No Father's Day is complete without a reflection on what fathers have achieved in past years. When the age has been reached whereby funerals feature more often than marriages one finds oneself raking through years gone by more often. There is so much more past than future, is there not? Of course "so much more past" has not come without effort and due care, regarding aging in general and healthy specifically.

With attention on Olympics, sport and medals and some art as well, we were drawn to the 'femme and homme' in all of us, including both sexes of each gender and even sometimes in reverse. Women in general look after health a lot better than men, because they care. Men are often somewhat shy of their health problems, although I must admit, one sees a lot more men in waiting rooms. Perhaps coyly seeking repeat prescriptions for Viagra?

But the real test of masculinity is of course the eagerness of men for the colonoscopy every couple of years. I have become a bit of an expert on the procedure so allow me to share my layman's experience regarding colonoscopy. While it can never be too early to develop an interest in one's bowels, most men (except AFL and VFL players) don't really worry too much until it is often too late. It seems masculinity deserts them when it comes to the nitty gritty of deep ring gazing by expert doctors.

This then is a plea for all, especially men of both genders, to go and have regular colonoscopy.

Let me give you a few handy hints.

After drinking all preparations and endless bowel 'evacuations', the day has finally arrived and one stands at the hospital desk. In my case it has always been my beloved Concord Repat. Hospital in Sydney. The waiting room is usually taken up with anxious and totally drained men and some supporting partners. A beautiful girl, not Lilly, behind the desk is writing our name tags. One is then taken to a cubicle and told to get undressed including underpants and ordered to put on a white gown with about six strings to be tied at the back. This is difficult if not impossible and of course the girl that led you to the cubicle does not assist in the undressing and the struggle with gown. The colonoscopy expert and staff need decent access that is why the ties are at the back. It took me years to discover that the best way is to lay the gown on floor, then tie the strings and simply slip the gown over head and shoulders like you would a dress.

After this has been achieved, a nurse will lead you to a bed, often past many other patients, nurses and staff, curious onlookers. This is where dignity and decorum might get a bit ruffled if the gown is somewhat peekaboos and akimbo. Also, please check your wrist name tag. The second last time I was just about ready to get wheeled in when I discovered I had the name of a women on my wrist. It will never be known how close I came to a pap smear, nor what happened to the person with my name tag.

You will be in bed just resting. Some men had their wives holding their hands but I was always alone and suffering total emptiness. Someone had to look after the farm. Anyway, when you get finally wheeled into the theatre you will be reassured and a kind of funnel is put in your backside with a smile and a lubricant. Next a needle in your veined hand and before you get a chance to reflect on anything you will be sedated and out of it. Oh, yes. I was told last time, to give doctor better access and draw up knees closer to chest (she looked me deep in the eyes when she said this.) The whole procedure is totally painless and you next wake up back at the ward and in bed. Once, during the removal of a couple of polyps called polypectomy I woke up during the procedure, looked at screen and wondered if that is what a porn movie might look like, before I realized I was looking deep inside my own bowel.

You will sleep off the sedation and then comes the reward which makes it all so worthwhile, it used to be a bowl of soup and then a plate of mashed potato with chicken schnitzel, followed by a lovely green jelly. Last time I was a bit miffed when the fare was reduced to cheese and ham on white Tip Top.

In my own case I liked to linger on as long as possible enjoying the spoiling by staff. Of course at the end of those colonoscopies it was always Helvi's calm and comforting smile that I looked forward to most. She seemed to care a little bit.

You are not allowed to drive for 24 hours in case the sedative has not quite been absorbed.

There is nothing better than being driven back to the farm and be greeted by 'Milo' the Jack Russell. He is always so caring.

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Last year, Kevin Rudd described the forthcoming dominance of his party federally and in every state and territory as an unrivaled opportunity to put the blame game behind us and usher in a new era of co-operation.

So far, Rudd has got very little out of his ALP colleagues in the states. They are not much interested in national approaches to education, health and industrial relations. State governments are still playing the same old game of selling their co-operation for the maximum price possible and the Rudd Government has proven itself willing to lavish plenty of largesse on the state governments.

No amount of federal largesse, however, is going to save the ALP in NSW. Outgoing treasurer Michael Costa made it perfectly clear in his extraordinary media conference this morning that the NSW government is basically 'insolvent'. Money has been squandered, budgets have blown out, and revenues are collapsing as the state heads towards recession.

Iemma and Costa have paid the price for failing to get their party to agree to electricity privatisation; and, we're all paying an economic price because the previous premier, Bob Carr, and his treasurer, Michael Egan, failed to sell these assets years ago when they were worth a lot more money.

Carr's lack of strategic foresight and fortitude extended into just about every aspect of government with hard decisions being eschewed in favour of spin. And that points to a much bigger problem that will reverberate around Australia over the next few years.

Over the past decade or so, starting with Bob Carr, state ALP governments have mastered a political strategy that is based around throwing money at tough problems to paper over them while you put a gloss on everything with oodles of highly-expensive corporate-style spin.

Railcorp, for instance, has never been properly reformed because, like electricity privatisation, it was just too hard to take on the NSW Labor Council. The result was that Railcorp, like many other government agencies, spent a lot of money without making any breakthrough changes and is stuck with out-of-date management and workplace cultures.

This strategy of problem avoidance was premised on money rolling in as Australia enjoyed the longest boom in its history. As Costa made perfectly clear this morning, those easy days are over and if the NSW Government is to survive it will have to take the sort of grindingly tough decisions it has been avoiding for years.

Whether a couple of inexperienced lefties in Rees and Tebbutt are up to the toughest of all economic challenges we shall all see in due course. But, I admit, I'm as nervous about this as any other resident of Australia's largest state.

Economic times are still pretty good in Western Australia, so the political realities are not so grim as they are here in Sydney. But there's another aspect of the State ALP political model that might give Alan Carpenter's government a real fright tomorrow, or even push it out of office, and that characteristic is arrogance.

Feeding off boom times and facing some pretty awful Opposition leaders, the ALP has grown complacent, smug and, even, arrogant. The political class in the ALP is captivated by focus groups, tracking polls, fund-raising (particularly from property developers) and masses of publicly-funded advertising.

They have come to treat voters as dummies who would have to fall in-line because the alternative has been so bad. After all, if Morris Iemma could get re-elected then anything is possible. In this weird world, projects like hospitals and rail lines are always getting announced amid great fanfare only to be cancelled after the election and then re-announced in the lead-up to the next election.

In the Northern Territory a few weeks ago the voters let the government know that they didn't appreciate a snap election being called for purely cynical reasons. And their cousins in Western Australia might just repeat the message tomorrow. A couple of weeks ago, the Carpenter Government looked impregnable but its cynicism, and the disdain of voters that goes with it, has brought it to the brink of an improbable defeat.

A change of government in WA tomorrow will re-energise the Coalition in a very big way. Not only is a win, any win, great when you've been losing so many elections for so long but a WA victory would create a beachhead for the conservatives. This can have the effect of attracting better candidates and more campaign funding across the country as people sense that the tide is turning.

A WA Coalition Government would also break up the ALP's cosy little club of national and state governments, making it much more difficult for the Rudd Government to negotiate its national approaches.

The implosion of the NSW ALP Government, and the revolt by WA and NT voters, poses a larger strategic problem for the Rudd Government. I think Rudd would love to have a double dissolution to push some legislation through and to use his popularity to get a more favourable make-up in the Senate. With NSW in disarray, and voters, faced with tougher economic times, getting impatient with spin and political cynicism the prospects for a double dissolution are diminishing.

What's more, there are messages in the recent ALP problems in NSW, WA and NT that the Rudd Government would be wise to think hard about while it is still fresh and held in reasonably high regard in the electorate.

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Victorian politicians are debating how to reform law on abortion. In Victoria, as in other states, abortion remains a crime. This is inconsistent with what happens. There are nearly 100,000 abortions every year in Australia.

The Victorian government will decide between two Models. According to Model B, abortion will be available on request until 24 weeks of pregnancy, but after that point two doctors must agree that it is indicated. Doctors who fail to comply with the law would receive professional and other sanctions. On Model C, abortion is available on request all through pregnancy. Premier Brumby and a majority of politicians support Model B.

Why is the imposition of sanctions on doctors who provide abortions so attractive? Firstly, abortion is an undesirable means of birth control. Most people would prefer to find other ways of not having unwanted children. Secondly, many people believe that as the fetus grows, and looks more like a baby, its moral status increases. After 24 weeks, some fetuses are even capable of living in intensive care units, outside the womb, as extremely premature newborns.

Despite its superficial attractiveness, Model B is deeply morally flawed. According to Model B, the moral status of the fetus, and whether it is kept alive or aborted, depends on the judgement of two doctors. Their decisions will usually be based on whether there is a disease or disability present. But this implies that fetuses with disabilities have less of a right to life than those which do not have disabilities. This is discrimination against the disabled and those with diseases. We would not allow two doctors to kill a child just because it had spina bifida. Why would we think the presence of spina bifida should change the moral standing of a fetus? Doctors can withdraw medical treatment leading to the deaths of their patients, but only when the patient's life is no longer worth living. This is not the case in virtually all abortions.

Either the fetus after 24 weeks of gestation is like a child, and has a right to life, in which case all abortions after 24 weeks are wrong, or it does not, in which case any abortion is permissible after 24 weeks (as Model C implies). To base abortion decisions on the presence of disability, or doctors' judgements, implies moral status and right to life depend on either being free of disability or meeting the approval of others. This is eugenic.

People fear that if there are no sanctions, more abortions will occur or occur for trivial reasons. This fear is groundless. The ACT has a liberal abortion law like Model C and there are no increased numbers of abortions. There are only a couple of hundred late abortions in Australia per year and virtually all of these are for medical abnormalities detected late in pregnancy. Women do not endure 24 weeks of pregnancy only to come forward for a social termination or for trivial reasons. The presence of sanctions only places further obstacles to a small number of women who make agonising and profound decisions late in their pregnancy. There is no need to punish doctors. Those doctors who disapprove can always pass the care of the woman onto another doctor.

We can all agree with those who see abortion as undesirable. We should promote other means of birth control and reduce the need for abortion. And we may disagree with people's decisions to have an abortion. But the decision to have an abortion is one of the most private and intimate decisions for a woman. There is no place for the law there.

There is an important distinction between morality and law. People may make the wrong decision to terminate a pregnancy. They should be counselled, advised and we can even attempt to persuade them to change their mind. But their actions should only be illegal if they harm another person. The paradox of the abortion debate is that there appears to be an innocent person who is harmed, and so we want some sanctions, but there is not. If there were, all abortions should be illegal.

What is the alternative? Model B implies that women can be denied late abortions. This means that they either have to be forced against their will to undergo delivery of the child, or endure the remainder of pregnancy, and adopt out the child. I am personally in favour of adoption. For example, hundreds of thousands of embryos which are no longer required by couples undergoing IVF are destroyed rather than going to other infertile couples or research. This is deeply wrong. But it should not be illegal. We should not punish people who choose to destroy their own embryos rather than adopt them out. We should perhaps raise the profile of adoption, of embryos and fetuses, as a moral option. But we should not require it by law, even indirectly.

The most publicised case of late abortion which motivated law reform in Victoria is of a woman who was suicidal over a 32 week pregnancy involving a fetus with dwarfism. The abnormality was only diagnosed late. Some people think she made the wrong decision (I personally don't know all the facts of her situation). To be sure, she should be and was counselled and encouraged to consider adoption. But should she have been forced to carry on the pregnancy? Or forced to have a Caesarean and adopt the child out? Or forced by law to keep a child she deeply did not want? All of these options are more undesirable than the unhappy choice of having an abortion a few weeks later than she should have because of delays in diagnosis.

One of the greatest achievements of modern civilised society is family planning. It has promoted women and children's health and education, equality and societal progress. People should make decisions about when to have children, how many children to have and what kind of children to have. Abortion is a necessary part of family planning, albeit a less than perfect part.

There is only one right way to reform law on abortion: to adopt a fully liberal approach with no sanctions against doctors who perform them. Abortion should not be a crime. There is no place for the law in regulating access to abortion. Model C is the ethical option.

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I flipped and flopped on the question of Sarah Palin for the US vice-presidency. First of all I thought it was terrific to have a bright-eyed woman finally on the scene, then I thought her pro-life position (who is anti-life?) meant it was merely an election gimmick. Then I did the algebra using the Null Factor Law.

On the Democrat side unknown black man chooses conservative white man as running mate. On the Republican side moderate older white man chooses white woman opposed to abortion and standing for nothing that would entice a Hillary loving Democrat to change vote.

In other words neither Republicans nor Democrats find gender politics matter. Neither believes it is a sufficient vote changer to promote a woman who ticks the Feminist boxes. They do the polling, they must know.

So what does Sarah Palin represent if it isn't that Capital F feminism we have come to know and, yes, well, slightly fear in case we say something let alone do something Wrong? (I know, I was The Headmistress for six years).

Ms Palin is a candidate with a past, with a story quietly familiar to many American (and Australian for that matter) families. The story becomes glamorous thanks to her good looks and success on the very public and tough stage of politics. It is not quite the McCain story, but then who has that?

If reports of her cracks about "old rich white boys" are correct, Ms Palin is also a character, so sorely lacking in this white flour mix of candidates. A person who says what she thinks and feels for God's sake. I have no doubt one of the few advantages enjoyed by women in public life is their greater capacity to get away with making outrageous comments than men. Men who stray from the party line or who challenge the dominant wisdom are expected to do so only from a position of grim intellectual strength; women on the other hand may be any one of strong, intuitive, playful or shocking. They may be provocative without being threatening. More on this in a moment.

When it comes to gender, Ms Palin represents the other feminist sister. The one who dares not claim that name. The woman who volunteers in local community groups, bakes cookies, brings up the kids, works in semi skilled work with hours revolving around her family's needs, loves lipstick and may or may not believe in a woman's right to abortion but nonetheless believes she is realising her ambitions, rights and freedoms. What's more, she finds the constant suggestion that she is oppressed ridiculous. After all it is her partner working forty or fifty hours in drudge jobs like oil production she feels sorry for.

In Sarah Palin the Republicans have nothing to lose. The romance between Obama and the American Public has overwhelmed the Republican campaign and it is only the inherent conservatism of the American people that has kept the very worthy, if much older McCain in the race. They cannot compete with the inspiring scent oozing out of Obama and indeed they pretend their strength lies in the quiet confidence wafting from the older statesman.

But the Republicans know they need to shake up this campaign, overwhelm the love affair or die in the attempt. They too, need a romance. Not one to eclipse the main story but a personal narrative that captures sufficient of their values to cause only mild philosophical tension while sharing a journey with working class voters who currently vote Democrat.

What does it matter to them if Sarah Palin explodes into thousands of tiny stars, crashing to earth with her five children, unborn grandchild, a very unlikely and surprised son in law who used to be a redneck and proud of it and a husband who works in the oil industry. Her bio. suggests she was probably pregnant when they eloped and I have no doubt that all those grotty little details will seep out in push polling and unofficial web sites over the next few months.

Sarah Palin is just so unlikely all round the media will be like pigs in mud for weeks, exactly as the Republicans have planned. America's 08 sweetheart; not too grand, nor too obviously intellectual, too severe. Her eye wear will become fashionable, babies will be called Bristol and Trig. Everyone who "had" to get married and stuck it out will rejoice for her.

Of course she will need to be kept well away from policy. Her background as governor, only recently, of a little tiny state, and her hitherto chorus line status in the Republic party will not recommend itself to campaign managers who will I am sure only use her for serious purposes if those same break-through or indelicate remarks are required. Her wit, charm and very non-Washington style will be relied on to get her and them out of gaol.

And if she fails, well then who cares? Such is the lot of women, so often asked to take on the cause only when all is lost. Another woman with a poisoned chalice.

But these women don't all die. And when they survive, they do very well. They have earnt sweet victories and assume enormous authority. This could well be the fate of Sarah Palin. If she survives then history and the Presidency are hers when the claws of mortality begin to tear at the body of John McCain and bring him down, even temporarily.

And why shouldn't she dare? No one ever said the first woman in the White House was going to get there the easy way, through marriage or connections or personal wealth. It was always going to be almost an accident. Fingers crossed.

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It was sometime in the 1870s that a Scottish bloke by the name of Peter McCormick thought it would be a grand idea to write a song about how utterly brilliant Australia is. In the 1970s, the Australian Labor Party decided that the country needed a new national anthem. A plebiscite was held - and the 100-year-old ditty was chosen by the people of Australia, edging out Waltzing Matilda - a quaint song about a suicidal sheep rustler. The nation had spoken.

But let's examine what else the nation thought was a good idea in the 1970s. We, as a country, were laughing at racist comedies like Kingswood Country, our love affair with the gas-guzzling family V8 was just hitting its straps and we had managed to elect a leader who, in any other era, would have had the political appeal of a severed thumb.

That's how, with the nation's cultural defences at an all-time low, we managed to choose a national anthem so prodigiously woeful, it took eleven whole years for it to become the 'official' anthem.

There's a reason for that, and that reason is this: Our national anthem is a dud. It's boring. And dishonest. And that's talking about the good bits. At its worst, it portrays a snapshot of Australia's early history - a thuggishly racist and thoroughly erroneous country. Don't believe me? The proof is right there in the lyrics. When we pick each line apart, the distressing reality is there for all to see.

Australians all, Let us rejoice - This has always been a contentious line, and was changed from "Australian Sons" to "Australians all" when women rightfully pointed out that they make up the majority of people in this country, and therefore should probably be included in the anthem.

For we are young and free - except, of course, for old people and prisoners. Which is at last count about 27 percent of the population. We should also bear in mind that this line refers to Australia as a 'young' nation, neatly excising the tens of thousands of years of indigenous existence on this continent, a clear indication that Australia doesn't care at all about those who came before us.

We've golden soil - except for the deep red sand of our vast deserts and the occasional startlingly dark loam found in the more verdant regions of the country. It's an interesting euphemism, though - we've managed to translate our 'wide, brown land' into 'golden soil', leading me to believe that McCormick had help with the lyrics from a real estate agent.

And wealth for toil - Minimum wage: $14.31 an hour, normally paid to people who work horrible jobs that no one else wants to do. People with cushy jobs (like mine, and probably yours) get paid a whole lot better than that. Putting that in perspective: An individual, after tax, will take home about $480 a week. To buy an average-priced home in Australia, the mortgage payment - per week - is about $840. There's your reward for hard work - an unattainable dream.

Our home is girt by sea - And there it is - the word that every Australian child needs to have explained to them when they learn the National Anthem. For those of you playing at home, 'girt' is the past tense and past participle of "gird". Which means it's got something to do with loins - presumably.

Our land abounds in nature's gifts - Nature's gifts? Let's see... we have the highest concentration of poisonous fauna of any country on the planet. Add to that the fact that the seas that we are 'girt' by are home to sharks, crocodiles and the world's most potent jellyfish. We have vast reserves of environment-destroying coal and radioactive uranium. And the country is prone to drought, floods and bushfires. Thanks Nature! Your gifts will be treasured, always.

Of beauty rich and rare - Australia has produced, by my reckoning, no more than ten Supermodels. Ever. They are beautiful, rich and rare. So how, pray tell, does this line represent the other 20 million or so Australians currently on the books? If you're not rich or pretty or both, then you're outta the club. Thanks for playing.

In history's page, let every stage - What does this even mean?

Advance Australia Fair - An admirable sentiment, make no mistake. But it is, when you think about it, overtly racist. Advance Australia: yes. Only the "fair" people - I really think that this could have been clarified.

In joyful strains then let us sing - I don't get this bit either. I trained as a singer when I was a kid. I've heard joyful singing, and I've heard strained singing. I don't think I will ever get the two confused. But here we are, being implored by our National Anthem to do just that.

There is, of course, the little-known and hardly-ever-sung second verse - a curious adjunct to an otherwise dire ditty of national pride. For those of you who are sticklers for the rules, we'll run through this second verse as well.

Beneath our radiant Southern Cross - If by 'radiant' McCormick meant 'twinkling faintly through the light pollution caused by our energy-hungry capital cities', then yes - technically, he got this one right. Mind you, in the late 19th century, the southern cross was probably as bright as the moon is now.

We'll toil with hearts and hands - Again with the toiling - and this time not only with our hands (which makes sense), but also with our hearts (which is medically impossible). I defy anyone to dig a hole using only their heart.

To make this Commonwealth of ours - By "ours" we mean "Queen Elizabeth's" - on paper, she owns the lot. Which explains why she always looks pretty grumpy - the operating costs of something so large must be prohibitive.

Renowned of all the lands - Finally! We're getting somewhere with this line - and for some reason, it's buried halfway down the second stanza that nobody in their right mind would ever sing, unless they're up for re-election and things are looking hopeless.

For those who've come across the seas - Except, of course, if you arrived from a foreign country, seeking refuge. In which case, you can expect to spend at least a couple of years in a detention centre. If you're lucky, it'll be somewhere warm. Like the middle of a 'boundless plain'.

We've boundless plains to share - "Boundless: Adjective, meaning 'infinite'". Which is true, right up until we remember that our home is 'girt by sea'. Also: historically, we've not been all that keen to 'share' the supposedly infinite bounty of Australia, particularly with those who have 'come across the seas' without our government's express permission.

With courage let us all combine - This is only the second line in the whole damn song that stirs any sort of pride or national spirit, and it's the last thing we're supposed to sing. For shame...

A national anthem is supposed to be one of the central elements of national identity... but ours is just plain embarrassing. Do we, as a nation, have the courage to stand up and demand a new one? And do we, as a nation, understand the collective stupidity of selecting something as abysmal as Waltzing Matilda in its place?

I hope so. When the time comes that Australia progresses far enough culturally that we all realise we have the single most appalling national anthem in the world, I pray to the soul of McCormick that we don't throw out one bad anthem and replace it - yet again - with another.

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Australian academic export Professor Germaine Greer has made a career out of being provocative. Her first book, The Female Eunuch, has become an icon of feminist literature and is credited for contributing to the emancipation of the seventies woman. Since then she has been the catalyst for columns and columns of outraged attack from all manner of columnists, journalists and other feminists. Be it her request that female circumcision be regarded within cultural context in 1984's Sex and Destiny, or her passionate homage to the beauty of the teenage male body in The Beautiful Boy from 2003, her writing has sparked everything from contempt to outrage.

And her lastest offering, On Rage, is no different: in the weeks following its publication, her illustration of its thesis that when people are disempowered they become enraged, and once enraged behave in ways beyond their control, with indigenous men in remote communities, attracted attacks from both the right and left.

Here, delivering the keynote address at the Melbourne Writers Festival, Greer uses the platform to expand upon her thesis, and defend herself against these attacks. Her speech, which covers contemporary society and literary history, is dramatic and bold, quite something to behold.

This video is presented in conjunction with ABC Fora, a great source of talks and debates online.

Comments on this story appear both here on Unleashed and on the ABC Fora site.

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• ABC Fora video link

The main issue with coal development is its impacts on economy, communities and the environment. It has skewed the local economy to its needs alone.

The roads are in disrepair from heavy use. It takes months to get a tradesperson or other skilled staff as most are working for the mines where wages are better.

The coal-fired power plant at Collinsville cannot find skilled tradespeople. I went to a local high school to give a talk to the eleventh grade on sustainable building, which I do every year. The teacher apologised as only six students attended. The rest had left to take jobs either in mine-related work or the hospitality industry.

Rents are so high many people such as teachers and policemen can not afford to stay and the working poor and lower middle class find it difficult to find affordable accommodation. Many of our green spaces have been sold by councils to pay for the onslaught of new infrastructure demand. What is left is mainly mangrove forests or sports fields. Funds for infrastructure to cope from the State and federal governments have been meagre and directed to mining infrastructure rather than community needs.

After furious lobbying efforts Mackay obtained the promise of a new base hospital when the Premier put up the Mackay airport for private sale. Many of our schools are run-down and in need of upgrading and even a coat of paint. Central Mackay School looks like not much has been done to it since the 1930s. People argue for Sunday trading, but where, others argue, will you get the staff? Miners work long shifts and are not usually able to fit in with a volunteer's schedule so our communities feel that loss.

The social fabric is rent in many places, especially for the poor and elderly. We have a two class society - miners and the rest.

There are around eighty coal mines in the Bowen Basin with more to come at a time when scientists are telling us we face the loss of the Great Barrier Reef and the collapse of marine ecosystems due to acidification impacts if we continue to pump more CO2 into the atmosphere.

The inland mining town of Moranbah is now almost surrounded by mines and an explosives plant is being built just outside of town. Mining continues through creeks and endangered ecosystems. Broadscale clearing for agriculture has also left only the creek banks for wildlife in many places. The only birds you see along the New Development Road are crows.

Despite a plan for wildlife and riparian streamside corridors to protect some remaining plants and animals in the Bowen Basin, the State has ignored its implementation for two years. Few to no regional ecosystems in the Bowen Basin are represented in the Protected Area System. It is to be a national sacrifice area, out of sight and mind of the nation.

There is a 16,000 hectare State Development Area recently established at Abbotts Point north of Bowen, with Bowen planned to be the next Gladstone within 35 years. It will have a 500 hectare industrial waste site. The massive Chinese CHALCO alumina refinery will probably be located there.

An entrepreneur speaks glowingly of a Boomerang railroad across the nation from west to east, carrying iron ore to the east coast and Abbotts Point, and coal from the Bowen Basin to the west coast, to feed steel smelters at each end. The beautiful Keela (Caley) Valley wetlands next to Abbotts Point are home to up to 20,000 migratory and local birds. Both this wetland and the Goorganga Wetland in the Whitsundays are the largest and most important in the Bowen to Whitsunday region.

I am still trying to get a copy of the Department of State Development's $100,000 consultant report to see what protection is there for the wetlands against industry. You don't find insects, flies or many birds in industrial Gladstone. Two out of three people die of cancer there.

There is a growing 22,000 hectare Gladstone State Development Area with Liquid Natural Gas docking facilities planned on World Heritage class Curtis Island, so three hundred trips a year can be made through the already crowded harbour a year. Premier Bligh just announced another port at Shoalwater Bay just north of Byfield National Park to place a coal train to the port through fields of massive foreshore dunes and a place of high natural biodiversity values. A coal conveyor belt and coal port is even planned through Mackay.

We hear there is to be an Industrial Corridor from Gladstone to Bowen. Gas pipelines and power transmission lines criss-cross the region from the mines to the coast. Coal ports, coastal development and superyacht marina villages must come first, not the need to maintain remaining wetlands and coastal ecosystems for migratory and local wildlife, a healthy Great Barrier Reef and public beaches and foreshores for community uses.

We have a peculiar law that allows 99 year leases of the seabed adjacent to the forshore. The result has been fill reclamation for marina villages and the loss of seagrass beds that feed our threatened dugongs, and other losses of natural beauty and diversity.

Now there is a proposal to mine 1.67 billion tonnes of oil shale over forty years next to one of the major wetlands along the Queensland coast, the 18,000 hectare Goorganga floodplain in the Whitsundays. It is prized as a commmercial fish nursery and a massive complex of freshwater - brackish and saline wetlands where runoff from the mountains to the west is up to a metre depth during the wet season and motorists can catch a barramundi fish off the side of the Bruce Highway.

The Goorganga Wetlands are underlain at one metre by some 16,000 hectares of acid sulfate soils. Pump groundwater upstream from these wetlands and you lower the wetlands water table and risk exposing the acid sulfate soils to oxidation. If that happens sulfuric acid from these wetlands that are affected will flow into Repulse Bay for hundreds of years.

The company says it will deliver 3,000 direct jobs but offers no explanation how. No mine in Queensland offers 3,000 jobs. A similar operation of the Stuart oil shale deposit between 1999 and 2004 did not work efficiently and delivered clouds of over 270 chemical compounds during most of its trial runs over the adjacent community of Targinnie.

People were sick from the stench and fumes which smelled like "burning rubber" or "sulphur" up to 70km to the north and 20km out to sea. The Whitsunday mine would also be an experimental pilot then later the first commercial scale operation of its size in the world. The people of the Whitsundays do not want to lose their homes and livelihoods like the people of Targinnie to another high risk operation.

Where will most of the water for such development come from? The Burdekin Dam already supplies Townsville with a back-up water supply and will supply Bowen and the Abbott Point State Industrial Area through the 'Water for Bowen' pipeline. A pipeline runs to supply the mines near Moranbah. The Bowen pipeline will be extended to supply the Whitsundays then the Shoalwater Bay coal port. What happens when the Burdekin gets another thirty-five year drought? Has anyone thought this through?

The regional development planning group I sit on to represent the environment keeps postponing meetings, because things keep changing so fast.

We have not met for many months. Community consultation on the mines and other developments has mostly deteriorated to a 'check the box' exercise. EPA is understaffed and under-resourced.

Central Queensland - or should I call it 'Coal Land' - has given much and received little back from this mineral exploitation. Enough is enough. Greed is not always good!

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We are all familiar with the kind of fellow, who has his favourite position at the end of a bar, and if you are unfortunate enough to catch his eye, will harangue you until the cows come home about some hobby horse. He will have seen something or read something which gives him unique insight into some aspect of public policy. It will rely purely or almost purely on anecdote, and it will be declaimed with a fervour that brooks no argument and is unswayed by contrary evidence.

These people once encountered are always subsequently avoided, and you would have no more interest or belief in their views than you would in listening to a used car salesman.

But now these people have come out of the shadows of the country pubs and are featured on national TV, enjoy the ear of ministers, appear in front of parliamentary committees and are the subject of major newspaper profiles.

When their recipes for, say, managing a forest with fire, solving the salinity problem, estimating the numbers of kangaroos in Australia in a drought year, or determining the impact of cattle on the high country are questioned by scientists with extensive research experience on the topic concerned, it is they who win out, not the scientists or the government departments concerned with the particular problem. Indeed when their pronouncements are queried they will receive massive support in the media, support at the ministerial level, and their views can become policy by ministerial decree over any objection.

The media support and the ministerial support of course are directly linked. It is mainly the pressure from media outlets that will get a minister to overrule the scientists in his department. But why the media pressure?

Television now covers stories by creating a narrative. The story line and outcome are as predictable as the old time music hall, or a mediaeval mystery play. Sometimes there is a choice to be made as to which role the main protagonist will play, but once that choice is made everything else flows naturally. I suspect that the narratives are now kept on computer and all a producer has to do is fill in some blanks with relevant names and places and hand the script to the presenter.

In the case of environmental stories of a certain type there are no choices to be made. The hero is the salt of the earth, battler, school of hard knocks, horny-handed son of the soil. Uneducated, but so close to the land that he knows it better than any academic. He has fought to get his views accepted but is met with an unfeeling and stupid wall of resistance from bureaucrats and ivory tower academics who have spent all their lives in the laboratory and know nothing of the real world. He has tried to speak out, and everyone in his small community knows that he is the real expert, but all to no avail.

Then the media takes him up and the public too knows the narrative and knows who they are meant to cheer for. There have been narratives like this before, the bureaucrats and academics are always the bad guys.

If there is any doubt left the media will quote famous men who were right but were not listened to. Letters to the editor and talk back radio calls build momentum and then the minister is intervening and away we go. With ministerial intervention our wise man from the bush will be on committees and even advising the minister directly.

The reality is of course completely the reverse of the media narrative.

Ecologists spend years learning the techniques of their discipline, then many more years, often decades, in the bush, sleeves rolled up, collecting and analysing data, studying earlier work, debating their peers. Ideas which are accepted are based on hard work, good data, and credibility. The ecological academic world as a whole is based on all of the people who have done such work. The man from the bush has had no training on the topics he talks about, has no knowledge of the history of thought in the discipline, has done no study of the issue, has collected no data. His view of the ecological world from the seat of a tractor has no more credibility than say the view of the international world from the driver's seat of a taxi.

In years to come when the foolishness of the man becomes obvious, and the damage that has been caused by following his prescription is evident the minister will have long moved on, and the media will have no interest in yesterday's news or doing a follow up, having already moved on to a new narrative.

In cases where the wild man from the bush is also a scientist of some kind, any kind, the narrative is a little different but the outcome the same. Here the narrative is of the lonely scientist with unpopular ideas, ideas that are unpopular because they are outside mainstream academic thought. The lonely scientist is an unsung genius, but never fear, the media will adopt him and bring his genius to light in spite of the attempts at suppression by academia. When the ideas do see the light of day popular acclaim will convince the public that he is right after all. The media and often the scientist concerned will emphasize the narrative by comparing themselves to earlier unsung geniuses who were eventually found to be right – Galileo perhaps, Darwin or Wegener.

The most insidious effect of this narrative is how it corrupts scientific discourse in the media. The set of a breakfast television show is a small place with room for a couple of guests in easy chairs. The format itself is a narrative which goes like this. Politics, like a football game, is a matter of two teams debating or fighting with each other. The teams have the same number of players, and the best team wins the game or the debate. Before a match or an election you simply bring in a representative from each party, and put them head to head for five minutes and you have informed the public.

In previous years the complexity of science wasn't easy to fit into this format, and consequently was little represented in the mainstream media.

But then came the breakthrough in narrative that suited the interests of television and of certain individuals. In the past if you came up with ideas that were not supported by data, theoretically unjustified, or in other words, simply wrong, you either developed new ideas, or changed your field of work.

The breakthrough was this: Oppose something that everyone in the scientific world accepts. Don't oppose it in scientific journals or at conferences where the idea will be tested and fail (and in fact may have already been tested and failed), but oppose it loudly in the media.

The media can't deal with (and would find boring) thousands of scientists from the whole range of relevant disciplines, all providing different kinds of evidence for say the reality and extent of global warming. But if you can get a charismatic and media savvy character to stand up and say there is no global warming, the media will find this newsworthy. He will be instantly interviewed in a range of media and obtain the celebrity and fame that he considers his due. The more the rest of the scientific world points out the fallacy of the argument, the more the narrative of the lonely genius against the establishment is strengthened and the more the media will love it. The process builds upon itself with the television studio now having a narrative fitting their format. They have a protagonist for one of the chairs on the set, and all they have to do is find some scientist from the opposing view.

The media will provide no context for the debate. The dissident scientist's credentials will remain unexamined. Is he a recognised expert in any relevant field? What qualifications does he have, what original research has he done, what has he published? How do his qualifications and experience match those of the other scientist, and, more importantly, what support does each have in the scientific community and why? These questions are never considered.

Now the game is complete. The debate about global warming (or prescribed burning, kangaroo culling, shark netting or grazing high country) is just like an election or a football match. There are two opposing views, represented here, in the studio, sitting in these two chairs. The two opposing views are of course now equal in weight, and the narrative becomes 'some scientists believe that global warming is a threat to the planet and some do not. Because they are matched one against one the subject in question must be, just like a debate on, say, health care, one where opinions are equally divided'.

The public viewing such a debate could, and do, think that with opinions so equally divided, who could know the truth about global warming, and politicians, seizing upon the artificially created public ambivalence, could decide to do nothing until the 'debate' was resolved.

The wild men from the bush, when adopted by the media, can and do cause a lot of environmental damage. Generally though the damage is restricted to a particular region or a particular issue, and is restricted to a country. The problem with the media approach to the 'dissident scientist', particularly on global warming, is that the damage that has been done is affecting the whole world.

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Since 2002 I've explored the question of whether Japan intended to invade Australia in 1942, reflecting on the meaning of the way Australians look at their wartime history. In Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942 (published by Viking Penguin in July) I substantiate my interpretation.

I place the idea of a Japanese invasion into the context of Australian fears of Asian aggression from the 1890s, look at what actually happened in 1942, and at the changing history of the way the Japanese threat has been interpreted since 1945.

In a nutshell, early in 1942, Japan's wartime leaders thought about invading Australia. They weighed up the costs and the possible results, and decided not to. Thank goodness their fortunes waned in the course of 1942, and they never got a chance to change their minds.

Australians not unreasonably thought that having conquered most of south-east Asia the Japanese would simply keep going. It was logical - and they'd been fearful of Japanese aggression for fifty years, fears evoked by novels, plays and films. The Curtin government understandably warned Australians to prepare for attack or even invasion - as the notorious poster put it 'He's Coming South'!

In fact, 'He' was not, but John Curtin and the Allied Supreme Commander in the South West Pacific, Douglas MacArthur, only understood this by about the middle of 1942. (Intercepted Japanese signals - using codes the Japanese thought were unbreakable - disclosed that Japan had decided not to invade.) By then the Australian government could not resile from the claim that invasion was likely. In fact, an anxious Curtin did not publicly admit that the threat had been removed until mid-1943, a full year after he disclosed as much to his War Cabinet.

The legacy of wartime propaganda left most Australians pretty sure that the Japanese had planned to invade except they had been stopped at Kokoda - or was it the Coral Sea ('the battle that saved Australia')? Veterans returning with Japanese occupation currency printed in shillings for use in occupied New Guinea - none was printed for use in Australia - seemed to buttress this popular belief.

But historians have not agreed. For fifty years after 1945 no one recorded that Japan had planned to invade Australia. Then from the mid-1990s, a new interpretation arose; the 'Battle for Australia' idea.

In this interpretation, Japan's intention was to invade Australia. Various unrelated actions around Australia's permitter- the bombing of Darwin, the fighting in Papua; the submarine raid on Sydney harbour - are stitched together to look like one broad operation - the Battle for Australia. This name is taken from a speech Curtin made following the fall of Singapore in February 1942, in which he anticipated that the fall of the great British base in Asia opened a 'Battle for Australia'. The phrase is not history, it was a prediction - one that did not actually come to pass.

The revisionist veterans and nationalist partisans attracted to the Battle for Australia idea turned Curtin's prediction into a new historical interpretation, one that recently culminated in the Rudd government announcing that 3 September is to be 'Battle for Australia Day'. We are now commemorating a battle that never actually happened. (No historian I know of agrees that there was actually a Battle for Australia: the government seems to have been persuaded in defiance of historical opinion.)

So what's going on here? Why have Australians become so susceptible to aggrandising a battle that did not occur? What should we think about Australia's part in the Second World War?

The Battle for Australia idea has taken root partly because it has been sold by a single-minded group with a shaky grasp of history but with an entirely laudable feeling that those who fought the Second World War should be acknowledged and respected. Sadly, they've sought to do so by inventing a battle.

I too want to acknowledge what Australian servicemen and women achieved, and what the war cost them. (I worked for 27 years at the Australian War Memorial, where I was head of Historical Research and then Principal Historian for twenty years. I've devoted most of my career as an historian to acknowledging and explaining what Australians have done in war.)

This is important, because my work will be denigrated as 'revisionist' (which it isn't - it reflects a pretty orthodox view of the history of the Second World War). And I will be slandered for 'demeaning our war dead' or 'insulting our Diggers'.

Don't tell me that by opposing the spurious Battle for Australia I'm demeaning those who served or died. Focusing on this 'battle' effectively leaves out of memory the thousands of Australians who gave their lives to defeat Nazism in Europe or who died to liberate Asia from Japanese militarism. A 'Battle for Australia' ignores the 3,000 Australians who died in the bomber offensive, the 1,200 dead of Alamein, and those who died in the battle of Britain, over Warsaw or in the battle of the Atlantic. And where do 8,000 dead prisoners of war or the thousand dead of 1945 in the Pacific relate to this 'Battle for Australia'?

How many died in a supposed 'Battle for Australia'? Perhaps several hundred Australians in the peripheral actions around the coast - even in the bombing of Darwin the great majority of the dead were actually Americans (the 188 sailors of the USS Peary - fewer than 20 Australian service personnel died at Darwin on 19 February 1942). Of course their deaths were tragic, but in scale and significance there was nothing that justifies inventing a 'Battle for Australia'.

On the contrary, I argue that Australians ought to be proud of the part it played in the Second World War. Australia entered the war at the outset, to help to defeat Nazi oppression. From December 1941 it fought against Japan's attempt to impose a tyrannical rule upon south-east Asia. Some 40,000 Australians died in the war - very few of them in direct defence of Australia itself - but all in defence of the lives and liberties of others, in Europe and in Asia.

Australians ought to acknowledge and respect what its men and women did in that war. But defending Australia directly had little to do with the sacrifice and the real achievements of that conflict. Imposing a 'Battle for Australia' upon a history that was actually more about a battle for humanity in Europe and Asia merely distorts the real history of Australia's part in that war.

So Invading Australia is not just about an argument about how we should interpret the events of 1942. It is also about the way Australia's history has been manipulated, about how a nation's history can so easily be hi-jacked by partisans and lobby groups. It is about the importance of historical evidence and the power of the widespread popular assumption that invasion plans must have existed.

Small minded parochialism for the time being seems to have trumped clear sighted, evidence-based historical scholarship. The debate continues, as it must.

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Hurricane Gustav? Don't worry about it: let the free market sort it out. The Chinese earhquake? No problem: the Unseen Hand will fix it; no need to do a thing. The Asian tsunami? A necessary market adjustment, part of the order of things. Global warming? It's a cyclical process. Our species will adapt to new conditions, or go under. Two hundred million refugees fleeing the rising seas as the polar ice melts? Not a problem. The thing we most have to fear is Big Government getting mixed up in our individual economic decisions. That's the real threat to humankind.

What is wrong with the above paragraph? Is there any part of it that seems wrong to you, or unwise in its priorities?

Curious, isn't it, how economic rationalism still has its true believers and intelligent men like Andrew Bolt and Paul Kelly and Paul Keating still think that government should get out of the big decisions in our lives, and Jodee Rich and Ken Lay and Alan Bond get in. That big companies whose concern is profit will deal with momentous matters like health and education and air safety better than governments we can vote out if they do it badly.

It's a measure of our capacity for doublethink that two kinds of reasoning simultaneously rule our world now. One of them says everything should be deregulated, freed up, let rip. The other says the planet's in big trouble, and rigorous discipline is required to save it, shore it up, beat back the worst that may befall; in other words, regulation.

New Orleans the first time round showed how many people deregulation can kill, impoverish, humiliate, drive to crime and suicide. Under 'freed up' capitalism emergency services were downsized, dykes and levees not repaired, a great city swamped, weeping multitudes made to wait in mounting excrement for buses that didn't come, and when they did come old women boarding them had to leave behind their beloved pet dogs, and their weatherboard homes to be looted; and young black men were shot dead for raiding butchers' shops to feed their mothers, butchers' shops whose meat would go off anyway.

This time round it seems, thus far, that the dykes have held and the buses turned up on time and the pet dogs either allowed on them or given adequate sanctuary. This was because Big Government stepped in, spent billions of – yes - the taxpayers' money, to strengthen dykes and shore up levees that free enterprise, low taxes, rugged individualism and a National Guard off kicking butt in Iraq had let erode and collapse so Gulf waters tumbled in killing fifteen hundred people and many more stranded pets; pets forbidden a bus ride out lest they piss on the seats, a capital offense in Louisiana, it seems, if you are a dog or a cat.

Yet deregulation is good, we are told, the unfettered market will supply us with all we need. If people want to neglect their safety because it involves high taxes, let them. If Qantas executives want to endanger their passengers by sending safety jobs offshore, let them. If people want to buy cluster bombs, let them. If they want to buy cigarettes, let them. The market will sort it out. Somehow it all shakes down; trickles down.

And the free market will rebuild the wrecked hill villages in China and get the traumatized children in school uniforms again though most of the children are dead, the children of one-child families who can now, according to free market principles, be replaced by further pregnancies if their mothers are young enough and their fathers in the mood, and their vasectomies reversible. The market, trust us, will sort it out.

Though in China it was the new free market ethic that did for them. The cheapest available concrete was used to build the new schools that then fell down killing many children though in surrounding upright buildings made of better materials, nobody died. The concrete-buying process was deregulated, you see, the cheapest concrete bought by deregulated local entities who had no choice. The market ruled in China at last, and what a good thing that was.

One of the arguments for socialism, or social democracy, or Swedish bureaucratic meddling or whatever you wish to call it, the odious thing we used to call government and now call Big Government, is it saves lives by regulation. By making sure the hospitals are well-equipped, the trains on time, the food unpoisoned, the streets policed, the cities unflooded, the fire brigades at the ready to take action in time of emergency, the planes landing safely on undercarriages lately inspected and approved.

And one of the characteristics of capitalism, if it's unregulated, is that nine-year-olds can buy cigarettes and offer their bodies up to prostitution if there's a market for young firm flesh and a shortage of money in their family situation, and private hospitals can turn you away if you don't have the right paperwork, and you can die unattended, or die overdosing in the street.

So do we need more regulation, or less? Do we let any farmer who wants to, steal water from the Snowy or the Murray or do we regulate him? Do we let Putin invade Georgia if he wants to or do we regulate him, contain him? Do we need in the present world crisis a rule of law that benefits the whole community, or an unfettered freedom to seek profit that benefits the energetic, buccaneering business tycoon?

It's interesting how long this doublethink has been going on, the idea that freedom to pillage the planet is congruent with the need to save it. The Indonesian and Amazonian forests cut down. The oil sold to the billion motorists of China. The cluster-bombs that kill children, and feed the terrorism that will one day nuke New York, or poison the tap water of London. The idea that Qantas don't need that many repairmen, and never did.

The truth of it is that capitalism pursues the ethic of the jackal, it feeds off corpses as readily as it does off home-grown food, and socialism shares the ethic of the St Bernard dog, of helping stricken people when it can. Halliburton feeds off corpses felled in battle while Great Britain's National Health saves lives free of charge, or tries to. The money-or-your-life ethic of the American 'managed' health funds is the ethic of the highway robber, the mugger, the marauding pirate in the Caribbean in the seventeenth century: pay up, give us your treasure or you die.

Socialism has a bad name, bloodily earned by a tyrant or two, until you think what capitalism finally means in contrast. Moneyism. Darwinism. Devil-take-the-hindmostism. The freedom to gouge, exploit, enslave. The dollar rules, the people weep, and the body parts of executed prisoners and clubbed tourists we should be free to sell. There's a need, there's a customer, there's a price. It makes perfect market sense.

Freedom is freedom, Abe Lincoln once said, and it cannot be extended to include the freedom to exploit, or the freedom to enslave. For then it is not freedom, but oppression. For then it is not freedom, but tyranny.

And the forests fall and the seas grow filthy and the ice-sheets slide into the ocean while we cry freedom for these our oppressors, our tyrants. And the world's end nears. And Alan Moss is awarded ninety million dollars, the market rate, for assisting this deregulated, freed-up catastrophe.

Deregulation? Let's have more of it. You know it makes sense.

If government can be trusted with our big problems, like war and natural catastrophe, why not our smaller problems too? Why can't government run an airline, a telco, a bank that lends money to home owners, ten thousand child-minding entities, trains that service remote communities? Why should Jodee Rich or Rodney Adler run these entities instead?

What, indeed, are the lessons of a New Orleans government poured billions into, so old women leaving could take their dogs this time, in buses that cost them nothing, to safe, clean, rent-free dwellings out of harm's way?

That government should get out of our lives, and let things rip, and the market rule?

Or that government is us, and we should give it permission to do the work it has always done, of defending us from foreseeable harm.

Or perhaps you disagree.

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We've just entered Ramadan, the most sacred month of the Islamic calendar.

Some of you will read these words and shudder. "Why is he saying that 'we' have? Is he declaring in some stealthy conspiratorial fashion the establishment of the Islamic Caliphate of Australia?"

It's fashionable these days to think along these lines. So often we are bombarded with stuff like: "The Muslim faith, with its attendant jihadi sensibility and Islamic supremacism, could not differ more from European Christians' beliefs". Making up conspiracies about nasty beady-eyed "Islamists" taking over the world is common, just as it was once common to talk about nasty Jewish bankers. It's as if Muslims are permanently logged into the al-Qaeda intranet, receiving immediate updates from Caliph Usama (with translations from The Chaser) on the next attack.

So let's imagine that Muslims, under the leadership of Uncle Sam, are aiming to turn Camden into Islamden and Canberra in Islamberra. Let's presume the PM will be transformed into Kaliph Kevin-07, able to speak fluent Arabic so that this time he can personally take a blowtorch to the next OPEC meeting.

What better month to complete that transformation of Australia than Ramadan? So let's just imagine that Islamist armies agree to gather at the end of the Federal Highway, just north of Canberra on, say, the 3rd day of Ramadan (which, according to my Islamic calendar, also happens to be Wednesday 3 September).

I can predict from now that probably only 40% of the army will show up on the Wednesday. The other half might show up Thursday or Friday. They'll then start arguing about which of them showed up on the right day.

As far as organised religion goes, Islam would have to be the most disorganised religion on earth. It isn't just that fact that Muslims are forbidden alcohol that leads me to believe they couldn't organise a piss-up in a jihadi brewery.

Islamic religious festivals are determined by the Islamic lunar calendar. In terms of our post-Christian Gregorian calendar, Ramadan and other Islamic months begin and end on different days each year.

In the Prophet Muhammad's time some 14 centuries ago, people used to sight the new moon with their naked eye. The Prophet gave instructions about how to sight the new moon, and how to calculate prayer times during the day using the length of a stick's shadow.

Today, we don't need sticks and shadows. Instead, we have watches and prayer timetables to determine when to face Mecca. But when it comes to determining when the months begin and end, each year sees a fresh lunar-tic controversy. And even the most radical imams are too busy issuing their own fatwa on this.

Aussie Muslims come from over 60 different countries. Mosques in Sydney and Melbourne are largely organised along ethnic lines. The ethnic group with the largest number of mosques and imams in Australia is the Turkish community. Turkish imams and astronomers have calculated lunar months well in advance. Each year, Turkish Muslims in Australia and across the world know exactly when Ramadan begins and ends.

Other ex-Ottoman Muslim groups (Bosnians, Cypriots and Albanians) tend to follow the Turks. Lebanese and other Arabs also fall into line, as do Indonesians, Malaysians and Central Asians.

But a sizeable number of imams and ethnic groups (like the Pakistanis, South Africans and Indo-Fijians) insist pre-determined dates aren't valid. They insist on sighting the moon with their naked eyes. Inevitably they start fasting at least a day later and have their Eid feast marking Ramadan's end 1 or 2 days after everyone else.

The naked-eyers or lunar-tics reckon their way is closer to the way of the Prophet Muhammad than the astronomers, who reckon insisting on actual sightings is as silly as throwing out watches and prayer timetables and calculating stick shadows. Or like throwing out the cars and investing in some camels.

And where does former mufti Sheik Hilaly sit? Believe it or not, he prefers the science. Someone told me he heard Hialy say in one sermon: "Man has landed on the moon and yet some imams are still too busy trying to see it with the naked eye!" This Usama bloke from London says something similar.

Who is correct? Which method is right?

Well, for the average Muslim punter, it really doesn't matter. They just wish all the imams and mosques could agree. Things become especially embarrassing in the workplace.

Imagine employing 3 Muslims. Each wants to take a day off for the Eid feast at the end of Ramadan so they can spend time with their family. But each has Eid on separate days. What would you do? Who would you believe?

This scenario will probably be repeated in hundreds of workplaces across the country. And Muslim religious leaders still can't get their act together and sort it out.

With Muslims too busy mooning each other over whether to use naked eyes, it's highly unlikely they'd get their collective act together to pull off a conquest of Canberra even if they wanted to. Those who believe otherwise should be relegated to the lunatic (or should that be lunar-tic?) fringe.

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Well, it's September 1 and I for one am feeling the usual right to spring. Pedants, who insist that Spring starts on the equinox, somewhere around the 21st will have to forgive me.

It's a fantastic day here in the Emerald City. George, the cat continues to deny my dislike for things feline and is having a purr festival sitting in my lap as I type. He's such a smoodger.

Wikipedia, in it's unending generosity offers us two rites of Spring -the mid 80's Washington punk band "Rites of Spring" and perhaps the more familiar - Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, or le Sacre du printemps. The Russian escapes me, except that one is led to believe that notwithstanding the translation, the reference is more towards a pagan rite than a consecration.

It's a pity that in our Australian cities, we so often make nothing special for the start of Spring. I think this is a great shame. It's a missed opportunity to celebrate the possibility of renewal – perhaps if not always the actuality.

Other nations and cultures run riot in Spring. I have a Japanese friend who puts away all the winter accoutrements including even crockery and she changes a major part of her world with the change of season – bringing out the Spring linen and changing the menu, swapping many of the pictures on her walls. The new wardrobe. Life in the garden. Something more than a simple clean-up.

Stravinsky's ballet score really gets into the swing of the new season with a dancing chorus of young girls – perhaps a little wasted on we of the Southern hemisphere since our Easter (Hester, oestrus, eggs, fertility, etc, etc, etc) falls in, well, fall. Moreover, with the possible exception of our pagan friends, references to 'young girls' these days are likely to provoke more Johnstonite outrage, than assist us to re-iterate a celebration of the earth.

And what of the Washington punk band ? Well, they recorded one eponymous LP on their own label, Discord Records. Need I say more?

Returning to the day, let's hope this Spring brings with it rain as well as sunshine. Give a prayer for our farmers whose lives and livelihood are so challenged by the Australian climate. And look forward to the joys of Summer.

Or would that be... Don Henley and the "Boys of Summer"?

George, what did you do with the Claratyne?

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The introduction of a Bill into the Victorian Parliament to remove all criminal law sanctions from any abortion in the first 24 weeks was proclaimed by ex-premier, Joan Kirner as "a fantastic achievement in the history of the rights of women in Victoria."

This shift of focus by the pro-abortion lobby to the 'rights of women' does seem to sit rather oddly with the campaigns run by the same people against other nations’ human rights records, given what is proposed is that one human being can kill another human being with impunity.

Perhaps they have already decided, like Peter Singer, that the creature in the mother's womb is not human?

It is worth remembering that for as long as human beings have had memories, dogs only ever seem to give birth to puppies. In the same way, we know mares are 'in foal', sheep are 'with lamb', cattle are 'in calf' and women are pregnant with babies. A woman who miscarries, will describe it as "losing my baby." This is no more than common usage.

The ripples of this commonsense understanding, however, travel much, much further. They suggest humans understand the nature of an infant of any species as an incomplete adult, something which is changing and 'becoming' an adult. A puppy is an infant becoming a dog, a foal an infant that becomes a horse. In the case of the human being, the term 'baby' in ordinary conversation is used to describe the stage from conception to child, 'child' from baby to adult and, thereafter, the 'adult' or complete being.

This is the sense of what the ancient Greeks meant by saying that Nature was teleological. There is an expectancy in Nature that infants develop into adults. In fact, common usage speaks of the boy 'becoming' the man for it is only as an adult that it's powers are complete.

In the realm of the animal, the adult exists once the physical growth is completed. At this point the animal's potential is fully realised. It may learn many more things either from experience or from its master but everything a horse needs to know to act as a horse is innate. It need only practice that behaviour in its own environment.

Humans, however, are very different. A child's physical growth takes much longer than other animals and even if the power of rational speech is innate, the knowledge the child requires to become an adult, including moral principles, must be acquired through practice and demonstration.

As a general rule, a human's physical potential is realised within the first 21 years; even sooner for women. Physical maturity, however, is overshadowed by the uniquely human intellectual power.

It has been suggested that there is an initial peak at the age of 30, the age when young men are said to begin to philosophise, but the full realisation of the intellectual power does seem to occur for at least another 25 years. Winston Churchill was over 65 when he assumed the Prime Ministership of Great Britain in 1940. He described his whole life to that point as being training for the task at hand. It suggests human knowledge is not only an accumulation of facts, something that would make it mere memory. Human intellect is the only power which can know the causes, that is the first causes, of those facts.

The remarkable discovery of the double helix DNA code by the English scientists Frances Crick and James Watson explained how a species, whether dog or human, remained the same even though individuals varied widely. No further explanation is required when we wonder at the process by which a single living cell becomes an adult human, that unique combination of physical attributes and intellectual potential. It is in the DNA from the moment of conception.

While the intellectual powers of the human must first await the development of the physical organ in which they reside, they must then be cultivated and trained through youth (what we call education) and then for most of the adult life before this supreme human power can reveal its full potential. What this suggests is that it is when that potential is realised that we are able to identify the complete human being.

If Crick and Watson’s discovery demonstrated why animals gave birth to animals of the same species, other science has helped overlay this fact with a degree of ambiguity.

The terms, foetus and embryo, are general terms from the science of embryology used to describe the stages of physical development of species as diverse as animals and plants which permit the scientific community to discuss cellular changes in a general sense. Having a purely physical connotation, however, they carry an implication that all such bundles of cells are equal.

Yet we know as surely as a chicken comes from an egg that the bundle of cells a woman carries is uniquely human containing the necessary code for a complete human being, even if the sufficient conditions must be provided from elsewhere and, initially, the mother’s womb.

The woman who says she is 'going to have a baby' speaks unambiguously and more truly than the person who speaks of it as a foetus or embryo. There is, however, an advantage in not calling the bundle of cells inside a woman a baby, but referring to it as a foetus or embryo.

The Negro was considered less than human by many in the pro-slave southern states which condition justified his slavery; for if the Negro was not human, he had no entitlement to the rights of the Declaration of Independence secured in the US Constitution. More recently, the Jew was equated to rats by Nazi propaganda of pre-war Germany and then ruthless killed.

However, once we accept the proposition that a human embryo or foetus is only another bundle of cells and we forget what it will become, you and I become just a bigger bundle of cells and then we are as vulnerable as the Negro or the Jew and as disposable as the rat. God help us!

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Almost exactly a decade ago, two Australian cricketers and the team's manager decided to visit the Khyber Pass before the Test match in Peshawar. Justin Langer, Gavin Robertson and Steve Bernard went to Macani, near the border with Afghanistan, and posed for pictures with the border guards. The trio cradled AK-47s to give the picture the necessary gravitas but when it was published in a newspaper the following day, it created a furore back home.

Bernard nearly lost his job, but there was to be a happy ending, with Mark Taylor scoring 334 – he opted not to carry on after equalling Sir Donald Bradman's score, then the highest by an Australian – and the team holding out for a first series win on Pakistani soil since 1959. Australia haven't toured the country since, and the three Tests in 2002 were played in Colombo and Sharjah after the players' apprehensions about being so close to the war zone in Afghanistan.

A decade after those Rambo poses, guns and the northwest frontier are once again a topic of discussion in the cricketing world. The decision to postpone the Champions Trophy – given how crowded the international calendar is, it's now highly unlikely that Pakistan will ever host it – was a direct result of the pressure exerted by players' associations on the International Cricket Council, the game's governing body.

Despite the fact that the very same player representatives admitted that the security arrangements in place for the tournament were among the best that they'd ever seen, there was never any real enthusiasm on the part of Australia, England, South Africa or New Zealand to play in Pakistan. The fact that the Asia Cup had gone off without so much as a misfiring cracker a few weeks earlier appeared not to register with those who had predetermined that they would be soft targets for the terrorists.

For a bunch of people who have never been in the country, they were surprisingly well informed about the state of affairs inside Pakistan. I'd be the last person to blame them. Prior to my first trip across the border in 2004, I was terrified. The propaganda and the stereotypes are packed with your suitcases, but from the minute I landed at the Allama Iqbal airport in Lahore to the day I left four weeks later, I experienced nothing but warmth and excessive hospitality.

From the wannabe jihadi professor of civil engineering who sat next to me on the bus to Multan to the qawwali troupe that played especially for us at a farmhouse on the outskirts of Lahore, the message was the same. "Aap hamara mehmaan hai [you are our guest]". The subliminal message was much more reassuring: No harm will come to you.

I'd love to know which security "expert" decided that cricket players would be under threat. India has been fighting terrorism in various states for more than two decades, the civil war in Sri Lanka in into its 26th year, while Pakistan's troubles need no reiterating, yet you won't be able to find a single instance of a cricketer being harmed. Terrorists may lack essential human decency and have value systems drastically different from our own, but at the end of the day, they don't operate in a vacuum. Whether it's SIMI in India, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka or Lashkar-e-Toiba in Pakistan, they know that targetting cricket is the quickest way to lose whatever little public sympathy they might have.

You have to come to the subcontinent to understand just how much the game permeates daily life. On my first tour of Bangladesh in 2000, I spent half an hour listening to an old man describing almost every stroke that Neil Harvey played during his legendary 96 on a matting track at Dhaka in 1959. "Better than Sobers, better than Tendulkar" was the final verdict.

Once upon a time, Australian cricketers were adored because they took these trips seriously. Despite the many hardships involved in touring the subcontinent in those early years – beautifully documented in Gideon Haigh's The Summer Game – Australia never went down the English-condescension road of sending weaker teams. That Pakistan still beat them was testament to the talent that has made them Asia's pride for much of the past 50 years.

It's safe to say that Ricky Ponting and friends won't be remembered with anything like the same fondness that Harvey and Richie Benaud still inspire in the region's cricket lovers. As a prominent Australian journalist wrote to me earlier this week, "At least Australians in the '50s could make the excuse of being isolated and uninformed. These guys don't want to know. It's active ignorance, the very thing we like to criticise Americans for."

Some Pakistanis will blame Cricket Australia for not taking a stand, without being aware that their hands were tied. If they had agreed to play, the union had arranged it so that not one first-class cricketer would have been available for selection.

Some say that sports and politics shouldn't be intertwined. Absolute rubbish, of course, spouted mainly by the mercenaries who went to South Africa in search of Rand after switching off their consciences in the Apartheid era. The average Pakistani on the street knows that the increasing marginalisation of the cricket team – just eight home Tests since the start of 2006 – has everything to do with the political situation.

As a recent editorial in The News said:

"The situation in Pakistan deteriorates when the Taliban and their ilk are being hit hard by the Pakistani security forces. The recent suicide bomb strikes in Pakistan are directly related to the gains that the government has been making against the extremists in the tribal areas.

We are told ad nuaseum that the fight against terror is a global fight and that it effects everyone; if it does, everyone should be showing a little more solidarity with Pakistan, especially since a huge bulk of public opinion in Pakistan already feels that this is the West's war, not Pakistan's. This, it would seem, would have been an excellent opportunity to stand with Pakistan and reaffirm the global commitment to the war on terror by people from a range of different countries coming to Pakistan and taking part in a high profile sporting event.

The shying away from Pakistan gives exactly the sort of message that should not be given - namely, the global community telling Pakistan that while it may be just us much our war as yours, you do the dying and if there is any risk involved, count us out."

The Champions Trophy was a wonderful opportunity for millions of decent, hard-working and hospitable Pakistanis to assert that the lunatic fringe is nothing more than that. That chance has been wrenched away from them and if they feel that it's not cricket, you can scarcely blame them.

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It seems to be the season for remembering 1968, that year of student revolutions and radical change. Feature articles in magazines focus on liberated attitudes, music, drugs and a politics. But for those interested in art, there is another reason to honour 1968, for that was when the academic discipline of art history (then called Fine Arts) was first taught to undergraduates at the University of Sydney. Without the ongoing base of teaching, learning and research in the field that flowed from that initiative I doubt if we would now have the lively culture of art exhibitions, publications and scholarship that so informs Sydney and its environs.

Art history was never a part of the original agenda for Australian universities. Their original liberal arts were confined to music and literature, but in 1946 Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch established the Herald Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Melbourne. Then in 1961 the University of Sydney discovered that John Wardell Power, a long time expatriate, had left his estate to the university to teach "the latest ideas and theories in the plastic arts". Although elements in the university's Philosophy department strenuously resisted such frivolity, by 1968 there was a professor, lecturers, postgraduate students, and a hoard of eager undergraduates.

It is only now, forty years later, that I realise how the way this fledgling department regarded its students has shaped my own approach to teaching. Because the implementation of the Power Bequest had been delayed, and because the formal teaching of art history had been confined to another state, there was a hunger for the discipline. Many older students, and even graduates, came to first year lectures. As a result of this our Fine Arts tutorials and lectures had a completely different atmosphere from the rest of the university's first year courses which were all jam-packed with school leavers. Indeed in 1968 the academic staff were so interested in their colleagues' activities that they all regularly attended the mass lectures. Their interest understandably waned in later years.

Bernard Smith, Donald Brook, David Saunders and others actively encouraged first years to become involved in external lectures, special events, and social events. We were there for the visiting American critic Clement Greenberg's first Power Lecture and also for smaller events, equally important. And so through Fine Arts, but not through my other university activities, I came to understand the surprising different backgrounds of some of my fellow students. Most importantly Kate Smith, Bernard's wife, invited undergraduate students to their house in Glebe for Christmas drinks with mince pies that she made herself. This humanity was the opposite of the modern corporate model university. Years later, when family circumstances kept me at home on weekends, I would host barbecues at my house for masters students, and think of Kate.

Perhaps it was that sense of community that enabled us to survive the crisis two years later. At the beginning of 1970 there was no one to teach the scheduled third year course on the European Baroque. Students were asked if we would accept a series of random assorted guest lecturers and organise our own tutorials based on Wittkower's Art and Architecture in Italy until the problem was solved. These tutorials were totally organised and taught by students, working our way through the book, chapter by chapter, organising our own slides and writing our own mini-lectures without any academic staff supervision. Any modern university that treated its students like this would be open to litigation, yet the group I was in was ably led by a combination of the ardent Trotskyist Gavin Gatenby and Catherine De Lorenzo, who now lectures at UNSW. "We took ownership of our own learning and thus were well placed to appreciate nuance and style", Catherine remembers. Because we'd been placed in a position where students were given collaborative decision making responsibilities we came out of our degrees with both an understanding of our real worth, and an expectation that others could also contribute.

We also learnt scepticism. After our 17th century specialist, the colourful Anton Wilhelm from Liechtenstein, finally arrived half-way through the year he treated us to a wide-eyed European response to life in the Antipodes. I remember with joy his tutorial conducted in the saleroom of a visiting British art dealer. "Why is this painting a fake?" he asked us, loudly, about a purported Van Dyke. We had to give the precise reasons by brush stroke, composition and colour. The furious London dealers did not intervene, but I don't think future classes were made so welcome.

Out of this rich but chaotic experience came a life long love of art and scholarship. A surprisingly large number of students from those early under resourced years became professional art historians, curators, writers, and art dealers. Maybe it is time to reconsider the modular corporate ways of the modern university. While it is probably not a good idea to give a gaggle of students a book or two, throw them in the deep end to learn from each other, there is a case to be made for giving students more ownership of their learning, to encourage them to collectively learn from each. And as well as formal consultations we could aim to support students with dinners, drinks and mince pies at Christmas.

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Despite the brilliant spectacle and excellent organization, the Beijing Olympics revealed the true nature of China's ruling regime: goose-stepping soldiers in the opening ceremony and tanks in front of stadiums were pure totalitarian dictatorship.

The Olympics are over and the truth about China's fragile economy will also become increasingly obvious. China's amazing growth and looming global dominance are constantly hyped, but evidence is mounting the country won't avoid a financial and economic crisis.

A crisis would have a number of implications including an impact on the Australian economy. But it could also seriously affect China's path to political freedom, which began with economic liberalization.

Many writers and journalists are labeling anyone who criticizes China as lacking an understanding of "complex" and "subtle" dynamics (and no doubt being post-Olympics party poopers). But repression and control are repression and control; there's nothing subtle or complex about it.

China's regime is obsessed with control. But - as with the Olympics - they're finding that when it comes to economics it is impossible to control everything.

For example, China's control of its currency, which has been kept too low, is creating problems. China financial markets expert Michael Pettis says expectation of a currency revaluation has led to a surge in inflows of 'hot (speculative) money' into China, despite heightened capital controls.

The inflows are fueling over-investment, inflation and over lending. But that hot money could also flee quickly after a sharp economic adjustment - as happened with the Asian financial crisis. (Though China's massive foreign reserves will provide a buffer.)

That will put enormous pressure on the Chinese financial system, which, though improving, is underdeveloped. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson describes China's financial system as "a joke" with a tiny stock market, a banking system that's a relic of the communist system, and capital allocated by personal connections.

Added pressure has been placed on banks, as the government has used them (selling them bills and increasing reserve requirements) to mop up excess liquidity resulting from their currency policy. That has resulted in risky lending practices in a bid to maintain profits.

Investors - who tend to be forward-looking - are forecasting trouble for the Chinese economy. As one fund manager said, Chinese stocks are trading at "crisis valuations". Slumping commodity prices are another indication investors see the Chinese economy slowing.

The growing middle class of China have been happy with accelerating wealth. But as Logan Wright, a China analyst for economic research firm Stone & McCarthy said: "Support for the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) depends heavily upon improving standards of living for Chinese citizens."

By liberalizing its economy, China moved towards democracy.

US financial writer William Bernstein in his The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World was Created, found democracy mostly began with institutional factors such as private property, which makes people richer. Wealth leads to increased self-expression and results in evolution into democracy. This has been the case in countries including Japan, Chile, and Spain.

The late economist Milton Friedman, who wrote extensively on the interaction of capitalism and freedom, believed China would be no different. In an interview he was asked whether China's "market Leninist" or "authoritarian free-market system" could last.

"No. The same thing will happen in China that happened in Chile," he said. "Political freedom will ultimately break out of its shackles... It cannot continue to develop privately and at the same time maintain its authoritarian character politically. It is headed for a clash. Sooner or later, one or the other will give."

The Chinese regime will respond to an economic crisis the only way it knows: by cracking down and increasing control. That could entrench the regime further. But a more optimistic view is that with their wealth threatened, it will be increasingly difficult to keep the newly confident Chinese subdued. They are likely to demand - and deserve - a greater say.

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The building and construction industry is one of Australia's most important industries. It provides employment for nearly one million people. It contributes $150 billion annually to the Australian economy. It is an industry absolutely vital to our economic and social well being.

Unfortunately, there is a dark side to this industry - an ugly and turbulent industrial relations history involving physical violence, intimidation, thuggery, union in-fighting and criminal activities.

This sort of thing has been the blight that lead to the establishment of the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC). Yes, the ABCC does have extraordinary powers, but only in response to an unacceptable culture of violence, thuggery and intimidation on building sites. The powers are there to protect workers and employers.

The old culture of violence and intimidation was well known to the Australian Labor Party (ALP). It was an ALP Government that federally deregistered the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF) in 1986. The BLF's demise led to the formation of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union (CFMEU), but this did not wholly resolve the problem. At the Commonwealth level the BLF disappeared, but the culture of violence and intimidation continued.

During the 1990s several inquiries and Royal Commissions found that the culture of violence and intimidation had not gone away. The latest of these was the Royal Commission headed by Terence Cole QC, which reported in early 2003. After the most thorough and detailed investigation ever, involving testimony from hundreds of witnesses, the Commission exposed the stand over tactics still used by building unions. It found a deep-seated culture of violence, intimidation and thuggery on building worksites that violated Australian principles of fair play. It recommended that Australia's building and construction industry needed a strong and independent umpire to ensure that there was fair play - or as the Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, put it "a strong cop on the beat".

The ABCC and the Building and Construction Industry Improvement Act flow from the recommendations of the Cole Royal Commission. The Act seeks to prevent unlawful industrial action and coercion in agreement-making, to protect freedom of association and to outlaw payment of strike pay.

The leaders of the building unions have objected to these developments, but they have been dishonest in presenting their case. They would have you believe that innocent peace loving union officials have been victimised by a Gestapo-like secret police. Anyone reading the building unions' version of the role of the ABCC would be alarmed. They claim that the ABCC is too powerful, and that its activities compromise workplace safety and strip away workers' rights.

These claims are nonsense. The truth is that the only thing the ABCC has compromised is the unions' unlawful hold over building sites.

Since the introduction of the ABCC in 2005, the building industry has experienced an unprecedented period of industrial peace, wages have increased and the number of accidents has fallen. The industry is currently enjoying the lowest number of industrial disputes since records began. Between 1996 and 2007, there was a massive 98 per cent drop in the number of days lost to industrial disputes.

Building workers have not suffered since the formation of the ABCC. On the contrary, they can come to work without fear of being bullied or intimidated. They have more cash in their pockets because of above average wage increases and far fewer strike days. The absence of industrial action alone has meant an extra $20 million in workers' pockets each year. Site safety has also improved. We always need to do more to reduce injuries and deaths on building sites, but this will not be achieved by a return to the bad old days. Unlawful behaviour does not improve safety.

The loosening of the unions' stranglehold on worksites has seen a huge leap in productivity that has benefited the entire Australian community. Key infrastructure projects, such as hospitals, schools and roads are being delivered on time and on budget, to the advantage of all.

A recent report by one of Australia's leading economic consultants, Econtech, found the ABCC had delivered sustained productivity gains of around 10 per cent to the construction industry. The report also revealed an ongoing economic welfare gain of $5.1 billion every year to the Australian community - not the sort of results you would expect if the ABCC was a Gestapo-like outfit.

In retaining the ABCC until at least 31 January 2010, the Rudd Government has done the right thing. It has taken a leadership role. Leadership is about making the tough but correct decisions; retaining the ABCC is the right decision.

The Australian people deserve the best. Australia needs more schools, more hospitals, better roads and communications infrastructure, improved port facilities and water harvesting projects. But it does not need to pay more for essential services because union leaders get a kick out of promoting unlawful and disruptive behaviour on building sites. The Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister have got it right on the ABCC.

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If anybody asks me, and they usually don't, I always say I'm an Australian republican, and I'd vote as I did in 1999 to end the monarchy and 'break John Howard's heart'.

But I've yet to sort out a worry I've had for twenty years, and it's this.

The best countries in the world are monarchies.

Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Spain, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, all monarchies, are enviable societies; and they're in sharp contrast with Iraq, Iran, Syria, Gaza, Israel, Egypt, Sudan, Algeria, Congo, Nigeria, Cuba, Mexico, Haiti, Panama, North Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Haiti, Russia, China and the United States, all of which are republics and most of which overthrew their kings with violence.

There are some exceptions, of course. Austria and Germany, both republics, are very good societies now, though they in recent times produced Hitler. The monarchies of Saudi-Arabia and Kuwait are very bad societies, stoning adulteresses to death and banning alcohol. Nepal in its pre-Maoist phase was pretty shocking but good to go trekking in. Tonga, though it has pleasant ruritanian-socialist qualities, line-ball.

Some republics are line-ball too. Greece since its king was evicted has flirted with military dictators, and Italy likewise with colourful short-arse fascists; and as for Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Georgia, the Ukraine and East Timor it's perhaps too early to say.

India and Pakistan, though technically ruled by the British Queen, are too confused in their present wobbly arrangements to classify either way. Zimbabwe though theoretically under Elizabeth II has lately acquired a usurping mad monarch of its own. And Monaco and Liechtenstein, though theoretically monarchies, are more like heightened municipalities. Thailand, remotely ruled by a thoughtful king who interferes now and then, is probably line-ball too.

But you would still be hard put to find twelve republics to match Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Holland, Spain, Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, my good monarchies. Venezuela? Guatemala? Fiji? The United States? Give me a break.

Why is it constitutional monarchies work as well as they do? It's because, I think, they provide a level of judgement above the level of chiacking politicians, which dignifies the country. It's the constitutional equivalent of an umpire.

However illusory, it gives the voters a comfort-zone which the opposing system does not. In a Republic, Alan Jones can be elected President, and for millions of Australians there is no joy in that. In a Republic, a George Bush can be accorded god-like qualities, and this can enrage decent civilised atheists everywhere.

A constitutional monarch is less like a god, or a Caesar or a Great Dictator, and more like a Guardian Angel; and somewhere in the human psyche there is room for this idea. It's what I call a sustaining fantasy, the kind of thing we suspect isn't true, but it's what keeps us going.

It needs good mild monarchs in the saddle however, Elizabeth not Gyanendra, to keep the show on the road. And it needs, perhaps, the kind of monarchs the Dutch and Scandinavians have, monarchs on bicycles, monarchs with middle-class hobbies like stamp-collecting and water-colours.

Or monarchs like Princess Di who hug AIDS patients and campaign against cluster-bombs and show off their legs.

There may be an argument for preventing an eighty-year-old King Charles from ascending the throne in 2028. But he seems, so far, to be more modern and sympathetic in his beliefs – in multiculturalism, sensible diet, architectural preservation, Spike Milligan, Buddha and sustainable farming – than, say, Tony Blair or John Howard, who prefer, on the whole, to slaughter heathens. And he's not a murderous dipstick like the avid Republican George Bush.

He might be worth keeping, and impoverishing a little.

Or perhaps you disagree.

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There are no ways to determine the long term effects of any insult to the human body, other than to wait it out and maybe look back in horror.

The furore around using your mobile phone has some parallel with the introduction of the contraceptive pill. It had no immediate effect, other than to reduce the population and - some long term health problems aside - its main change has been to demographics.

New mothers are much older and so are parents when kids grow up. When children reach their teens and beyond, their parents are really old! Fewer people are having children when they're young and healthy - there is a higher rate of chromosomal abnormality from Down Syndrome etc.

So it wasn't really the pill that changed things, but what it enabled us to do with our lives.

Two things concern most about mobile phones. Firstly, they operate at frequencies which could resonate in small conductive tissue structures - nerve ends. Although this may only cause slight localised heating, even if the radiation penetrates that far (most phones are only 0.6 watt), anything that focuses even a small amount of power could cause adverse heating to some tiny part of the brain.

Secondly, we are given to believe there are no 'magnetic' structures in the body that could react to radiation from a mobile phone. However, there are plenty of electrical pathways in the body and a structure of the correct size will resonate like an aerial to focused radiation, provided (and this is a big proviso) that it is electrically isolated - which it generally isn't.

The use of a mobile phone is not like drying off a kitten in the microwave. There is very little power involved.

Even though MRI scans that use massive magnetic fields of 2000 Oersteds are quite benign to humans, there are studies showing brain waves are influenced by magnetic fields and can actually change behaviour. (Mind you, the MRI does rattle your molecules, that's how it works!)

Magnetic fields are used to separate DNA stem cells from fetal cord blood but only after a magnetic antibody is tagged to the cells.

Do our bodies react to radiation at mobile phone frequencies? Maybe a bit. Does it do much harm? Probably not. So while researchers are looking for cancers, maybe something completely different will happen.

An evolutionary change might occur, in response to magnetic fields - it might be a change in the size of the neural structures of the brain to avoid the heating effects of low level radiation or a change in the meninges (brain cover) to protect the brain from radiation.

The minuscule amount of heating caused by the power of a mobile phone may be indistinguishable from getting one's head hot from standing in the sun, so maybe nothing is going to change at all.

So far, concerns about mobile phone radiation have centered around any increase in brain tumors. Like the pill, maybe the direct effect is not going to be the problem.

Unfortunately, people do die of cancer a lot and it is caused by things we live with every day like pollution, poor diet and lifestyle choices. Given the 3.5 billion mobile phones being used constantly worldwide with no established link with any adverse health effect, I for one am not going to hang up.

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I used to be a fan of the Olympics. One of my earliest memories is the sound of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue playing on a sea of grand pianos at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. And for 16 days in Sydney, my father forced us to watch the telecast every waking moment.

It was perhaps around that time I started to question the perceived wisdom of the Olympic 'brand'. The idea that somehow a society should invest countless billions into a two-week tournament where people compete to run, swim or jump faster than everyone else began to seem scandalously pointless to me.

To be sure, the opening and closing ceremonies make for exquisite theatre and there is a great deal of athletic prowess on display. The Olympics, like the football World Cup and other major sporting events, is one of the few domains where people of otherwise dissenting views or from marginalised communities are respected for skills alone.

Sport itself is not the problem. It's the darker things wedged between the bright ceremonies and competitions that is the concern. Cities hosting The Games are transformed into sterile, open air hotels where brand names are jealously guarded and undesirables, mostly the poor and political agitators, are shunned or imprisoned. The Olympics transformed Sydney from a big town into a bustling, air-brushed postcard. Ever since, police powers and CCTVs have proliferated in the city. Welcome to the dark side of the Olympics.

The modern Olympics is very much in keeping with the logic of a certain understanding of modernism. It is no coincidence that the modern Olympic movement commenced just prior to the turn of the 20th century. Staged in Athens, it was an opportunity for the so-called civilised nations to showcase the best in human athleticism, tempered by modern science and Western organisational skill. At the time, only around 14 European and American countries competed.

Today almost every nation on the planet sends athletes to the Olympics. Elites in poorer countries view the tournament as an opportunity to prove they can compete on an equal footing. Some send as many officials as athletes. Who can forget Eric ‘the Eel’ Moussambani, the diminutive swimmer from Equatorial Guinea, at the Sydney Games? Although his time in the 50m freestyle final was the slowest in Olympic history the crowd cheered him on as though he had won.

There is value in such acts of solidarity, but it is mostly symbolic. How often have we learnt that Equatorial Guinea has a dictator as oppressive as Robert Mugabe? Only, unlike the erstwhile socialist in Harare, Teodoro Obiang has opened his country to Western capital so our governments don’t trouble him very much.

The Olympics isn’t about raising this kind of awareness. It is and has always been about the harmony the powerful create when people shut up and do as they're told.

Consider these examples: At Sydney, Cathy Freeman represented a powerful symbol of reconciliation between mainstream and Aboriginal Australia when she lit the Olympic flame. Much of the opening ceremony performance was inspired by the Dreamtime. Yet the moment Freeman highlighted Aboriginal disadvantage - and remember her grandmother was a victim of the stolen generations - there was an awkward silence. We’re happy to accept oppressed minorities so long as they don't crow too much.

At the Mexico Olympics in 1968, two United States athletes, with the support of a third Australian, accepted their medals in bare feet to reflect the poverty that Afro-America experiences in the United States. The two Americans raised their fists into the Black nationalist salute as the Star Spangled Banner played. All three athletes were ostracised by their countries for their political statement.

With much fanfare, Muhammad Ali was awarded a Gold Medal at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics to replace the one he won at the 1960 Games. The medal was presented with much fanfare during a prime-time basketball match as though he had misplaced the previous one. But Ali didn't lose the medal; he famously threw it over a bridge in protest at the racism he continued to endure in the US.

Around the turn of the 20th century, when the modern Olympic movement commenced, there was a great tussle for the soul of the nation state. A state may be organised in several different ways but fascism, in the first decades of the 20th century, seemed to have the inside running. The Olympics had a role in this too.

The 1936 Berlin Games was the first to be televised. It was around this time that Olympic ceremonies turned into a crypto-religious celebration of the powers of industrialised man. According to Richard Mandell in his book The Nazi Olympics, Berlin was meticulously prepared for The Games; "Visitors were confidently assured that the boulevards, streets, and even the dingy by-ways of the enormous, sophisticated city would be utterly safe," writes Mandell. He could have been speaking of Beijing.

The Olympic motto, 'Faster, Higher, Stronger', could equally be the banner for corporate globalisation (although it might be copyrighted). If the Olympics is a tournament pitting human against human, surely only the very best should be celebrated? Moreover, if some nations dominate over others, surely they are faster, higher, stronger? Why else do wealthy countries spend billions on winning medals other than to improve their international standing?

In 2008, there is perhaps no better country to host the Olympics than China. With authoritarian precision, the Chinese Government has sanitised its gloriously overcrowded, polluted capital. The media is in town to make sure China can provide 'world-standard' sporting conditions. Beijing's air quality was hurriedly improved - not because air quality is important to Beijing’s residents, which I assume it is, but because marathon runners need to breathe it too.

In China, children who show promise as athletes are roped into giant training academies. Much like a factory, the sole aim of these facilities is to produce more and more medal winners. China is not alone. Athletes from every country use performance enhancing substances wherever possible. Governments and corporations spend healthy sums trying to develop better swimming suits because even milliseconds count.

Hyper-competitiveness such as this is impossible to control unless we openly admit there is more to competing than winning at any cost. It is time we realised that the Olympics is not a healthy measure of humanity.

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It is one thing to see sports players going overseas but worse still would be losing artists to greener pastures.

I am reminded somewhat by the reverence shown to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who died recently. Thousands filed past his open casket. Television showed metre long roses placed there by Putin and Gorbachev. I wonder whether we would revere our writers and artists the same.

I can't remember when I have last seen a PM opening a book show or being photographed at an art gallery, or even commenting on the importance of art. On the contrary, the Bill Henson affair brought out suspicion, disregard and ignorance from those that ought to know better.

Why is it that sport is the Holy Grail above everything else?

Years ago I took the overnight train from Moscow to St Petersburg (Leningrad) in midsummer and shared the sleeper with a couple and an ample-bosomed and beautiful Russian woman by the name of Lilly.

Most of the sleeper cabins behind me had groups of American choir singers, both boys and girls of around 20-30 years of age. They had performed in Moscow and were booked to sing in St Petersburg. Being midsummer, and so far north, the days lasted forever. It had also been very hot with thunderstorms in the late afternoon. The Americans were pleased to meet someone from Australia and, as proof of it, I was asked to give an impromptu impersonation of Crocodile Dundee star Paul Hogan and say "goodiaye and hozygoin" over and over again.

This was nothing compared with what would follow next. The beautiful Lilly in my cabin spoke some German and so did I. The train was air conditioned but it was stifling hot and, as Lilly and I got acquainted, she, now and then, modestly dabbed her bosom with an Eau de Cologne sprinkled silken and embroidered handkerchief. She kindly asked what I did when I was not travelling and I told her I painted pictures. Ach nein, du bist ein Artiest? Wie ist das möglich? (An artist, how is that possible?) The hanky started working overtime.

The secret was out and went like wildfire through the whole train. The next thing, passengers were lining up to meet me, vodka was offered and Lilly unpacked some 'kuchen' with cubed sugar soaked in almond essence. (I remember it well.) I was almost carried around on shoulders and tears were flowing. I was feted like an emperor.

Some hours later, when darkness finally announced itself - and consider Russian sleeper trains are not gender separated, and the vodka had settled - the four of us, including the beautiful Lilly, calmly undressed. I hopped in the top bunk and she underneath. I slept on a cloud of Eau the Cologne and almond essence.

Next morning, breakfast was served in those ornate silver plated urns and glassware. The Americans behin