Tasmania's forests are iconic - all Australians and people all over the world recognise them as possessing a value that goes way beyond the economic and political machinations of the day.

Yet Tasmania currently sits at a crucial crossroad in determining how its future will look.

Following the federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett's decision not to consider key modules of the mill's Environmental Impact Management Plan until at least 2011, Gunns Ltd are now disingenuously claiming to have a green light to push ahead with the project.

In actuality, the new delay provides a much needed window of opportunity for Tasmania to deeply reconsider its future.

Tasmania is poised at a threshold of two possible futures - one which would lock in forest destruction and the resultant pollution and carbon depletion, or the other which would embrace the potential to build green industries in the state and ensure the southern isle's natural environment remains one of Australia's most valued natural icons.

The reality is that there is too much at stake for this pulp mill to go ahead. It proposes to include the use of old growth and high conservation value native forests, some of which are identified world heritage value, and to put 30 billion litres of effluent, containing more than 100 toxic substances, into Bass Strait each year.

According to a recent study from ANU's Professor Brendan Mackey, Tasmania's forests are among the most carbon dense forests in the world, holding more than five times the carbon than Australian and international climate change experts had previously realised.

The leading international authority on climate change, the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, estimates the average carbon content per hectare in temperate forests is only 217 tonnes per hectare. Tasmania's tall wet eucalypts hold more than 1200 tonnes of carbon per hectare.

Given that about half of Australia's forests have been cleared in the past 200 years, we need to ensure that these life-giving carbon banks are not lost. In a resource depleted world, these forests are an invaluable storage house of precious carbon, the lifeblood of our fragile atmosphere.

The debate surrounding the proposed pulp mill in Tasmania cannot be simply reduced down to a jobs versus environment equation. If anything has been gleaned from Australia's recent engagement with the threat of dangerous climate change, it is that we as a nation need to adopt a long term view on what will be in the best interests of future generations.

As evidenced by several leading financial institutions, there remain grave concerns about the impact this proposed pulp mill will have on the Tasmanian environment.

The ANZ Bank decided not to back the proposed pulp mill last year. The company's forests policy which states: "ANZ will...avoid supporting the logging of high conservation value areas or areas protected by specified legislation or international environmental treaties and conventions."

We note that large potential financial backers and now the federal Environment Minister have not been satisfied with the mills environmental impacts.

Why would any financier boasting a good reputation want to put its name behind a company and a project with such a bad reputation? Why would any financier want to support a project that has failed to obtain its legally required approvals?

As Sydney businessman and high-profile anti-mill campaigner Geoffrey Cousin said this week: "The coffin was already nailed shut on the mill - Garrett's decision screws it down forever."

The Australian Conservation Foundation has taken the position that the proposed mill should be rejected outright because of the risks of the pollution it will emit into Bass Strait, its impacts on fisheries and ocean health, and because it will use as feedstock some old growth and high conservation value forests.

While we applaud the Environment Minister Peter Garrett's delaying any further government approval of the project until 2011, we are also aware that this is an imperfect result. Tasmania's future is at stake here, and most Australians expect to see the mill rejected by both state and federal governments.

We urge governments, the business and forestry sector, and the broader community to come together to envision a better way forward for Tasmania. Protecting old growth and high conservation value forests and the development of value adding industries based on sustainability will present a better and more certain future for jobs and the environment in Tasmania.

This proposed pulp mill at Bell Bay would lock the state into a project that will entrench forest destruction, pollution and community conflict, while further depleting some of the worlds richest carbon banks.

It is a legacy that we just can't afford to leave behind.

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In light of the 2007-2008 subprime mortgage collapse and corresponding 2008 global market meltdown we are once again left scratching our heads. It's not surprising we're being told not to panic. However, if you tell me not to panic one more time, I think I might.

The current economic scene in Australia is a drab one. Economic indicators such as the increasing rate of unemployment and dampening gross domestic product are failing to provide investors with the good news they seek as we begin 2009. With the Government recently awarding billions in incentive to rev up the economy, we're starting to worry. The world of superannuation has not been left unscathed. The median loss in October 2008 for a balanced super fund option came to an all time monthly low of -6.7 per cent bringing the one year figure to -17.6 per cent; the lowest one year return since compulsory super was introduced in 1992. Investors are scared and they're looking to their super fund for answers.

What does the current economic climate bring to the world of super?

At a recent member briefing carried out by a prominent Australian super fund, a member raised this question to the Chief Investment Officer; "If you knew that heavy losses were expected in 2008, then why didn't you move our money out?" To me, this question summed up the Australian attitude towards superannuation. It's compulsory, we do it because we have to, but we don't want to take any responsibility for what happens to it. A staggering statistic given emphasis during the financial crisis, is how many people neglect to exercise investment choice. Approximately 80% of super fund members are invested in a balanced option, which is often the fund's default. To highlight the fact further, records indicate that as few as 10 per cent of members have exercised the right to choose a fund. Whilst this figure is expected to increase over time, it doesn't do much justice for the Choice of Fund Act introduced in 2005.

Presumably these findings mean one of three things: people believe a balanced investment option is most suitable for them, people feel they don't have enough knowledge to make an appropriate decision, or they don't care about super.

Funds are on the ball and have already recognised this inaction. Most funds nowadays provide good educational information online or through seminars; covering topics such as investment choice, retirement strategies and efficient ways to increase your balance. Some funds believe that providing an investment quiz can assist members in making an appropriate choice. Other funds offer members a 'lifestage' option which automatically moves them from high risk to more secure investment strategies as they grow older. ASIC (Australian Securities and Investments Commission) has also recognised this information inadequacy and has recently agreed to super funds providing limited financial advice through their call centre. The advice can relate to product benefits, implications of switching and what to consider before withdrawing or contributing to super. With many funds sprucing up their investment menu to provide access to investments such as capital guaranteed options, direct equities and term deposits; members can't complain for lack of choice or even lack of assistance.

Think back to the old dilemma of the fast but brazen hare and the slow but steady tortoise. You have two very different types of competitors here. One is fast but more likely to stumble along the way and the other is slow but consistent. Now pretend these two figures represent two styles of investments; one with higher volatility and historically higher long-term performance and the other with lower but more consistent performance. If you look at the different investment types over the long term, you have the hare representing Australian Shares with greater pace but more hiccups and the tortoise representing Cash with very steady but relatively lower returns.

The current economic environment is perhaps the best time to consider what you really want from your super. There are so many investment opportunities contained in super and piles of additional benefits being provided by funds that consumers really have the driving force. If one good thing comes from the current financial crisis, we might hope it is people taking more of an active interest in what they are fortunate enough to have as a given. Sometimes it takes a crisis like this to gain people's attention.

Comparison of 5 year rolling returns since June 2004:
Red: SR50 ASX Green: SR50 Balanced Index Blue: SR Cash Index

Disclaimer: SuperRatings Pty Limited holds Australian Financial Services Licence No. 311880. The information used in compiling this report comes from sources considered reliable. It is not guaranteed to be accurate or complete. The report has been prepared for the purpose of providing general advice only and has not considered the recipients objectives, financial situation or needs. The recipient should consider obtaining independent advice before making any decision about a financial product referred to in this report and should obtain and consider a copy of the relevant Product Disclosure Statement from the product issuer.

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In principle approval of the Environmental Impact Management Plan (EIMP) this week for the world class Bell Bay pulp mill should have been great news. But new Commonwealth Government demands for even more modeling brings a degree of frustration to Tasmania's timber dependent communities.

The former Commonwealth Chief Scientist stated that the Bell Bay pulp mill would lead the world in being environmentally responsible and it would achieve an "environmentally natural footprint". Now there is to be more modeling on top of what was previously stated as the world's most stringent environmental conditions.

Timber folk have been waiting five long torturous years for approval of this project that would create jobs and add value to resources but now it appears the Commonwealth is asking timber families to endure another 26 months of uncertainly.

It is frustrating that all but three modules of the EIMP have been approved. But also frustrating is the apparent inconsistency between what Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett told the media this week and what he told the developer in a letter.

On Monday Garrett said that "National environment legislation requires that I take a precautionary approach to environmental protection".

Yet in a letter to the developer he said: "I am satisfied with the scope of the hydrodynamic modeling set out in module L and the other content of modules L, M and N".

Why mixed messages? His expressed satisfaction was supported by the Chief Scientist and his Independent Expert Group in 2007 and met the EIMP conditions "that the mill will operate with an environmentally neutral footprint".

Timber Communities Australia continues to hold the strongest possible belief in the social, environmental and economic soundness of the project and following detailed research it is evident that all around the world that modern Elemental Chlorine Free (ECF) pulp mills do not have any significant impact upon marine areas.

In 2005 the Commonwealth correctly approved with no conditions the ECF upgrade for a Victorian pulp and paper mill that has been discharging into Bass Strait for 60 years with no detrimental marine impact.

But there is a positive in that the required modelling will answer once and for all outrageous claims made in a 2007 submission to the Commonwealth about treated effluents. Some of these claims were the basis of alarming media reports that the effluent would taint the environment.

Perhaps the most influential was the ABC's 7.30 Report segment broadcast on June 5, 2007. Last month the ABC made an on-air apology for this broadcast, acknowledging that it was seriously inaccurate and misleading.

The ABC's independent Complaints Review Panel found "the viewing public could certainly have been confused or could have formed a far more negative view of the outflow than was actually warranted".

Not long after this (now discredited) story the Commonwealth Independent Expert Group chaired by the Chief Scientist put in place the toughest standard in the world for effluent treatment and discharge.

TCA's frustration is tempered to a degree by the enormous benefits the project will bring in being environmentally natural, job creating, adding value to a renewable recourse and economy building.

The location of the mill is the correct location as it is within Tasmania's largest heavy industrial zone, it will be built along side of two existing wood chip mills, operating for over 35 years with no impact upon the continued growth of the regions valued wine, tourism and fish-farming sectors.

The mill's wood supply will be tree farm plantations and supplemented from regrowth native forest managed under the Tasmanian Community Forest Agreement.

The mill will have no impact upon wilderness values as Tasmania has 97.5% of high quality wilderness secured in National Parks and World Heritage Areas. One million hectares of old growth forests is equally reserved along with the reservation of 45% of all aged native forests.

Tasmania leads the world in conservation achievements. At the same time our forest and timber industries inject over $1 billion annually into the state's economy and employs about 5% of our states workforce.

The pulp mill will generate its own power needs from wood waste and inject about 90 Mega watts of surplus power into the national grid.

This big green energy plus which will aid the government's desire to reduce the impacts of greenhouse gas and climate change. It is in line with the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report that found:

"In the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fibre or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit".

Despite these enormous positive benefits, the pulp mill has been opposed at every step by anti-everything activists and their political masters.

During the last Federal election the Australian Greens told Australian voters that a vote for Labor or Liberal was a vote for the Bell Bay pulp mill the result was, 81% of the nations voters took Brown's advice and voted for the Bell Bay pulp mill.

Along with this vast majority of our nations voters TCA holds the view that anti-everything activists claims are nothing more than scaremongering as ECF pulp mills do co-existence in harmony with vitally important wine and tourism industries, perhaps none more evident than in France.

The Bordeaux and Provence regions of southern France are world leaders in tourism-based fine wine production. Each year Bordeaux produces 850 million bottles of fine wine and attracts three million tourists. Both regions are also home to extensive industrial forestry, including ECF pulp and paper mills.

With the acceptance of ECF pulp mills in world leading wine producing regions like Southern France, Tassie's timber community maintain their solid belief in the Bell Bay pulp mills environmental, social and economic benefits.

TCA urges all those interested to look behind the media reports and read for themselves the actual letter sent by the Minister to the developer and the detailed reports and briefings prepared by both Federal and State agencies that demonstrate the Tasmania pulp mill will be clean, green and environmentally neutral.

It will be a major step forward in the adding value journey for Tasmania's timber dependent communities.

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I have a challenge for you. Next time you visit the grocery store try to find an advertisement, even just one, that uses the word 'old'. If you take me up on the challenge, you will find this one very simple word seems to have been blacklisted by marketers and advertisers the world over. Old simply doesn't cut it.

In our modern age, age itself has become the enemy. In just one short century, we have shifted from a 'built to last' society to a 'quick-fix' culture. We crave the newest cars and fastest computers, whilst anything deemed to be dated, yesterday or worst of all old is simply discarded, disregarded or disposed of. Our obsession with progress is typified by the modern-day doctrine arguing that everything old is 'bad' and everything new is 'good'.

And yet, what of those amongst us who have the misfortune of being the very thing our society disdains? In a sad indictment on our modern culture, this cohort of the elderly is too often tolerated rather than celebrated, dismissed rather than cherished.

This obviously has not always been the case. It was not that many years ago that age was honoured and wisdom esteemed. The process of 'passing down' through the generations from elders to descendants was at the core of our social fabric. Culture developed, history was preserved, craftsmanship was taught and wisdom was bestowed through the stories passed down from father to son, mother to daughter, grandparent to grandchild. Whether around the campfire, the watering hole, or the dinner table, our elders showed us how the world worked and the meaning of our place within it.

Today though, it seems, the stories and wisdom of an older generation are falling on deaf and seemingly disinterested ears - if they are even shared at all.

This need not, and must not, be so.

In my work as a professional speaker, I have found that the theme of connecting generations is one that resonates across the spectrum but perhaps most surprisingly with young people. Having worked with and presented to over 80,000 students around Australia in recent years, I can attest to the fact that young people today are indeed searching for a meaningful connection with their personal heritage more than ever before.

We see young people flocking to Anzac Cove each year and often wonder why. What is it that motivates this generation to travel half way across the world to commemorate an event that seems so far removed from their own reality? I would suggest that the reason for such a yearning is clear - this is a younger generation who are eager to get a sense of where they have come from and who has gone before them.

The link between generations is under increasing threat and young people sense it. In homes across the western world, a dramatic role reversal is occurring; for the first time it is the tech-savvy younger generation teaching their elders how the world works.

Whilst it is true that older generations were raised in a vastly different age to that of the modern era, it is equally true that the principles, values and experiences which guided and shaped their lives are as relevant and applicable today as they were in centuries past. I suspect that the advice and comfort to be found in the wisdom of older generations is probably needed even more than younger people recognise, or are willing to openly admit.

We run the risk of today's younger generation being the first in history not to receive stories handed down from their elders. Currently only 4 per cent of Australian parents have recorded elements of their life story with a view to capturing wisdom to pass on to the next generation. However, stories and the wisdom they contain are what today's young generation are craving. The most valuable inheritance they can hope to receive is a legacy of wisdom from their forebears.

Each day we are creating our legacy. We make memories, learn lessons, collect experiences and grow relationships that become the richly woven fabric of our life.

Whilst a fortunate few have a library or the wing of a hospital named in their honour, and others can point to streets, suburbs or even comets that bear their name, surely the most meaningful legacy we can leave is not in the accomplishments we accrue but in the lives we touch - especially when they belong to our family.

As I speak to audiences of parents and grandparents, my challenge to them is a simple one; don't underestimate the power of your story and make sure it doesn't go untold.

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There is nothing that looks worse in the CBD, in my humble opinion, than thongs. And of course, I'm talking the rubber footwear and not the underwear - although I don't really want to see that on the street either. But people wearing them is OK as long as they are kept under cover.

The little rubber excuse for a shoe is something that should be saved for the beach, weekends and generally holiday or home wear. It doesn't matter whether they are brand name Havaianas or Giselle Bundchen's Ipanema range.

If people could see how they detract from anything they are wearing, how it throws out any semblance of good posture, I think they would opt for a pair of shoes.

The funboy pandemic has reached a critical stage in our beloved city, as thong-wearing Sonny Bill clones pop up faster than Gremlins in a community swimming pool.

As I watch from the window on my daily bus commute I see such lovely outfits ruined by someone deciding they couldn't go to that extra effort of putting on shoes before leaving the house.

It's not that hard. I'm guessing most women working in the city have quite a selection they can draw upon and it is not desperation or lack of shoe options that is forcing them into what comes on the scale well below what is a fashion faux pas.

It's shabby, unprofessional and gives an overall impression that the wearer cares little about the slovenly image they are projecting.

Thongs have only two purposes in our society - wearing to the beach and wearing to the cop shop if you're a Bulldogs player. They don't belong in the CBD.

When Benji Veniaman wore thongs constantly in Underbelly you knew that he was no good - even at being a gangster. Sophisticated gangsters in The Sopranos and Godfather franchises would have too much pride and style to be in thongs.

What would be the point of achieving great success if just to bum around in tacky footwear?

And it's dangerous - you're putting yourself at you at risk of injury from stilettos, discarded glass, steaming dog poo and other city unpleasantness.

Workplaces allowing them to be worn should also be frowned upon. Especially in tough times such as this, the image to be projected to clients should be one of intense professionalism not a lackadaisical workforce.

It's not a matter of smart casual in the office. There is nothing smart about a pair of thongs. It's more like saying: "I could barely drag my sorry self into the office, so I just threw something on and shoes were too hard to add to the ensemble."

It's not like I want to blame the whole global financial crisis on the rise of the wearing of the thong.

I know a lot of people are using them as a comfort shoe for their walk into work, but even for this task there are myriad footwear options which are probably better for your feet.

And another thing, there are a lot of unkempt feet out there which really should not be on display.

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The silly season is upon us again, and I don't mean the commercial frenzy, the bizarre fascination with a white-bearded man or a Middle-Eastern baby, the over-indulgence at the barbie or hangovers persisting several days into the New Year. I mean it's the time of year when beach-goers, surfers, and municipal and state policy makers go a bit ga-ga over sharks.

There are few more polite pleasures than heading down to the beach during the holidays for a surf, quick dip or just a laze under the brolly. Some would argue it's an inalienable Australian right and that anything getting in our way should be condemned to no less than severe retribution. Well, in the case of sharks, that's exactly what's happened.

Apart from a good number of adrenalin-addicted surfers and mad marine scientists, most people are scared sh*tless by the prospect of even seeing a shark near the beach, let alone being bitten or eaten by one. I won't bore you with some ill-advised, pseudo-psycho-analytical rant about how it's all the fault of some dodgy 1970s film featuring a hypertrophied American shark; the simple fact is that putative prey don't relish the thought of becoming a predator's dinner.

So, Australia is famous for its nearly 100-year-old pioneering attempt to protect marine bathers from shark attack by setting an elaborate array of shark nets around the country's more frequented beaches. Great, you say? Well, it's actually not that nice.

Between December 1990 and April 2005, nearly 3500 sharks and rays were caught in NSW beach nets alone, of which 72 per cent were found dead. Shark spearing was a favourite past-time in the 1960s and 1970s, with at least one high-profile species, the grey nurse shark, gaining the dubious classification of Critically Endangered as a result. Over-fishing of reef sharks has absolutely hammered two formerly common species in the Great Barrier Reef, the whitetip and grey reef sharks (See the Ongoing Collapse of Coral-Reef Shark Populations report). And illegal Indonesian fishing in northern Australia is slowly depleting many shark species in a wave of protein mining that has now penetrated the Australian Exclusive Economic Zone.

Despite the gloomy outlook for sharks, I'm happy to say today that we are a little more aware of their plight and are making baby steps toward addressing the problems. Australia has generally fared better in shark conservation than most other parts of the world, even though we still have a lot of educating to do at home. Over 50 per cent of all chondrichthyans (i.e., sharks, rays and chimaeras) are threatened worldwide, with some of the largest and most wide-ranging species being hardest hit, including white sharks. The most common threat is over-fishing, but this is largely seen by the lay person as of little import simply because of the persistent attitude that "the only good shark is a dead shark".

The attitude is, however, based on a complete furphy. I'm sure many readers would have seen some statistics like the following before, but let's go through the motions just to be clear. Dying from or even being injured by a shark is utterly negligible. Based on the International Shark Attack File data for Australia, there were 110 confirmed (unprovoked) shark attacks in Australian waters between 1990 and 2007, of which 19 were fatal. Using Australian Bureau of Statistics human population data over the same period, this equates to an average of 0.032 attacks and 0.006 fatalities per 100,000 people, with no apparent trend over the last two decades.

Now let's contrast. I won't patronise you with strange comparative statistics like the probability of being killed by a (provoked) vending machine or by being hit by a bus, they are both substantially greater, but I will relate these figures to water-based activities. Drowning statistics for Australia (1992-1997) show that there were around 1.44 deaths per 100,000 people per year, or approximately 0.95 if just marine-related drownings are considered. These values are 240 (158 for marine-only) times higher than those arising from shark attack.

It's just plainly, and mathematically, ridiculous to be worried about being eaten by a shark when swimming in Australia, whether or not there's a beach net in place. The effort made, money spent and anxiety arising from the illogical fear that a shark will consider your sunburnt flesh a tasty alternative to its fishier sustenance is not only regrettable, it's an outright crime against marine biodiversity. Of course, if you see a big shark lurking around your favourite beach, I wouldn't recommend swimming over and giving it a friendly pat on the dorsal fin, but I wouldn't recommend screaming that the marine equivalent of the apocalypse has just arrived either.

You may not be fussed either way, but consider this - the massive reduction in sharks worldwide is having a cascading effect on many of the ocean's complex marine ecosystems. Being largely carnivorous, sharks are the ecological equivalent of community planners. Without them, herbivorous or coral-eating fish can quickly get out of control and literally destroy the food web. A great example comes from the Gulf of Mexico where the serial depletion of 14 species of large sharks has caused an explosion of the smaller cownose ray that formerly was kept in check by its bigger and hungrier cousins. The result: commercially harvested scallops in the region have now collapsed because of the hordes of shellfish-eating rays.

The day you fail to find sharks cruising your favourite beach is the day you should really start to worry.

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Chris Puplick was a Shadow Minister for the Arts and Heritage in the late 1980s, and has since held several positions in arts administration, including serving on the board of the Griffith Theatre Company, the Freelance Dance Company and NIDA, and on the Theatre Board of the Australia Council. He was also President of the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board.

In the most recent of the Currency House Platform Papers, he argues that artists need to become better lobbyists if their sector is to attract more government funding. He spoke with ABC broadcaster Stephen Crittenden at the paper's launch.

The duration of this video is 67'57".

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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You wake up in the middle of the night. And the word 'kindness' is in your head. It's not like you are very good at remembering your dreams, so why wake up with a word? Let alone a word like that?

So you lay there thinking about it, turning it over almost as if it were an image from some lost place in your unconscious, tasting the sound of it quietly in a whisper that won't wake your partner.

"Kindness".

Your imagination is often more violent, sexual, angry or surreal. As if everything you suffer and which frustrates you finds some somnambulant catharsis in that boiling ocean of abstract visions and intense emotions we call a dream-life, thoughts given a sardonic narrative in your daylight hours that would shame Quentin Tarantino, thoughts let loose beyond the reach of even David Lynch in your sleeping ones.

Your friends talk about this violence as an emotional and fantastic condition in all their lives. This rage that snaps and crackles and pops in the mind's eye; they see it in themselves and others, laugh about it, acknowledge its presence.

We want to hurt people, they say to you, punish them, slap them around, beat some sense into them, even just hit them because it's just what you want to do and somehow it feels good to imagine it even if you would never really do it.

Consciously they don't believe in the capital punishment yet they fantasize murder. Politically they are of the Left or small 'l' liberal persuasion yet they dream of crushing all who are in their way. They oppose war and stand for peace - but they dream of private revenge.

How did we get so angry they ask?

You try to fathom it as they sit round and talk about road rage, strange and sick crimes from Belgium to Baghdad, irrational arguments that seemed to come out of nowhere. They talk about Eminem songs and the film Fight Club ("a bit passé" someone says) and the constant pull of a sport like boxing as well as the way modern cultural criticism has become so cruel and witless and nasty in the newspapers these days.

You all try to draw some sense from this, as if there's a thread that unites such feelings into something that can be analyzed, responded too, possibly changed. Maybe it's to do with this 'time of terror' says one friend, but this anger has been burning well before September 11 ever came along. Perhaps it's something about the inequities of society says another, the gross disjunction between the poor and the rich, but that's as old as the hills too. We've always been violent insists another, it's in our primal nature, which may well be true, but if that was once natural why do we all feel so sick and ill-at-ease about it now? We've lost touch with our morals and passions and we use irony to mask it till we turn cruel someone says - but is irony a mask or a brake - or the lid on a boiling pot? It's more about the crisis of materialism in a capitalist society says another, the absence of any spiritual succor and the intuited desperation and panic this engenders. Do you know that Saul Bellow line about modern entertainment, "the ecstasies of destruction"? Have you seen Into the Wild? Have you read The Road by Cormac McCarthy and recognized the survivalist doctrine that underlines it? The connections and speculations roll on like a mad telegram from the frontlines of pop culture.

In an essay from 1996 entitled "Perchance to Dream" you know that Jonathan Franzen wrote of how "privacy is exactly what the American Century has tended toward. First there was mass suburbanization, then the perfection of at-home entertainment, and finally the creation of virtual communities whose most striking feature is that interaction within them is entirely optional - terminable the instant the experience ceases to gratify the user."

As the conversation coheres around this finer theme of atomization and loneliness, it's vaguely agreed that rage sets in when we no longer truly connect, and so it is that angry feelings flow sociologically too, from the disenfranchised towards the relatively better off, from the intelligent towards the glib and stupid, from the stupid and oppressed and beaten back towards the superior and the condescending, from the average towards the different.

It is some conversation.

And it is all yours, all in your head, imagined as a dialogue between people you know and people you don't. This one night laying in bed. Play acting the drama of what is wrong with your world.

Are you still dreaming now you wonder?

Are you sick or is the society that spawned you ill? You want to hold your lover or your child or your parents in your arms and know the nature of softness and something like forgiveness, though you are unsure what there is to forgive. Let them know you are there - for them, with them.

There are days of course when you do generous-spirited things. Days when you hope a mere look from your eyes might send of rays of warmth over another troubled soul. When compassion lets you be a little better than you feel you actually are. In a funny way it as if you need to let go of the world, and by letting go you somehow release these bad feelings as well. You know it's not a feeling you can stay high on, but it is there as another option to foul cursing, a foot on the accelerator, a fist, a gun, an American Bad Dream.

Is it about some form of tightness, you think, that finally closes around you. Yes, you have become tight, and even closed. Like that Paul Kelly song where he sings it so fatal and so sweet: "I've been careless, I've lost my tenderness, I've taken bad care of this."

"Kindness."

The word leaves you. Hovers close above you in the darkness like a being. A car passes by. And the night goes on. You don't have an answer. But you let it go and the word travels through the streets with that car, an angel in a slipstream, visiting people in their beds in the darkness, while you dream and finally sleep, a thing of wishes and forgiveness in the black, black world.

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Robert Menzies remains Australia's longest-serving prime minister. He's also a polarising figure, revered by the right and disdained by the left.

Delivering the annual Menzies lecture in Melbourne recently, conservative commentator Gerard Henderson explained why Menzies still matters.

Gerard Henderson is the executive director of The Sydney Institute, and writes a regular column for the Sydney Morning Herald and the West Australian. Henderson was chief of staff for John Howard, prior to his prime ministership. He has written extensively on Australian history and politics, with books including Mr. Santamaria and the Bishops and Menzies' Child: The Liberal Party of Australia.

The duration of this video is 47'29".

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

I know Germaine Greer's written a much more important rave about rage, and the Grumpy Old Women TV show is over and only cheap comedy routines start, "You know what I hate..." I know that "vent" ought to be a noun. I know that in journalism I'm not supposed to refer to I at all. (Three in one sentence, right there.)

So, I'm sorry, but I just can't help getting utterly, utterly, utterly FURIOUS. I think at least one of those utterlies is added because there's no point. No matter how angry you are, the people who could fix the thing you're angry about could not possibly be arsed to manage the most fractional flying hoot about you. They are not even slightly hootish.

Am I getting angry about the smaller things because I know I can't have an effect on the big things? Is it seemly to get shouty about new expensive underpants that should carry a label saying New Improved DIY Wedgie, when the Government of Victoria, in a population boom, builds a new Women's Hospital that has no more beds than the old one? With not nearly enough toilets and chairs for women waiting in the outpatient department (most of them thoroughly up the duff and possibly IN NEED OF A TOILET. Or a CHAIR.) The count is in: 90 patients at any given time. 60 chairs. Two toilets. Was it designed by otters?

But enough's ebloodynough and recently I got so cross I wrote two letters of complaint. First, I wrote to the Advertising Standards Board and about a TV ad in which a woman is accompanied by an animatronic-looking beaver. Beaver, incidentally, is a word used in American pornography to mean vulva or vagina. It's not commonly used at all in Australia, either by women, or men who have half a brain or don't want to be thrown out of the house.

Anyway, the woman in the ad takes her beaver (get it? It's her beaver, so she has to take it with her) to dinner and to a beach, where the woman seems thrilled by men on the beach ogling her and her beaver. (GET IT? Looking at her BEAVER! Argh aharrghh!)

So I wrote and said how were little girls supposed to feel okay about getting their periods if this was the sort of ad they would see? I told them it was insulting to women to so blatantly make use of a term from exploitative pornography.

The Advertising Standards Board wrote back to say, among other things, its members (concentrate now, because you won't believe it) congratulated the ad's makers for being clever and getting around the rule of not being able to say what tampons were for.

Also, the word beaver was not actually spoken during the ad, so it didn't break any rules there. (Sure. Because it didn't have to. It had thousands of people shouting in their own homes to each other: "Is that...is that a beaver? They wouldn't. Am I hallucinating or is that a BEAVER? No it's beaver. Darl, is that a beaver? It is, isn't it? I can't believe they've done that. It's a hairy grinning beaver. A freaking beaver. And furthermore, beaver."

Also, the board said, the ad was not shown before nine at night. Except it was, because my friend's 10-year-old saw it before her 7.30pm bedtime in Brisbane and asked her mummy to explain what it meant.

Macquarie Dictionary does not define the word "beaver" as offensive, added the board's letter. They're right. Nor does the dictionary define slut, dickhead or moron as offensive, because that's not its job. It tells you what the word means, not whether its use is ill-advised.

My second complaint letter went to the manager of the Spotlight Shopping Centre in South Melbourne. There's a big supermarket, and several other shops on the ground floor; upstairs is a gigantic Spotlight store, part of a national chain with a customer base that's about 98.7 per cent female clientele (I'm guessing, but I reckon it must be close). It sells homewares, craft supplies, fabric and sewing bits and bobs.

The first thing you see when you come up from the car park on the thrillingly named "travellators" is a Romano's coffee shop with a photograph blown up and pasted along the length of its counter.

The image shows distressed young woman in the street, hurrying through a hail of sexual abuse by various men, some of them on Vespa scooters. It's not an image that shows good-natured fun: it is clearly an ordeal. One man is clutching his genitals, and making a certain shape with his mouth (one imagines, at any rate, he is not inquiring after her health).

To use it as some sort of generic image supposed to conjure up the cultural esprit of Italy is, I would have thought, pretty offensive to Italians as well. It's a famous photo, by Ruth Orkin called American Girl in Italy, 1951. Here's how it's been described in the New York Times:

"Her 1951 photograph of an American girl in Florence, assaulted by catcalls as she walks through a crowd of gesticulating men, is a photographic icon and by far her most famous image...The image's dramatic presentation of a young woman confronted by crude sexual advances struck a strong emotional chord in many viewers. It also stirred debate about just how the photograph was made. The scene seems almost too perfect, with no fewer than 15 men clustered around the attractive young woman scurrying by ...Orkin asked the woman, Jinx Allen, to walk down the same block a second time after observing the responses of the men when she first passed by."

I don't think the image should be banned and never seen. It's a great photo. But it's not wallpaper. It's powerful. The first time I saw it, the little girl with me asked, "Why are the men being mean to the lady?" I could sort of explain that, but not answer the follow-up question, "But why did they put it there?". You've got me, kid.

A while ago I spoke with some of the young women who work in the area. They said they find the image (to use their words) "revolting", "yuk" and "horrible". Somebody at the café itself told me that the workmen who installed the image also found it disturbing, and questioned whether it should be used in this way.

I rang the Spotlight Centre manager, and asked whether there was an official response to my letter. He said nothing would happen because the owner of the café chain says he likes the image, it's a "famous picture", he has it at his other franchise locations and the centre management might not have the power to change the image. I asked if management would let the image remain if it didn't approve of it. The manager allowed, "I don't see a problem with it". I imagine he's never been abused in the street by a large contingent of larger and more intimidating people than himself, either. So that was it. Somebody could stand there and look at that image and think - nothing.

(I haven't been so gobsmacked since I rang the children's party organiser who came to our place with a petting zoo of wildlife creatures and left behind a guinea pig which had run under the verandah. "I'd come back if it was a kangaroo, but a guinea pig's not worth my while," he said. So, it'll just starve to death? "Yeah, probably", he said, and hung up.)

But back to the shopping centre manager. He hadn't received any other complaints, he added, and when he asked a woman working at the café about it, she didn't object to the picture. I suppose that's the real point, isn't it? How many of us would risk a job to complain, or have the time to get a campaign up against a goddamn coffee shop poster? Life's too short. We're too busy. There are more important issues to get cross and feel impotent about.

But that doesn't stop me from being utterly³ furious. At the calculating men parading as boofheads on the television deliberately demeaning women for laughs and shock value; at the politician who sniffed the seat when a woman left a meeting and then didn't resign until forced to; at the avalanche of calculated advertising creepiness, at the pervasive air of constant, casual, insulting indifference to the dignity of women.

So, all I can say is, they owe us all an apology. Oh, we know we won't get one. But to the men who think it's okay to display an image of a woman being abused as a charming expression of Italian culture, to the "creative team" on the tampon ad who just deliberately created a kerfuffle for more publicity without regard for context and the woman on the ABC TV's ad for the ad industry, The Gruen Transfer, who said she thought it was great, to the Advertising Standards Board standard of having a quick riffle through the dictionary: youse can all get rooted. (According to the Macquarie, colloquial but not offensive).

PS: Eventually we coaxed the guinea pig out with some grated carrot and took it to the vet, who found it a family. I should have let it loose in the coffee shop.

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Shrieking headlines proclaim that 30 per cent of women are 'opting' to get sliced open and the baby extracted rather than go through the vagina destroying, but apparently nobler old-fashioned method of down the shute. Too posh to push, they cry. Online message boards fill up all over the country haranguing that state of modern women and modern motherhood, not to mention those private obstetricians who would all apparently prefer to tee-off on time rather than sit through 24 hours of contractions for the big event.

How did this happen? How did the manner in which we give birth, once a very private affair done behind closed doors, become a matter for social debate, concern and meddling?

Having a baby is very 'now', right now. Australian women seem to have been spawning en-masse ever since Peter Costello told us to have one for the country, turning reproduction into a public service complete with the requisite transparency and accountability.

I too am a spawner. In two months time I will add my own little digit to next year's baby tally.

Like plenty of other new-to-be-Mums, I'm feeling the pressure to put in an Olympic-class pregnancy. I religiously take my vitamins, shun alcohol, get the right amount moderate impact exercise, turn my nose up at salad bars, and try not to get stressed about the regular news reports on how getting stressed can harm your developing baby's brain.

And then there is the looming Big Push. The size zero dress at the moment is giving birth 'au naturelle'. Do it at the comfort of your own home in the bath and you are likely to get yourself a Hollywood star. Drugs? Well, they're ok, in much the same way that a cheeky cigarette with a glass of wine might be. Going the cut? Despite the statistics, it's about as popular as someone with a 50-a-day habit.

Don't under-estimate the pressure on women to push. Message boards are peppered with stories of new Mums dealing with the subsequent feelings of shame and inadequacy for not pushing a prize-winning pumpkin from between their thighs.

"My wife had to have an emergency caesar for our first child at 39 weeks as her liver was failing," read one. "Despite this not being her choice, she struggled afterwards because she had not given birth 'properly' and had therefore failed one of the tests of motherhood."

When did giving birth naturally become a test of motherhood? About the same time the turf war erupted between midwives and obstetricians in a political power struggle over who has the right to catch the baby.

They are locked in a tough battle for business. Midwives, who tend to supervise over natural births, want their role in the system expanded. But they have a tough adversary in the stereotypically knife-wielding obstetricians, who need only mutter the words infant mortality, to send women fleeing their way.

Misinformation and disinformation is rife. Both sides claim their way is better and safer and the mother and her full uterus is caught unhappily in the middle.

Aside the growing number of newspaper articles tutting about private obstetricians and their caesarean rates, I first got wind of the tension at my first midwife appointment. Finding out I was a journalist, the midwife spent half an hour haranguing me to write a story about cut-happy obstetricians, especially one dubbed 'Mr 100%' who I was told to warn every mother-to-be about. She did balance things out though, dismissing doulas, or childbirth helpers, as "hippie rubbish."

Later, doing my research as a good little pregnant poppet is advised, I read a book lent to my beloved about fathers and childbirth. It was filled with comfortingly tales of successful births. Great, but then other themes emerged. A surprising number of the births were home-jobs, all doctors that featured were bad, rude and un-necessary, while Mother Teresa's spirit lived on in the midwives. Front flap checked, it turned out the book was published by a midwife association.

Other women, fresh from the birthing battlefield, have so far been the most honest source of information about the trials of labour - and the antics of the birthing professionals.

One friend, lying in wait to go in for her scheduled caesarean - for medical reasons, as she is always quick to point out - was subjected to a slanging match between the midwife and doctor who weren't at all happy about being rostered on together. The obstetrician is famous for his work with the knife and the caesarean birth went to plan. Now though, she confides, she wonders if she should have chosen a different obstetrician for her second child, who might have floated the option of a natural birth.

Another friend, 30 hours into a difficult labour, witnessed the midwives twice tell a concerned obstetrician to get out of the labour ward. Her baby did come naturally, in the end, but it wasn't magical. It was carnage, and the physical and mental scars left behind meant her second child had to be delivered by caesarean.

If only proponents of a natural birth could get off their birthing stools and talk a little more honestly about the possible complications. If only obstetricians listened to what birthing mothers wanted before intervening, a common complaint by mothers who made up many of the submissions to a federal government review. If only both would lay off the guilt about how the 'right' way to give birth, and help woman choose, without influencing or judging, what works best for them and their baby.

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On December 1st, the Reserve Bank ("RB") reduced official interest rates by one percent. That was the third reduction in three months; and the good oil is, that there are more reductions likely, given that the full force of the economic decline has yet to materialize.

On the negative side, recriminations started as early as the first rate drop in September with a number of calls being made for those responsible to lose their jobs. Pleasant as revenge might be for all those who have lost such large amounts of superannuation, the problem goes much deeper than an error judgment. The problem is one of economic methodology and until the methodology is discarded, we must brace ourselves for a repetition of the economic waste that everyone suffered in 1987, 1991 (the one we had to have), 1997, 2001 and 2008, perhaps even sooner than the forecasts show.

The best vantage point for seeing the problem is to ask the question, "why did it take the RB until September to realize that the real economic problem Australia faced was not inflation?" then to look at what the relevant spokesmen said in the lead up to that tectonic shift in policy.

A quick check of the RB's notes shows that as late as August it might have identified the liquidity problem in global money markets as an ongoing problem, but that was not a reason for reducing interest rates; after all, inflation had been increasing over the past year (wow, 3 - 4%) and the RB "sought to restrain demand in order to reduce inflation over time."

In fact, the RB had done the same thing in July when it noted that the increased focus on inflation in global financial markets"; not, we should say, in the US where there was already concern that what they could hear were the death rattles of global financial markets.

June was much the same, but there had been some good news in April. Inflation was not a problem because, the RB said, "monetary policy and independent factors were moderating demand".

May, however, was unique. So many from industry sectors had called for the RB to reduce interest rates that the Secretary of the Commonwealth Treasury, Ken Henry, covered for the RB and its inflation targeting, even though inflation was also being driven by increased international prices, which were unresponsive to Australian interest rates. While stating his absolute faith in the price mechanism for allocating resources, the logic of markets, Henry explained that the RB policy was to anchor inflationary expectations and thus prevent a possible wage price spiral driven by domestic price rises.

As only a few days earlier, the RB had decided to leave interest rates unchanged in May because of a need to deal with the "tightening in financial conditions since 2007 and the uncertainty... for economic growth and inflation" Henry's supportive speech demonstrates the confusion that had arisen surrounding the economy.

In April, demand was moderating and inflation was not a problem. In May, the outlook was uncertain. Even if there was evidence of increasing demand, it could only have been considered transitory as history demonstrates; but the moment RB reached the conclusion that inflation was uncertain, they should have known that their interest rate policy was wrong. "Uncertain" means, I don't know.

Ben Benanki, the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve admitted he didn't know when he said in November: The causal relationship between the housing problem and the broad financial system was very complex and difficult to predict.

His reference to 'predictability' indicated where he was mistaken. No economist guesses the outcome of economic policy anymore. In this country both Treasury and the RB invest millions in econometric models to provide forecasts for their policies. All of those models rest exclusively on the assumptions of neo-classical economics, on the logic of the market, as Henry put it. The clear inference is that the financial collapse that everyone else knew had arrived had not been predicted by the models. The brief reference to market stress in April and May can only be interpreted to mean that Henry's market forces were in the process of self correcting.

This mistaken view of the world is, unfortunately, one of the fundamental assumptions of classical economics and its derivative, neoclassical economics. Those theories are at the heart of our current problems, problems that reflect the obsession of economists and modern governments with forcing trade and commerce to conform with a model that is both theoretical and distorted. This they call economic efficiency.

These models reflect economists' attempts to provide a scientific economic theory that predicts the actions of ordinary men and women engaged in trade and commerce in a free society, a predictive theory that will replace political science, a market mechanism that replaces the human need for good government.

The clearest example of the gross injustices that the pursuit of classical economics can cause is the communist tyrannies that compelled their citizens to comply with Marx's economic theory of historical necessity and which punished them for acting naturally. Yet Marx's Communism, like Friedman's capitalism, accepts and incorporates the analysis of Adam Smith and the methodology David Ricardo as correct.

There is a gulf between a political science that espouses the principles of a free society and an economic science that promotes free markets as if they are identical. Free trade, markets without rules, does not and can not exist. Yet they are espoused as a standard for a well ordered economy by both Labor and Liberal alike and endorsed last May by the Secretary of the Treasury.

If Treasury and the RB still believe that classical economics and its positivist methodology have any relevance to good government they should heed the humiliating admission by Alan Greenspan, the ex-Federal Reserve Chairman who said during the October Congressional hearings:

Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief.

In one sentence, Greenspan repudiated Adam Smith's invisible hand and all classical and neo-classical, scientific economic theories, including those of Milton Friedman and Karl Marx, that are based on it.

We may never know if it was the squeals of unbearable pain from the stock market or the dreadful sound of a market mechanism grinding away without any liquidity. At some moment in August when the noise became unbearable, both Treasury and the RB ditched controlling inflation and focused on reducing interest rates and increasing demand. They became in some small way, Keynsian.

Keynes' General Theory, describes an "art of economics" which explains real people and real markets. In doing this, Keynes distinguished his General Theory from the scientific economic theories of Classical economics in which category he included, Adam Smith, Ricardo, Marshall, Pigou and Karl Marx.

The General Theory describes an art of economics which is a servant of the political art whose purpose is that of maintaining full employment. As an art, it has only general principles which are "mostly true". People knowing the general principles, can, with experience, become prudent practitioners who can cause the economy to generate full employment.

Had the general principles been known to our bureaucrats, they would have obtained sufficient experience in the economic crashes of 1987 and 1991 to have been able to spare us the disasters of 1997 and 2008. However, while they continue to rely on theories whose assumptions and methodology are unrelated to reality, future major economic crashes are unavoidable. If you doubt this compare the relative sizes of each rescue package to see how serious the situation is becoming.

We tend to forget that it was an earlier Labor Treasurer removed the government guarantee for Australian bank deposits in order to free up the Australian financial markets. It is the greatest irony, that had the present government not reversed that decision, our savings would have been safer under a mattress than in a bank.

That is the level of economic efficiency to which the free trade theories have taken us.

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I find a new year is always a good time to reflect. To reflect on things past and to make plans for the future.

But what of those for whom there is no future - save in memory? Last November I was forced to confront this unpalatable question on a couple of occasions. Firstly, I was at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne on the 11th day of the 11th month at the 11th hour for the Remembrance Day service. We were honouring the fallen who had died defending our country. It was a moving experience. It gave me pause to contemplate the way we remember our loved ones. I've come to the conclusion that we don't remember them very well at all.

It was also the month that Sandy died. After a long illness my sister-in-law passed away in the same manner she had lived - quietly and with dignity. When the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas wrote...

Do not go gentle into that good night,
...Rage, rage against the dying of the light

...he wasn't talking to Sandy but to his father. It's just as well because that's exactly what she did. When the progression of her disease became inevitable she didn't "rage". It wasn't in her - especially not on her own behalf. She was a most unassuming person.

Her life was not extraordinary. She was not at the forefront of any world-changing event. She wasn't famous. She made greeting cards: 'Handmade by Sandy'. The cards contained messages of good fortune complete with a Chinese good luck charm. She was very creative. We, who knew her, are shattered. For those who didn't, her death is just part of the inevitable cycle of life. A cycle everyone will experience. The end of which is rarely happy.

What is gut-wrenchingly sad in this inevitable cycle of life is that in no time at all, we'll forget. All the little people who once led happy, productive, unremarkable lives will simply disappear from our lives and our consciousness far too soon after their deaths. The winners write history and, in the main, we record the lives only of those we deem 'important'. The rest slip through the cracks into obscurity. Contemplating this makes their loss unbearable.

Let's face it, most of us are really hopeless at keeping a record of the past; of remembering the lives of those who came before. We're so consumed with our day-to-day lives that we let knowledge slip through our fingers and become lost for all time. Last year I had occasion to interview Dr Julia Horne, University Historian of Sydney University who commented:

"To write history, any sort of history, you need evidence, you need sources and with most people the sources are thrown out when they die".

If we, who loved them, do not take the trouble to record what we know, forgetting is inevitable.

This can even be true of people who were quite prominent in their time. Let me give you an example. Ever heard of William Francis Merrell? He was Sandy's grandfather. I'd be surprised if you had. His name produces a 'Google whack' (no information), which is a rare thing these days.

Yet, he was Australia's second Inspector General in Bankruptcy in the Commonwealth Public Service, when that service was still operating out of Melbourne. It was a position he held through most of the Great Depression of the 1930s. He would have many an interesting tale to tell. If only someone had remembered and retold the stories. No one ever did.

Dr Horne (Sydney University's historian) told me that she had recently attended a history forum at the Library of New South Wales where the loss of personal histories was raised "if not fully addressed". It seems that the answer is to become proactive in recording our histories. Keep that diary; preserve that newspaper clipping; if your grandmother has a story to tell, tape an interview with her. It sounds so easy, but, alas, few of us will do this.

Gone are the days when people kept diaries, it seems. Sure, the written word is making a comeback with the proliferation of the internet, and especially blogs, but Dr. Horne believes that, as historical records, they will prove inadequate. She cites the problems of fast-paced technology rendering the blogs unable to be opened in the future. Time will tell if this will be the case.

Our society does not have a strong oral history tradition either. Walter Benjamin in The Storyteller, wrote: "Storytelling is the oldest and most successful form of cultural reproduction... The loss of storytelling means the loss of knowledge passed from generation to generation by word of mouth."

Storytelling has been replaced by information-which is its antithesis. "...narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks", says Benjamin. And it is the ever more vast quantities of information by ever-expanding media sources that is destroying 'storytelling' according to his theory.

But, be that as it may, we still do crave the stories. "From an early age, probably in most cultures, an important aspect of just being a family is that you learn about where you come from. As a social group where we come from is really important," says Dr Horne. It is probably the reason that happily adopted children still feel it necessary to search out their birth parents. It may also be the reason for the popularity of genealogical internet sites.

It's a paradox really isn't it? We only want to hear the stories when they are no longer readily available, or so it seems.

So, for the record; to all who fought and died in the service of this country, although I never knew you, for the freedoms I now take for granted, I thank you.

And, Vale Sandra Merrell, it was a pleasure to have known you.

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The rumour about Joe Hockey moving from Canberra to take over the leadership of the NSW State Liberals from Barry O'Farrell wins some sot of prize.

It began with a poll suggesting 54 per cent of NSW voters would rather have neither the incumbent Nathan Rees nor O'Farrell as their premier. So it was unsettling to O'Farrell, who did however draw in front in the polling a few days later.

But the rumour, as far as one can establish in the murk as those in and out of office blunder about in their own errors of judgment, is completely untrue.

So who started it and why. Clever disinformation from the ALP, because it really is clever. It gets us to the grip that Malcolm Turnbull has on the leadership at the federal level of the Parliamentary Liberal Party.

Has he passed the mustard? He has a fight on his hands with the National Party spurred on by Barnaby Joyce. Is Peter Costello really waiting on the backbench until the time is ripe for him to have a go, finally, at the leadership?

And if he is, and if things go badly enough for Turnbull, would Costello have the support to beat Joe Hockey, whose standing rises perceptibly on almost a daily basis.

Were sources close to Malcolm Turnbull responsible for the rumour? The argument being that Turnbull is endeavouring to get the man who is becoming his apparent alternative out of the way, that he is running scared.

So the rumour is double-edged. It is also unsettling to Turnbull.

That's not bad for a rumour without a shred of substance behind it.

And while we are on about politics' little ironies, it's beginning to look as if Kevin Rudd will get his second term. The GFC - Global Financial Crisis to you and me - is turning out to be Kevin's lucky number.

It has cloaked his irresponsibility with respectability. Get in there, grab the surplus inherited from John Howard and Peter Costello, and chuck it all about in lumps of $8 or $10 billion at a time, and call base political vote-buying 'pumping liquidity into the system'.

The money is going to the "poor", and who can quarrel with that. They are sacred objects. Furthermore, they are the ALP demographic, the support base that sticks with the ALP, although the "poor" have already begun to lose their jobs in Kevin's Australia.

We undo the industrial reforms, and pay off Julia Gillard, who delivered the Left vote when Rudd sought the leadership, and pay off the trade unions whose advertising campaign last year convinced so many voters that jobs and rising real wages were a form of suffering.

We deliver the daily bucket of money, the latest being for "infrastructure" with NSW, where, out of a total of $4.7 billion, Nathan Rees is to get $2 billion in the hope that it will save NSW seats at both the federal and state level.

And then off to the real work of the day: popping into a sandpit with the kindies while the cameras roll.

Rudd was becoming ridiculous, a national figure of fun, until the GFC came along. World leaders met, and agreed that the banks must be supported, and that the global financial system should be more liquid. Rudd no longer looked as if he didn't know what he was doing. He looked decisive.

Never mind that he may have just stumbled into his decisiveness. Never mind that the real explanation was that he was deeply offended by the inherited budget surplus, because ALP governments don't have them, and that he just wanted to spend it, along with the public service superannuation, which Peter Costello had misleadingly described as the "Future Fund."

While Kevin Rudd is winning brownie points by doing the what comes naturally, that is to say spending other people's money, and then spending money that doesn't exist except as future debt, Malcolm Turnbull's end of the see-saw was becoming lighter.

Supporting legislation that abolishes the industrial relations reforms of the Howard Government is indefensible. It will put thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of people out of work. Rudd may have a mandate, but it is more likely that he won the election a year ago because of Tony Abbott's administrative games with abortion laws and contraceptive pills, and because the voters had become tired of Howard, the way they became tired, after a while, of all his predecessors.

Industrial relations reform was one of the three pillars, along with deregulation of the markets and balancing the budget, that delivered unprecedented prosperity to Australia, prosperity that is now slipping away. If either or all are now to be held by the present Liberal party to have been wrong, as the ALP says, then what do they stand for and what is their case for returning to government.

Turnbull's standing in the polls began to slide. Stand him next to Rudd, and Turnbull looks like the political opportunist. Isn't that just another of the little ironies to be found at the top.

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In 2008, the net entered politics.

The rise and eventual election of Barack Hussein Obama as 44th President of the United States proved that point beyond any question.

During the endless and hard-fought primary race between Obama and Hillary Clinton, the Obama campaign's consistent advantage lay in its ability to reach out to millions of individuals for fundraising, for neighborhood canvassing, to show up in unprecedented numbers at campaign rallies.

This connection to the 'netroots' - grassroots political activists who work primarily through online media, such as blogs, instant messaging, Twitter and the like - gave Obama an unshakeable advantage from the earliest days of the Iowa caucuses through to the general election in November.

As an American citizen I was proud to donate US$75 to Obama's campaign over the last year, one of the many millions of citizens who contributed an average of $80 apiece. When I donated, I was signed up to the campaign's email list.

For many months, almost every day there was a new piece of email, from Obama, from his wife Michelle, or campaign director David Plouffe. During the campaign, the vast majority of these emails asked me to part with more cash. But now, with the campaign won, and Obama just 20 days away from taking the oath of office, the emails continue to arrive.

What's going on here? Isn't Obama done with us - at least until 2012?

The ringing theme of Obama's campaign wasn't "Hope", or "Change", but "Yes, we can", a message that got taken up with such hunger that it permuted into many different forms, such as the video by Will. I. Am., which received tens of millions of views on YouTube.

If Obama remains true to this commitment, he will turn to the American people for their input, for their help, for their encouragement, not just when the chips are down, but consistently throughout the next four years. This is why the emails keep landing in my inbox. Obama doesn't need my cash. He needs my network.

Although the network entered politics in 2008, 2009 is when politics will enter the network. As Obama and his designates enter the halls of power in January, as they open up their offices, and establish connections to the outside world, they will be connecting to the network. By this I do not mean some well-designed websites promoting an agency's profile and capabilities, but a re-definition of that agency's relationship to the public.

Political discourse has been a one-way street, from governing to governed, since the emergence of democratic institutions a few hundred years ago. The ballot box only occasionally afforded feedback from the governed to the governing. Now that feedback is continuous and instantaneous.

Example - as I sit writing this little essay, the following message has come through on Twitter, the 'social messaging service' that allows individuals to share 140-character thoughts with vast numbers of friends:

"A SERIOUS PLEA TO YOU: Join us in asking Obama to appoint a Spec Prosecutor for torture on Change.gov (deadline!)"

A provided link takes you to a page on the website for The Nation, an American left-of-center publication, which further links you to pages on Change.gov, the website established by Obama's presidential transition team.

Change.gov is the beginning of what network politics will look like in 2009, a site where individuals can make comments, suggestions, criticisms and recommend policy directions. The dialog which will frame Obama's presidency has already begun on Change.gov, a dialog that will transition seamlessly to the corridors of power.

Will it all work? Can we hope to have anything like a coherent government when millions of voices all clamor to be heard? This has ever been the argument against 'direct democracy' - it simply doesn't scale. Hence we have representative democracies, with individuals standing in for tens of thousands (in Australia), or hundreds of thousands (in the United States).

We concentrate power in the hands of the few because spreading that power around would result in chaos. Or so we believe.

One of the big things we'll learn in 2009 is how well power can be redistributed via the network. Obama is asking for suggestions, but soon enough he'll be looking for individuals to watch his back as he goes to war against recalcitrant (that is, Republican) senators. And if his army of supporters are successful, they'll be more likely to put that power to work directly for themselves.

This is the promise and the peril of network politics: by empowering the network you risk creating an empowered public which can use its own power against you. It's a daring strategy, and by the end of next year we'll have some idea how well it has worked.

Closer to home, the Government has poked a hornet's nest with its own proposal to mandate ISP-level filtering of Internet content. This proposal got a lot of people upset, and, unsurprisingly, many of these people are well-versed in the use of the network and in network politics. Thus far, that community has outpaced the Government in its ability to get its message out to the broader public.

Most people aren't yet tuned into the debate. As they do, the first messages they hear will likely be from opponents of the filter, because they’ve effectively used the network to state their opposition.

The Government is trying to keep up - Senator Conroy has a blog, and Kevin Rudd (or rather, a proxy for the Prime Minister) began to use Twitter a few months ago. But none of these efforts have been anything other than spin and PR, using the net as another publishing medium to get the message out there. Things don't work that way anymore: 2008 was proof of that.

In 2009 we all get to learn just how much power lies in a network of activist, empowered citizens. I imagine there are some major surprises in store - both positive and negative - as the old institutions of power collide with a newly empowered networked citizenry

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It had been carefully planned as the smooth-sailing year when the reform agenda upon which the Rudd Government won office would be translated into a raft of new policies. But thanks to a dire global economic outlook that brings the prospect - if not the likelihood - of a recession in Australia, 2009 instead promises Kevin Rudd an extremely rough crossing.

Throughout 2008 Rudd held his nerve in the face of criticism he was running "government by committee", because of the inordinate number of policy reviews he'd initiated.

But after almost 12 years of Coalition Government which radically altered the very fabric of Australian society, Rudd's bureaucratic review process was entirely justified. Justified, that is, if voters could be assured these policy reviews - on everything from the tax system and pensions, paid maternity leave and higher education, defence and climate change mitigation - would lead to reforms for which Rudd won such a sweeping mandate in November 2007.

So, if 2008 was the year of the committee, 2009 was to be the year of action - the platform for Rudd's meticulously calibrated plan for re-election in 2010.

Political observers thrive on the left-field emergence of the utterly unanticipated challenge to government - the crashing entrance of the gorilla into the Cabinet room, if you like. And that, of course, has been the immediate political impact of the global economic meltdown for administrations the world over.

In America the meltdown - stemming from the appalling lack of financial regulation responsible for the sub-prime housing crisis - contributed the final element to a perfect political storm for the Republicans.

The genesis of the storm was a simmering unease over the Iraq War and Washington's disproportionate "for us or against us" response to radical Islam and terrorism. It gathered force with a gnawing sense that the 43rd President of the United States had diminished his country's international standing, not least through his climate change denial-ism.

Predictably, the storm swept in a new president about whom voters knew precious little - except that he was not George W Bush. That was enough. But now, upon his inauguration on January 20, Barack Obama must act on his vague promise of bringing balance to a nation in recession which also has the world's most inequitable public health, welfare and tax systems.

Genuine social reform costs money. But Obama enters office with the coffers worse than empty.

Across the Atlantic in Great Britain Gordon Brown had been heading for the exit - until his country went into recession. Brown acted swiftly, effectively re-nationalising some of the major banks and adopting the persona of a war-time Churchill or Great Depression-fighting Roosevelt. Brown, whose British Labour Party was set to dump him, re-launched himself from zero to hero in a matter of months. His much-maligned dourness, it seems, has morphed into a gravitas that seems suddenly appropriate for the times.

Rudd, meanwhile, finds himself at the end of his first year in government in the unenviable position of having to jettison core promises of reform – on climate change, on tax and welfare, on defence and education – because of the economic slowdown.

Rudd's exceedingly unambitious carbon reduction target (just five per cent on 2000 levels by 2020) is a bleak talisman of just how heavily compromised his policy (and re-election) plans are by the grinding economy. The question is whether those who were captivated by his pre-election promise of leading the world through example on greenhouse gas reductions, will understand that economic circumstance, not lack of will, have compromised his intent.

And what will they make of his promised "education revolution" (an idea straight from the script of West Wing; see Series Two, Episode Seven - The Portland Trip) since the government's frosty response to the recent "Bradley Report" on higher education which recommended $6 billion worth of reforms?

Is Rudd willing to go into deficit to meet the recommendations of a report such as this, commissioned by his government? Heck, he can scarcely bring himself to mouth the word D-E-F-I-C-I-T, let alone the big one, R-E-C-E-S-S-I-O-N.

He'd better practise though. Because that's where some of his most senior ministers regretfully concede the Australian economy is headed in the near future.

This will present Rudd with some extremely tough choices.
His dilemma was succinctly articulated by senior Liberal frontbencher, Joe Hockey, recently.

He said: "The thing about Kevin Rudd is that he has 168 committees and reviews out there that are going to come back with the biggest wish list that Santa has ever seen. How is he going to work out what's important and what isn't?"

It's a question at the heart of Rudd's re-election plan. And one about which a more formidable opposition would make greater political capital.

With the notable exception of Hockey, his P-plate leader, Malcolm Turnbull, and several others, the Coalition has so far failed to take the economic fight to Rudd. Shadow treasurer Julie Bishop seems incapable of constructing a credible intellectual criticism of Labor's many economic vulnerabilities.

Turnbull goes into 2009 experiencing the very worst of opposition's cruelties. But despite being desperately behind in the polls and leading a bitterly divided Coalition, he remains his party's best prospect.

Rudd's worries extend well beyond the economy. The threat of a conflagration between nuclear rivals India and Pakistan is destabilising North and Central Asia – a region that is, in geo-political and strategic terms, effectively on Australia's doorstep.

Meanwhile, recent Israeli military strikes on Gaza – in retaliation for repeated rocket attacks on Israel border towns by terrorists associated with Hamas – will reverberate throughout the Middle East.

The focus of American military operations is poised to shift from Iraq to Afghanistan. Rudd will almost invariably be asked to commit more troops to the increasingly dangerous theatre of Afghanistan when it is unclear exactly what the 1090 Australian troops already there are actually achieving.

Happy New Year, Prime Minister.

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Vic Alhadeff is a senior Zionist organisation official. His Unleashed article provides an opportunity for analysis that is instructive about our media and intellectual culture. The very persuasiveness of Alhadeff's case for Israel is the reason it deserves attention. It misrepresents the uncontroversial facts and the moral issues at stake.

Alhadeff rehearses official lies of the Israeli government that are, moreover, uncritically repeated by our politicians and "free press".

Alhadeff portrays Israel as a victim of implacable, irrational foes who are bent on gratuitously "killing, maiming and terrorising as many civilians as possible". At a time when Israel is committing unprecedented violence, such reversal of the facts requires contempt for an audience who is expected not to know better. Israel's actions are comparable to their killing of stone-throwing children with rifles and tanks.

Israeli victim-hood is the premise on which the public relations machine relies to warrant their military actions. On this picture, a well-meaning, peace-loving Israel offers generous treaties and truces that are rejected by fanatical, fundamentalist terrorists in favour of murdering Jews. The story line is that, finally, Israel had no choice but to invade the terrorist infrastructure of Hamas.

This story can only convince an audience that does not know the facts and these are either falsified or left out altogether by Alhadeff.

First, the central factual claim on which the entire campaign rests concerns the relentless rocket fire against Israeli citizens that finally became intolerable and the justification for large-scale air-force strikes. As Israel's own newspaper Haaretz reminds us: "Six months ago Israel asked and received a cease-fire from Hamas. It unilaterally violated it when it blew up a tunnel, while still asking Egypt to get the Islamic group to hold its fire."

Haaretz reports Israeli ministry of defence sources who reveal that plans for the operation were made over six months ago, at the same time as Israel was beginning to negotiate the truce agreement with Hamas. Nevertheless, the media and politicians have consistently reported the official Israeli lies, re-writing history effectively as it happens.

However, even if the Palestinian violation of the cease-fire were true, it would not justify the current intense military assault on Gaza which is the most destructive since 1967. Israel has declared Gaza to be a "special military zone", a classification that is one degree below a declaration of total war against an enemy state.

While the rocket fire is illegal under international law, it does not give Israel the right to respond against the population of Gaza since collective punishment is unequivocally prohibited by the Geneva conventions. This comes after the collective punishment of Israel's devastating blockade for which it was condemned by the UN and human rights groups around the world. The blockade had already created a severe humanitarian crisis with shortages of bread, fuel, ink, paper, electricity, medications and hospital equipment among other elementary necessities of life.

A separate violation by Israel concerns the targeting of civilians. Since Hamas is a legitimate, democratically elected political party that controls the government, security-related institutions are civilian targets including police departments and uniformed officers. Other targets are incontestably civilian such as factories, mosques, a television broadcasting centre, university and other sites that have been demolished with loss of innocent life.

The excuse that Hamas is to blame for placing military sites among the population would not justify killing civilians even if it were true.

Another clear violation of international law is the grossly disproportionate scale of the military attack. Alhadeff's rehearsing of official Israeli excuses for a massive military over-reaction to the supposed provocation is an attempt to excuse the inexcusable.

The rocket fire has claimed altogether a handful of Israeli lives despite Israel's unprecedented military assault - clear evidence of how little threat Hamas rockets pose for Israel. To put Israel's aggression into perspective, we must juxtapose the claims of urgency and "no choice" with the entire history of harm caused by home-made rockets: altogether around 20 fatalities in the past two years.

Alhadeff is certainly correct in noting that Hamas is listed as a "terrorist" organisation - but this just reflects the Orwellian terminology used by Western commentators to exclude Western crimes by definition, regardless of their scale. By any meaningful definition, Israel is responsible for large-scale terrorism, if the facts make any difference.

In 1982 during the first Lebanon war, Israel killed around 17,000 civilians - by far the largest act of terrorism in the Middle East, but conveniently forgotten by Alhadeff and media commentators. The 2006 Lebanon war cost around 1,000 lives and involved cluster bombs against civilians and other forms of terrorism including gross violations of international law.

Another revealing omission from Alhadeff's version of history is the 40-year military occupation and its toll on Palestinian lives. However, perhaps most glaring is Alhadeff's failure to even hint at the crushing blockade of Gaza. Contrary to the picture retailed by Alhadeff, Hamas showed remarkable restraint under the most desperate conditions and extreme provocation.

The exaggeration of the danger posed by home-made missiles leaves no doubt that the Israeli attack on Gaza was driven by political and not security motives. The posturing before forthcoming Israeli elections is widely cited as motivation for this military adventure.

The mainstream understanding of what goes on in the world is often the reverse of the truth. In light of the facts, it is regrettable that the Australian government has uncritically echoed Israeli-American talking points.

Contrary to standard perceptions, since its election in 2006 Hamas has consistently offered negotiation with Israel and expressed a willingness to accept a two-state solution based on 1967 borders. As Harvard Middle East expert, Sara Roy, has pointed out, Israel pretends that they have no partner for peace precisely because they know that the reality is quite the opposite.

Even the Australian Jewish News (AJN) recently expressed the need for friends of Israel to be critical of the Jewish state. This view was widely shared by around 500 signatories of a statement published by Independent Australian Jewish Voices (IAJV) () in 2007 who urged a wider and more honest debate over Israel and Palestine.

Alhadeff's article has interest as an example of apologetics in the service of power and state crimes. He does not contribute to the well-being and security of Israelis or Palestinians.

Israeli peace group Gush Shalom published a statement in Haaretz on December 30 calling for an immediate cease-fire, arguing that the war is "inhuman, superfluous" and that "nothing good for Israel will come out of it". They further point out that the attack will deepen hatred for Israel, "arouse the whole civilized world against us" and "undermine even more the status of peace-seeking Palestinians".

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The ones in the helicopter gunships shooting up apartment buildings at midnight are the good guys. The squealing children and their frightened mothers are the bad guys. Discuss.

The 200 innocents killed in the Bali bombings deserve to be avenged. The 200 innocents killed in Gaza do not. Discuss.

The worst things Israelis do is make you lie to them. Is this okay, they say to us. Is it okay with you we do this? Yes, yes, we say, it's okay, you've got our full support.

They do other things, of course. They bomb universities. They kill children on their way home from school. They target the duly elected leaders of neighbouring countries for assassination. They cut off the electricity that keeps babies alive in humidicribs, thus ensuring they die. They bomb tunnels through which food comes to the hungry. They hoard atomic bombs, deny they've got them, and plan to stop the neighbours they thereby threaten from getting any of their own. They killed with explosions this weekend as many people as the Bali bombers and Julia Gillard said they were right to do this.

But she I think was lying too, the way we all do. The worst thing they do is make you lie. Practically nobody likes what they're doing, yet nearly everybody says they "have a right do defend themselves". By bombing young policemen on their graduation day. Of course they do. And obliterating a television station. Of course they do. And blowing up an old man in his wheelchair. Of course they do. And five little sisters asleep in their shared bedroom. Of course they do. They have a right to defend themselves in this way. In any way they like. Unlawfully if they like.

I have a thousand Jewish ancestors I guess (on my grandmother Rachel Larkman's side) and a million Israeli relatives probably - twelfth cousins, twentieth cousins, some more distant than that - currently applauding the bribe-taker Ehud Olmert and the prattling dipstick Tzipi Livni and their latest ill-planned massacre of the innocents, and I keenly feel considerable shame at what's happening in Gaza, intellectual shame most of all.

For who do these my brilliant relatives think they are kidding? They're shooting up and firebombing a territory without an air force, without a navy, without an army, without anti-aircraft guns, and claiming this territory is a threat to their existence.

They're calling 'a terrorist regime' - a government elected by 60 per cent of a democratic vote the UN said was fairly conducted. They demanded this government 'renounce violence' and kidnapped 40 of its parliamentarians when it wouldn't.

They would never renounce violence themselves, of course. When we do it, they seem to be saying, it isn't violence. It's defending ourselves.

They seize land owned by peasant families for a thousand years, and shoot them if they try to cross it, to water their dying crops. They shoot boys dead for throwing stones at them. They bulldoze the houses of the widows of suicide bombers. They keep reporters out of Gaza, away from the evidence. And they allege that they're a democracy.

Who do they think they are kidding? Me? You? Condaleezza Rice? Anyone?

Why are the Israelis like this? Why do they brutalise each generation of conscripts with compulsory atrocities they call 'national service'? Why are they so fond of pain, both given and received?

The answer may lie in their holy scriptures.

For deep in their tribal psyche (my tribal psyche, I suppose) is this Bronze Age ethic of righteous killing. The Old Testament is a catalogue of proud slaughters so many and so fierce that the Catholics kept it from ordinary colloquial readership for a thousand years. It speaks of 'sparing not their women and children', 'killing the heathen firstborn', stoning Sabbath-breakers to death, adulteresses to death, quite a lot, approvingly. The admired passage that begins 'By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down', for instance, ends on a rather different note. 'O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed', it ends. 'Happy shall be he that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall be he that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones'.

I thought for a while of the five little dead sisters who were alive and happy last week after reading an hour ago these ancient, reverenced words. And I asked why they and their parents had to pay so much, in lives and survivor's grief, on Sunday night; and for what? To ensure some nearby Israelis would sleep sounder in their beds hereinafter? Was that it? Was that the reason? Was that all the reason? Tzipi Livni says it was. That some shall sleep more soundly, and some shall sleep no more. Or live no more.

As a lifelong bearer of her genes I know, or I think I know, the source of her creed of complaint and serial vengeance. It's a sort of tribal Original Sin, and the guilt that thereafter proceeds from it. The Israelis invaded and rased the villages of people who had done them no harm up till then; and they now want to deal with their guilt by goading their victims into rising up and attacking them, and so give themselves an excuse to kill some more of them, kill the witnesses, the victims, of their primal crime against the innocent, the dispossessed.

Sigmund Freud, a member of the tribe, would have understood this connection immediately. So I think do Phillip Roth and Woody Allen and Frederic Raphael and Robert Manne, and they perhaps should be asked what they think of these post-Christmas events, this war for a quiet sleep and a sweet dream that kills little girls in their beds and how it helps world peace and the cause of democracy.

How 'Eight hundred eyes for an eye' is a good motto.

How 'unintentional civilian casualty' adequately describes a decapitated little girl.

How this war is good for Israeli tourism.

How an economy with no tourism can long survive.

How when Yitzak Rabin roared "Enough of blood! Enough!" on the White House lawn he thought this present war an exception and a good idea.

How the octogenarian Shimon Peres approving the slaughter of infants 80 years his junior is shrewd international diplomacy.

How a Prime Minister under indictment for a gaolable crime has a constitutional right to wage war on anyone.

How targeting and killing a graduation class is not a crime against humanity.

How 'self-defenc' and 'vengeance' are not, and have never been, mixed up in their minds.

How the sum of human happiness is increased by all these howling, fist-shaking funerals.

How 'Thou shalt not kill' as a precept does not include the children of Gaza, and Talmudic scholars can argue that this is so.

Hands up those with the answers.

Julia Gillard? Gerard Henderson? Bill O'Reilly?

Anyone?

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The end of the year is upon us all, and as we collectively sift through the remnants of the festive wrappings, we should take the time to reflect upon the year that was.

2008 was a strange year. Australia was plunged into a bizarre televised mourning, following the death of Heath Ledger. The usual suspects (and yes, morning television hosts, I'm talking to you...) made sad puppy eyes at us all - and most likely didn't give any other person who died of an overdose - accidental or otherwise - a second thought for the rest of the year.

Politically, 2008 was a landmark year. Australia's leaders bumbled their way through the beginning and middle of the worst economic crisis we've ever been told we're having, and most Australians watched in dismay as the money the government has been telling us to put aside for our retirement was summarily pissed against the wall.

Businesses collapsed. People lost their homes. And a guy I know whose job it was to make sure this sort of thing didn't happen skipped town to go skiing at Whistler, British Columbia.

In overseas politics, The Great White Idiot was replaced by the Great White Hope (who is actually black) in the US. Whether a change of leader will be enough to halt the horrifying slide of America's collective IQ remains to be seen. But where America began - after eight stultifying years in the wilderness - to look to the future, Russia took several determined steps back towards the 1950s. The most recent example - the removal of the need for a jury in trials concerning terrorism, espionage and, distressingly, "civil unrest".

China performed well on the international stage, bringing us the twin joys of a remarkable Olympic Games followed closely by a poisonous milk scandal. Zimbabwe stayed ahead of the international curve by further propelling its economy into a boiling sewer of recession. There, but for the grace of God and the fact that we lack a brutal dictatorship government, goes Australia.

But as nice as it is to look back at the year that was, there's another important part of the festive season that we should be looking forward to. As the new year is rung in, around the world the traditional making of promises we have no intention of keeping will take place. We call them 'New Years Resolutions'.

Having made - and failed to keep - many of these resolutions in years gone by, I have taken to considering them in terms of a lesson I learnt from former Prime Minister John Howard. It was Mr Howard who brought to the Australian lexicon the ideas of core and non-core promises.

Core promises - such as "I promise I'll take out the garbage" and "I do" - are the ones we have to keep. Non-core promises, such as "I will keep interest rates low" and "I will stop smoking on January 1st" are the ones we probably would like to have kept, but clearly didn't.

The problem with many New Years Resolutions is that they're invariably made under the influence of alcohol, 'non-prescription medicines' or other such stimulants, which have the tendency to fill our hearts and minds with artificial vim and vigour. In much the same way as the stranger you're talking to when you're helplessly inebriated is both intensely interesting and jaw-droppingly beautiful, the promises that well up inside us unbidden on New Years eve are false. Cruel hoaxes.

It gets worse when you make the resolution in front of a room full of people. It gets even worse when one of those people is your significant other. It reaches the pinnacle of worst-ever when your significant other is also the designated driver, and thus in the unique position of being able to remember every slobbery, slurred word you utter as the fireworks shatter the atmosphere and everyone struggles vainly to remember the words to Auld Lang Syne.

So let this be a cautionary message for New Years Eve. We'll just add it to the list of New Years Eve "don'ts" - Don't take drugs, don't drive drunk, don't try to outdrink an Irish tourist and don't make any stupid promises.

The statistics suggest that on all four of these key points, you are likely to find yourself in hospital, in jail, in a well-meaning but actually quite violent headlock or denying yourself something that, had you not been drunk on an epic scale, you might still be enjoying.

New Years Resolutions are meant to be good things. As the new year rolls in, it genuinely is a great time to stop, take stock of your life and perhaps change something about yourself that you, or the people around you, find quite odious. And in a lot of ways, that is actually a pretty noble pursuit.

But I know, deep down, that there's probably only really one resolution I'm going to make with any conviction this year. And it's not even, strictly speaking, a New Years Eve thing. It's more of a New Years Day thing - and I know that I'm not going to be the only person making this particular promise to myself.

"I swear I will never touch another drop of alcohol as long as I live".

And we all know that's one resolution that will last about as long as the others.

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When it comes to alcohol, American women are finally catching up with men. The latest reports should make me feel smug about my decision to abstain from hard liquor, but it's not that simple. It never is.

At a recent holiday gathering, I sat beneath a 15-foot tree and just said yes to a whisky-based cocktail garnished with pine needles, even though I had promised myself I wouldn't drink anything stronger than water. Whisky isn't my particular weakness, but I'm a fool for pine cuttings - and it's sheer madness to resist a hostess with her own signature drink. The Divine Oh-Nine struck me as a "chick Sazerac" - a lite version of a venerable American cocktail. It was quite good but my problem in life isn't whisky, it's gin martinis.

So, having sampled the holiday cocktail, I progressed unscathed... to white wine.

Yes, I'm afraid it's come to that. Martinis were my undoing. Pinot Grigio has been a kind of solution, Sancerre my salvation.

In America, feminist peer pressure is turning educated women into aspirational sots: the more degrees you have and the higher your income, the more likely you are to become a lifelong drinker. Since American men drink less than in the past, and we keep tippling ahead, the sexes are finally achieving alcoholic parity. It's an area in which women lagged. We've come so far that it's fashionable (or soon will be) to bemoan our new equality.

But we're equal only in terms of consumption. Remember when fat was
a feminist issue? It still is. The reason we'll never be men's equals - i.e., get away with drinking the way they do - is our body fat. We get drunk faster and can get hooked more easily with smaller amounts. Even if we don't plan on having children, which would be a good reason to cut down, freedom from reproduction isn't the get-out-of-jail-free card we were banking on. The hedonistic gal who lives only for herself (and her next martini) will eventually have to tone down her act and start being a sensible drinker, simply because she's a woman - if she cares for health and happiness.

Why does alcohol matter? Every woman has her own explanation.

I was a high school dropout who avoided college, so I've never attended a keg party - a rite of passage for many Americans. Instead, I ran off to London where I hustled champagne in a hostess club. While college-bound friends got sick on Purple Jesus - grape-flavoured Kool-Aid and vodka - I was learning about Dom Perignon and Taittinger.

In the nightclub, customers had to buy a bottle or two just to sit and chat with us. What we did later, after leaving the club, was never discussed with the owner (who pretended not to know). My first night was a disaster. I had no idea what would befall me if I drank as much bubbly as I was served. Shortly after discovering Dom Perignon - yum! - I had my first encounter with smelling salts, administered by the house mother. This was very bad manners - getting soused after a customer has a bottle - and thoroughly unprofessional. I had to be sent home in a cab.

Amazingly, they allowed me to come back the next night. Having learned my lesson, I watched the other girls artfully tipping their glasses over. I sipped some and spilled much. Still, I had a definite liking for the stuff and learned to coat my stomach with mashed potatoes before heading out to work each night. This way, if a customer ordered my favourite champagne, I could indulge!

Fortunately, I didn't spend my entire sex work career in a champagne club. I moved on to escort agencies and brothels where drinking wasn't central to the job. I came to see alcohol as something you enjoy after work - even if the customer is having a drink.

As a New York call girl, I made sure to keep vodka and scotch in the apartment where I entertained my customers. Older clients, popping in for a late-morning appointment or lunch-hour quickie, would invariably want some hard liquor on the rocks. Their tastes were simple and generic.

Over time, this changed. I began to notice that a bottle of vodka would last longer. I no longer shopped weekly for hard liquor. Sometimes I ran out of booze and nobody noticed. During a 15-year period, I watched the drinking habits of New York males - especially my daytime customers - shifting. The older clients were retiring, coming into the city less frequently.

Younger customers rarely drank, and when they did, never in the morning, usually in the late afternoon. Alcohol was more of an event for them. One customer taught me how to make a vodka gimlet. Another arrived with a bottle of Cristal and a joint. A number of my clients - and a few co-workers - were in recovery. They talked about their adventures in Alcoholics Anonymous.

I now made a point of stocking bottled water, and I still remember one customer's disquisition on the quality of San Pellegrino bubbles - smaller and finer than Perrier. Watching this transformation in the men around me didn't make me lose interest in alcohol. Actually, a man discussing Perrier bubbles could drive a woman to drink.

Until she opens her local newspaper and learns... that New York's 2009 budget will probably include doubling the tax on wine!

Will hard liquor also be double taxed? If not, the inequity might turn this prudent Sancerre consumer back into a reckless martini drinker.

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The accompanying picture of Sir Derek Gentron Gaspart Ulric van den Bogaerde gives only a hint of the depths it might be necessary to plumb if we are to uncover the whole truth about who anyone really is.

Typically for the States where these matters are settled, the Office of Consumer and Business Affairs of South Australia doesn't greatly care why people wish to change their names. It announces, simply: "Any person may legally assume a new name by repute or usage, but if the change of name is not registered, lack of documentary evidence may cause problems". As bureaucracies go it might even be considered ingratiating in its readiness to cooperate with deceivers.

I suppose the reason why such a perfunctory interest in human motivation is taken is that people only tell the truth on those comparatively rare occasions when it beats lying. Who, after all, is about to confess to a clerk across a counter that her proposed change of name to Julia Gillard is no more than a step toward a devious acquisition of the Deputy Prime Ministership, perhaps with some credit card fraud thrown in? The exemplary reasons helpfully suggested by the authorities themselves are much more likely to be offered; as, for example, to take the natural father's name after being born out of wedlock, or to identify with the foreign nationality of one's great-grandparents, to kiss goodbye to Krzyskwkschoppf or even, in the alternative, to embrace it as a sprightly pen name. Why not, indeed, to sustain in a more durable way than by wearing matching uggboots a regular relationship with a possibly mythical person of the same sex?

If almost any story will do, what is to become of the principle that truth is not only stranger than fiction but also more redemptive? Here is an opportunity for Unleashed contributors to rid themselves of their unbearable burden of guilt by fronting up with a few of those admissions that that have been cravenly concealed from the Office of Business and Consumer Affairs. Tell us: just how uncomfortable was it to arrive in Australia from Berzerkestan with the family name of Katzturd? How transformative to your career in the local amateur theatre group has one's metamorphosis into Russell Crowe turned out to be? For how long have you evaded Crimestoppers under the lawful name of Fred Daggs of Salisbury East, when you are really Ratko Mladic?

Such disclosures as these can be painful, and I am ready to go first. My family name was changed by one of my great-uncles who ran a nice little earner in Leeds, just before the First World War. He was unexpectedly threatened with ruin because the new electrical telegraph rate in England, transmitted in those days in Morse code, was extortionately raised so that one could send no more than five letters for a ha'penny. 'Brooke' had six letters,

You may think that he was a cheapskate. I prefer to recall that he was a Yorkshireman; and moreover there were extenuating circumstances. The family ran a business which involved placing technologically sophisticated observers at every football match in the country. At the end of the match they telephoned the results through to the head office in Leeds, where they were collated and sent out in the form of Football Telegrams to every subscribing public house in the country. Drinkers could thus settle their bets on Saturday night instead of having to wait for the newspapers on Monday morning. The proprietary name identifying this service on every telegram had to be paid for a great many times over, which meant a lot of wasted ha'pennies.

The end finally came with the arrival of the wireless set, and news agencies such as Reuters and Associated Press woke up to the realities of modern mass communication. Or so the official version goes. Off the record, I think that my grandmother - a Rechabite, a Jehovah's Witness and a scourge of public houses - had a lot to do with squelching the entrepreneurial side of the family. She was certainly responsible for diverting a lot of my grandfather's discretionary spending from alcohol into those powerful mints that gave him an abrasive breath and took the skin off my childhood tongue.

So you see, it's not too hard. Take a deep breath, face the world and confess. The moderators of Unleashed are not required to inform the Office of Business and Consumer Affairs about every sordid insight they acquire concerning the true pathogenesis of every alias, aka, pseudonym and nom de plume brought to their attention.

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Imagine a scenario in which a terrorist organisation based offshore starts firing dozens of rockets and mortars, day after day, at towns and cities in northern Australia, aimed expressly at killing, maiming