've had five prime minsters since John Howard powerwalked away after 11 years, and not one has served a full term. Our political system's become as volatile as Kanye West on Twitter.
Voters are realising they rejected Labor's musical chairs only to sign up for the Coalition version. Polls recently hit fifty-fifty and the PM is running against both the Opposition leader and his predecessor, who's been dubbed "Tony Rudd".
Why are we trading leaders as regularly as our smartphones? Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott won landslides, and Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull were installed because they seemed competent. Surely there's more behind their difficulties than coincidence or bad luck?
Although each leader has unique shortcomings, the similarity of their fates raises questions about our system. Since Howard, the job has become harder, to the point where no leader can be confident of survival.
For a decade, Bob Carr dominated NSW headlines with a carefully-curated stream of "announceables", but nowadays it's harder to control the news cycle. New policies only get brief coverage before we return to Tony Abbott's surfing antics or whichever sideshow has captured our fancy.
The front page and the 6pm bulletin were once key, but today's news beast needs feeding 24/7. Via clicks and shares, it's not editors or producers but the public who determine which stories have impact. We like personalities more than policy, which is why our politics are merging with our soap operas. And we reward leadership spills with poll boosts, but lose interest when our adrenaline fades.
John Howard held on despite months of trailing behind both Kim Beazley and Mark Latham, but modern leaders aren't afforded that luxury. The political scientist Sally Young has shown that poll coverage increased significantly through the 2000s. Opinion polling now rivals cricket as our national sport.
This has rendered our politics more pain-averse. The carbon tax and 2014 budget reforms died after backlashes, and it's hard to imagine the dollar's flotation or the GST's introduction today. Scott Morrison pondered a GST increase only to yank it off the table when the prospect of more tax was, astonishingly, not welcomed by the electorate.
Proposals like Tony Abbott's parental leave policy are gradually undermined by their critics and, when a leader like Julia Gillard is determined to hold the line, the pressure drives marginal MPs to become colleagues of no confidence.
We love a good backlash. The likes of Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones stir up dissent on radio, TV and in print, while chatty new websites like Buzzfeed, Pedestrian and Junkee are always on the lookout for a target. Their criticisms are amplified by social media, and then the reaction becomes the story.
The political conversation's now a two-way street. Focus groups are obsolete when we can tell our leaders what we think immediately. It took seconds for the news of Prince Philip's knighthood to be followed by the first jokes on Twitter.
Governments have tried to adapt. Instead of launching new policies, they float test balloons. When they founder, worthwhile proposals get abandoned and the government becomes inert and reactive. Before long, the dice is rolled on a new leader.
In recent weeks, Malcolm Turnbull has gone from criticism for drifting to praise for boldness, but his ploy of proroguing parliament was quickly tainted by mass amusement at a line that was reminiscent of the TV show Veep.
He might look enviously at his NSW counterpart, who's taking advantage of fixed, four-year terms to implement extensive reforms. But fixed federal terms would require a referendum, which seems about as likely as Mike Baird opening a nightclub.
Over the past decade, technology has transformed the media, and our politics along with it. To borrow a Turnbullism, our politicians will need to be agile in order to survive.
There may never have been a more exciting time to be prime minister, but it's probably never been this difficult to govern. While the pace of political reporting and voter reactions have become dizzyingly rapid, our need for considered, long-term policymaking remains the same as ever.
Originally published in the Sydney Morning Herald