It's up to men to stop violence against women

It was the mass public response to the death of Nelson Mandela yesterday that got me thinking about violence against women because of the extremely high incidence of rape in South Africa. Aligned with this thought was a video I saw of a young man doing a spoken word performance in which he talks about his response to the issue.

The video is particularly striking because it is a young man who has gone out of the way to talk about an issue that has especial relevance for his demographic. I think it's time for all men to say "I have never hurt a woman" or if they cannot honestly say that then they need to say "I will never hurt a woman again". I applaud the young man who made the performance video. It's for men to make the change, and it's such a large issue that it seems to me at least dishonest, if not hypocritical, for commentators in the media to go on talking about this political event or that economic issue, while ignoring the elephant in the room.

For me, I have never hurt a woman. I cannot say I have never made a woman feel nervous because people get scared for unaccountable reasons. In the empty town streets around where I live you never see women walking alone at night. You might occasionally see a woman walking alone at the time of the dusk, but it is rare. Even in the daytime women walk fast around these streets, and many women joggers go accompanied by a dog.

Just over two decades ago my daughter was born in a Sydney hospital that now no longer exists. My daughter has been subject to violence from a man; I know because she told me. Remembering the event makes her angry and resentful. Violence erodes the quantum of trust in society and leaves people vulnerable to other evils like poverty and mental illness. It corrodes the links that in a healthy society bind people together in fellowship and good feeling. The social organism can become brittle, fragile, easily breakable and ugly. Men have to start talking - like the wonderful young man in the video - about how to make all people feel safe and secure in the streets and in the homes we live in.

It's not just a social issue, violence against women. It's a matter that all men must face and then say "Women need and want my respect".

Acceptance by Southerly is strong encouragement

Wherever you are on Australia's east coast it's hard to ignore the Great Dividing Range, a geological formation that reaches 3500km along the edge of the landmass pretty close to the water the whole way, so it's always close to the cities and their populations. In early November 2010 I was thinking about a trip I'd made to New England in New South Wales, where I'd attended the Myall Creek massacre ceremony, an event that takes place in June each year. While I was thinking the words "botanic paws" came into my mind and that worked to form the skeleton, or the embryo, of a sonnet I wrote on 4 November and which has just been accepted by the literary journal Southerly, published out of the University of Sydney, my alma mater.

This is a big endorsement for me. I started writing sonnets on 13 December 2007 on the day after I met someone, so my formalist urge began within the realm of love poetry but it also branched out into what I call "concept" poems, like 'On the way to New England', the sonnet that has just been accepted for publication. It's a major fillip especially since I have perhaps stubbornly stuck to formalism despite contrary urgings from various quarters, but as my Myers-Briggs assessment says of me illogically cleaving to an apparently counter-intuitive position is natural. The Elizabethan sonnet form is exploited loosely though. Though the model is over 400 years old there are concessions made in order to avoid excessively unnatural diction. The rollicking "weak-strong" rhythm has been jettisoned as unworkable although there are always 10 syllables in each line and although the rhyming quatrains (abab cdcd) are observed.

It occurs to me that merely needing to explain these arcane details indicates how perverse my fixation is.

The acceptance by Southerly is also a strong form of encouragement. I now have thousands of lines of poetry written and a mere 14 will be published. Many of those lines of work are, furthermore, parts of what I call "sequences", so all those love poems written between December 2007 and October 2013 belong to a sequence of 39 sonnets that form a single narrative chronicling a relationship. Another sequence chronicles the wet season at the beginning of this year, and spans January to March. A further sequence of poetry is in the heroic stanza form (the sonnet rhyming scheme but without the 14-line sonnet length; these chapters can go on for pages) and chronicles my amatory education. This last work has almost 1700 lines of quatrains and took two months to complete.

How marginalised the writer of formalist poetry is can be best understood if you consider that it's something of a miracle that any poetry is published in Australian journals these days. That observation can, if you like, be qualified when you think of all the rhyming lyrics that writers of popular music make every year in Australia. Elsewhere in our big cities there are spoken word events where poetry designed uniquely to be recited aloud can be listened to.

My poems are designed to be read on the page. Talking here about the project I began in December 2007 makes me remember telling a coworker a half-decade ago that I considered poetry to be the acme of literature, a mode of expression situated above the novel or drama. But if my endeavour smacks of hubris take comfort from the fact that the next acceptance from a journal might lie years in the future. For me it's just tremendous fun. Like writing a blog, writing poetry enables me to actualise parts of myself that otherwise lie dormant. So it's a felt need rather than a mere conceit.

Career planning means understanding the past better

Today I completed a series of written assessments, for the benefit of a career development consultant who works for a firm I have contracted to help me reorient my career. It sounds a bit formidable, I know, but in actual fact the performance of this task - answering all the detailed questions - has helped me to understand why certain things have happened in the past in the roles I have been employed to perform, in two organisations.

When I think back it is often with dismay. On two separate occasions separated by a decade I have lost my immediate manager and I have wondered fruitlessly over many years what, if anything, had been my part in the desertion, because in both cases what followed their leaving turned out to be less than optimal from the point of view of my career. What could I have done differently to ameliorate the situation, firstly by making sure that the manager did not leave the role and, failing that, to make sure that my own prospects after the organisational change were healthy and positive?

The assessment documents I completed today function to help you zero in on details and to think productively on what kind of issues were involved in past events. They also ask you to list things that you might want to consider doing to rectify shortcomings identified by reconstructing the past. I can't include all the questions here because the documents are the intellectual property of the firm that supplied them. What I can say, however, is that I have decided that in the past my fault was not to have behaved stupidly (per se) but, rather, the fault lay in the fact that I did not (1) stand up for my own interests strongly enough and (2) communicate well enough in spoken form. So it wasn't because I'm a dumbass. It was because I didn't know how to engage effectively in work situations. So many problems could have been fixed before they became problems if I had been more assertive, I have now, after so many years, decided.

This could be why the online environment appeals to me. Online you have time to pause and reflect before committing to an utterance. You are also removed from the physical presence of those with whom you are communicating, which means you don't have to deal with body language. This remoteness from those aspects of personality and communication has its upsides, I've concluded, especially for physical cowards (!) like me. Rather than having to think on your feet, online you can think through your fingers. You can go back and rephrase, you can hesitate without showing that you are doing so, you can fudge and reword at leisure because there is noone standing in front of you with their time-sensitive demands. You have space, and time, to reflect, and this can work well for a certain type of personality. That's what I think anyway.

But it's not enough, when you're considering reshaping your career, to merely rely on the distance that the virtual world enables. Having completed the assessment tools it is now time to make an appointment with the career consultant in order to talk over matters arising from the material submitted. Is there anything left incomplete? Are the conclusions really accurate? (I mean, how accurate can you be when you are self-assessing at the quiet of your own desk?) A frank conversation can narrow in on the answers to these questions, and it can also lead to the formation of ideas about what steps should be taken to address issues the self-assessment has raised.

Completing the documents is part of a longer process with the ultimate goal of gaining employment in a chosen field. Work? It should be fun and rewarding in ways that are both financial and personal. I strongly believe that the best days lie ahead in terms of my career. Sometimes you just need a little help to work out how to make them happen.

Tory loons attack Aunty, again

Serial loon.

As a journalist it is almost impossible to describe the level of frustration you feel when you see the prime minister, the speaker of the House of Representatives and the communications minister joining in a chorus with the more routine type of serial loon (Cory Bernardi, pictured) to lambast the ABC for publishing stories based on material sourced from security agencies by whistleblower Edward Snowden. It is as though politicians on the Right have decided, en masse, to drink the Kool Aid mixed up for their benefit by conservative media players (yes, that's anyone employed by Rupert Murdoch) and participate in a naked hula session on the roof of Parliament, in the moonlight, accompanied by a barbershop choir of giant rainbow-hued geckos with fluorescent eyeballs.

In the UK, the Guardian's Alan Rusbridger has today been questioned by a parliamentary committee about his media organisation's reporting on the Snowden leaks, so the madness is evidently not restricted to antipodean climes; clearly said geckos are able to engage in international air travel and acclimatise themselves adequately to the severe low temperatures that characterise a Northern Hemisphere winter.

Rusbridger did make one point that is worth detailing when he said that once media outlets stop publishing material provided to them by whistleblowers and leakers those people will simply cut out the middleman and publish the material they possess directly to the internet. I think it's pretty safe to say that even the most egregious serial loon would prefer to see a sober and responsible journalist (which, by the bye, rules out all of Australia's commercial media outlets with the exception of Fairfax) oversee the publication of controversial information, including proper redactions, than to see a whole cache of sensitive government documents thrust, pulsating, down the throat of an unsuspecting public.

But the reaction of the Tory loons in Australia has something especially creepy about it, a sort of Pavlov's-dog, knee-jerk quality like when a group of dumb animals fly off squawking when you wave your arms at them so they don't shit on your nice, clean car. I suspect that the smelliest pile of shit would derive from the arse of Bernardi but I hesitate to delve to deeply into the mysteries of his colonic effluent lest he offer to show me. Bad boy, Cory!

Literature is the thing that best prepares you for life

It has long been my belief that reading good books fosters empathy: the ability to appreciate how others feel. I don't know why I got this idea but it has long seemed logical that exposing the mind to a wide variety of disparate situations in this area of erzatz (though rich) experience would make people better able to feel how others feel. Empathy is a particularly important asset in a modern, pluralistic society that functions in a globalised world because it is crucial to be able to make good choices periodically - for example within the political cycle - that accurately reflect the individual's best interests. So it's a very practical thing. Yes, it can make your son or daughter a better friend. But it also makes them better citizens, and this, in the collective, is a crucial element of their lives well beyond the time that they will regularly come to you to help them solve their problems.

The thing that I want to point out here is that I was right all along. A study undertaken by researchers at the New School for Social Research in New York, and published in the journal Science in September, found "that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence."

These are "skills that come in especially handy when you are trying to read someone’s body language or gauge what they might be thinking".

The researchers say the reason is that literary fiction often leaves more to the imagination, encouraging readers to make inferences about characters and be sensitive to emotional nuance and complexity.

We know from other studies that reading activates the same parts of the brain as when a thing is experienced directly, so that a rich metaphor that exploits a physical sensation lights up those parts of the brain usually used to reflect the actual sensation itself, for example touch or feeling cold. In a real sense, then, reading literature enables our brains to directly experience what is described in the words on the page. The study merely shows that literary fiction provides a richer experience for the brain because it tends to challenge the reader to infer conclusions about situations, while other forms of writing are less ambiguous. We can go a step further and claim that this ambiguity inherent in literature helps the reader to become a better person, because it forces him or her to make up his or her own mind in any given situation. That ability to make good decisions is the crucial thing when it comes to being a good citizen. Not only that, but it is also important to be able to cope with complexity, to hold multiple ideas in the mind simultaneously.

In the digital era new experiments are being devised to help us to understand how reading actually functions, such as this one involving a Dutch writer based in New York who is writing a book while wired up to measure brain activity. Once he has finished writing the book, researchers will wire up a group of readers, whose responses will also be gauged while reading the same book. A comparison can then be made between brain activity for the writer and brain activity for the reader, at exactly the same points in the narrative-to-be.

It is exciting times for those interested in the soft arts. These areas of endeavour are often overlooked when it comes to addressing social issues but it should be remembered that everything comes from the arts. In writing, in creating new ideas, in nominalising - making a whole sentence be represented by a single word, which has happened time and time again throughout recorded history, for example with the word "selfie" - lie the roots of every science we participate in today. And writing remains a central part of every science project, not just in order to further it on a technical level but also to communicate it to the broader community. And that is a key ingredient of the work of all scientists, as they will readily tell you if you ask.

I seek to give my dreams a second run

In my dream there were no doors to knock on because every house had a secret method of gaining access. So I was escorted everywhere. After crossing a railway bridge on the rotten boards I feared I would not keep up with my hosts and, as they disappeared into the distance, I realised I would end up alone, with nowhere to go, and no way to communicate with anyone. Even the serpent that had bit me benignly in greeting, and which looked like a big, green cat, had disappeared. I was a dependent but I had my own agenda, so I was an anomaly without any solution except to wake up.

It would be easy to interpret this dream as a metaphor for death, a very elaborate and intricate one, to be sure, but the transition could be made without stretching the boundaries of understanding too far. This kind of interpretation is the stuff of ancient texts, texts rescued from the ravages of time by scribes or archaeologists. It is because in us there is a built-in need to find meaning, and if religion is the answer to questions posed by dead generations, then reasoned critique of religion now arises from the same font.

If I don't understand the religious impulse it might of course be because I haven't examined myself adequately. What do I rely on in times of trouble, and what inspires me? I am more equable in the face of the questions that come out of my own reason - which discerns patterns among the random phenomena of existence - and which has served me so well for so long. So in a sense I am being more honest, and more adventurous than the religious individual for instead of relying on the wisdom of the ancients I am creating my identity anew each day that I wake from my dreams.

But yet I ask: what was the green cat that mumbled softly on my arm, and whose back I stroked so affectionately? We may stand aside from ruminations like this and assert that dreams are the mind's way of cleansing itself, as well as the body's way of telling us how healthy - or otherwise - it is. Even if we do, however, there will always be moments when we regret that our waking mind cannot see as clearly as our dreaming consciousness. We are all dreamers at heart.

How to leave a bad relationship: My story

I'm reminded of this version of me - office employee, two young children, two-bedroom apartment rented in northern Yokohama, stay-at-home wife - when I see the stories about Lisa Harnum, the young woman who, it turns out, was thrown in a jealous rage off a Sydney city apartment balcony by her then-boyfriend Simon Gittany. Harnum had wanted out, it seems, and had "been planning to go[,] leaving bags of clothes with her personal trainer and a counsellor so that Gittany's suspicions would not be aroused, and discussing one-way flights back to Canada with her mother."

This is what strikes a chord in recollecting my own life back then, in 1999, when things had started to go sour. I had been moved around at work to different groups but the main source of anxiety was domestic, in which sphere there was a chill as my then-wife and I had become estranged to such a degree that not only did we sleep in separate rooms but conjugal intimacy had long ceased. If you can see a half-smile in this photo, if there's a shadow of unease infecting the features of this chap, if he looks a bit care-worn and tired, then these are the reasons. This guy is just making it through each day. Domestic violence may be physical and controlling - as in the case of Harnum, who lived under the gaze of surveillance cameras installed in her home by Gittany - but it can also be psychological, with anxiety fed by attacks in verbal form. This man is on edge despite the fact that the photo is cropped to remove the faces of his two children.

You'll notice that I'm wearing a sweater. It's a style of sweater that was once fashionable, and it was warm. In Japan in the winter it gets very cold and it often snows over the New Year, a time of celebration for all of its people. The cold is important here because it was in the context of freezing weather that my then-wife told me to leave one night that year. That night she sat on the floor in front of the couch where I was perched and, for six straight hours, screamed out her frustrations at me. Leave, she said, or I'll cut up your work clothes. She headed to my bedroom, where my closet stood, brandishing scissors. The crisis had arrived, but I had for some time suspected that this was how it would work out and so for months I had put away part of my weekly allowance - forgoing my much-needed lunch on many occasions - so that I would have funds available if things came to a head.

The car, a green 7-seater Toyota, was loaded with my belongings. The December night was freezing cold and I camped out in a room in the apartment of my parents-in-law for that night and the next because I still had to go to work. I drove south deeper into Yokohama after work on one of those days to secure a letter of recommendation from an old friend (a man who died, I learned recently, in September just past) so that the real estate agent would accept my application to rent a small unit located above a small factory about 15 minutes, by bus, from the train station I had always used to go to work. Japanese landlords do not like renting to foreigners, and my friend's letter was a kind of passport. So within several days I had moved into a new home. I had managed the transition without taking too much time off work - just a couple of days' leave; I remember calling the department chief to explain the need for time - and had done so on my own coin. Those 10,000-yen notes I had put away had served their purpose. I was free of the accusations, the shouting, the complaints. My life would never be the same again.

Recollections of the manager from hell

I started working on a short-term contract at the university in mid-2003 and one of my first jobs was designing a website to deliver technical documents to staff, which went so well that a couple of years later I was hired on a continuing basis by the organisation. Things were looking promising and in 2006 I started a part-time degree in media, a long-time interest of mine. But cracks started to appear. Some people in the university did not like the website, it seemed, although noone came directly to me to talk about their concerns. Then my manager was let go midway through that year. I was not asked to step into his role and spent the following year completing my degree, performing my normal technical writing duties, and also writing stories for internal communications vehicles. I was told I was going to be promoted.

At the end of the year, I was asked if I'd like to join a new team focusing specifically on training, an area my work as a technical writer qualified me for; my work to that point had been writing training documents and other materials for users of the university's student administration system. I was told, "you’re heading for bigger and better things" than doing internal communications. I was also told that I would approve of the choice of the new manager, and soon another person moved down to where I worked and we began to set up shop. In early 2008 we moved our location to another building and eventually the new manager did turn up: a woman I'd worked with previously in my training role. But things started to sour.

I felt that she did not like me. If I had occasion to go to her desk, to explain something on the computer screen, for example, she would back away as if proximity to me were repulsive. The words she used also caused stress. "I suppose I'll have to find something for you to do today." "Whatever." “I want to make it perfectly clear once and for all that when I ask you to do something, you must do as I say.” “My impression is that there are too many words.” Other factors in my life at the time these things took place (March to June 2008) led to a psychotic episode, which was part of an illness that I had, but the toxic atmosphere produced by my manager exacerbated my condition. There was no allowance made for the illness and the only mention of it centred around my performing reduced duties, which made me even more anxious. Now, reading my chronicle of those dark times, I feel my heart rate increase, I feel my throat constrict as if I might cry, and I feel a tightness in my chest. It was so unfair, and although these things happened five years ago the memory of the constant humiliation resists dislocation; it can be, sometimes, as if I am still there, in the little room on top of the old brick building with the frogs sounding loudly outside the windows.

At the end of the year my position was made redundant. Conditional on completing a training course I was invited to apply for one of the new training roles that were to be created. After the shock of losing my job had passed I decided that I wanted nothing more to do with the woman who had become my manager from hell. I wanted to be a journalist. I left the university in March 2009.

Google Glass: Have people really thought this through?

Thinking about the socmedisation of meatspace I'm not sure that your average person has really thought about the consequences. Online, we tailor our messages for a specific public in certain controlled ways, knowing that all we are is a stream of text and images, set pristinely at a distance from those who consume what we post. So we can be quite revelatory, showing aspects of ourselves that we would never introduce into conversation in meatspace. With Google Glasses, of course, we're talking about a level of engagement that occurs well in advance of that required for a conversation; we're talking about ourselves being tagged so that others walking down the street have access to information about us.

How much control will we want to exercise in such a situation? Would we really be happy if Google Glass showed passersby what we had recently posted on Facebook? I sincerely doubt it. But the tendency once the technology has been adequately realised will be toward more revelation, rather than less. It's hard enough now in Facebook to stop the application using the scraps of information it possesses about me to serve up targeted ads designed to pique my interest. (Let alone how successful or otherwise that activity actually is.) And socmed platforms like Google itself are going around the virtual online walls and harvesting related information from many places, where it can positively identify who I am. In meatspace once there is the likelihood of a company - which may not even exist yet - using information about me to sell products to other companies (say, through advertising) then the gloves are going to be off. In such an environment, you may want to be careful what information you show to the people walking past you down the city street.

I wonder just how it's going to work, anyway. Will we see barcodes attached to everything from storefronts to individuals to cars to bicycles? If someone's Google Glass catches sight of a barcode, just what information is going to be visible to the wearer? Are we going to see tattoo parlours offering to affix those barcodes permanently to some highly-prominent part of our anatomies? Will criminals have barcodes affixed as part of their punishment? Would public servants like emergency personnel have barcodes affixed that would be impervious to counterfeiting, to prevent crimes from occurring? What about police?

Live tagging in meatspace offers so many new ramifications that we are still in the grey-fuzz phase of imagining how it can turn out, and how we want to be portrayed in this strange world of revealed truth. For myself, I like to think that I can walk down the street in complete anonymity, with nothing visible to others apart from the clothes that I wear; am I being selfish? Am I being just blithely optimistic?

Nasty, secretive Abbott government implodes

It can be no surprise to many who wake up today to see the Herald story focusing on a Fairfax-Nielsen poll that has the Labor Party running 52 to 48 2PP against a depleted Coalition. As the story points out, this bodes ill for Tony Abbott's attempt to repeal the carbon price laws, which are set soon to be taken to the Senate, a Senate where Labor and the Greens predominate. It looks like the laws will stay and that Abbott's promised double dissolution will not eventuate. Slow golf clap for Tones.

Elected at the start of September, the Abbott government has been grinding along like a steak mincer on mute, with ministerial instructions telling party members to vet all media appearances via the PM's office. As asylum seekers continue to arrive off the coast of Western Australia, Immigration Minister Scott Morrison routinely rolls out his military spokesperson to tell the electorate to shut up and make do with the meager snippets of information on "operational matters" the department sees fit to dole out to a carefully-listening public. Abbott has also become deeply embroiled in a couple of mini scandals: travel rorts for the first month or so of government, followed by a rift with the perennial elephant in the room, Indonesia.

Now the poll, which shows that it's crystal clear the electorate has gotten sick of the born-to-rule bully-boy Tony Abbott unquestionably is, and the message is that since he's so tight-lipped with information they're apt to be equally tight with their approval. Abbott's nasty, secretive government is rapidly imploding; it's almost unheard-of to see such low approval rates for a government so soon after an election. No wonder Tones is looking puzzled.

Dreams of dead fathers

This is a photo of Peter da Silva, my father, not long before he was admitted to a care facility due to Alzheimer's disease, which was a stage of his life that I, personally, found relaxing in his company. He became spontaneously affectionate, instead of stiff and cold, and he stopped saying the hurtful words that usually comprised his remarks to me. He died almost two years ago, in March 2011, and I was relieved that he did.

Strangely, I am not ashamed to say this. This is partly because he has not completely left me and I still submit to dad-comes-back-to-life dreams on a regular basis. They are not pleasant. I even thought he was walking silently in my room one night when I had had a few too many glasses of wine. Silent and reproachful he stalked past the foot of my bed in the penumbra. I do not think all sons have dreams like this of their fathers.

I was a remarkably obedient young child. Because my brother - two years older than me - was the family tear-away, I sought peace at all costs and raised voices alarmed and upset me. I was oil on the family's troubled waters. I did what I was asked to do, and more: I tried to anticipate what others wanted and catered for their requirements before they could even be voiced. I was the family's philosopher, seeking common accord while ignoring my own needs and desires. I was cautious, fretful, not bold. When it came time to choosing subjects in the final years of school, I followed my father's guidance. I dropped art and continued with French when class times clashed. Upon entering university I continued in the same form and studied Italian to please him. I did not take a year off before first year. I studied hard and completed the degree.

Oddly, it was years before I stopped caring what my father thought of me. I wasn't so much the philosopher as the one suffering from Stockholm syndrome. Out of university I moved listlessly from job to job. I even dropped out of the workforce voluntarily for a time, and got my kicks in a share house in Newtown. I made friends who were also seekers of truth. I was not the family philosopher, I was the suppressed radical. That arts degree started to make more and more sense but even so around the age of 30 I married and had my first child.

I never settled into routine work. I was always impatient, too creative, unhappy and it showed. It wasn't until I had a breakdown due to mental illness, and recovered from that, that I realised something important about myself: I was different from others and I had better get used to it. The obedient child was a sham. I was creative, headstrong, enamoured of my own opinions. My father, who did nothing to help me in the dark years following the mortal crash, fell away more and more in terms of relevance. His own mental illness - the Alzheimer's - was nothing more than a suitable coda for a life spent in overbearing dominance relative to those who he professed to love. The love was nothing more than a figleaf covering his need to manipulate and use others to his own ends. His success - he began life in utter penury and ended it in material comfort - was nothing more than a product of the attention those close to him devoted to his convenience; he converted domestic affection into worldly gain, like an alchemist. Having lost my own family, I knew how critical domestic fulfillment is to a busy man like dad.

In the end he had a few mourners at his funeral and a son whose bad dreams have now morphed into a desecration of an alarming kind. I do not think I will ever be entirely rid of the man, though he long ago lost me.

Snapshot of Quito Old Town

In Quito's Old Town religion is everywhere, including this strange neo-Gothic cathedral that was conceived in the final decades of the 19th century. It sits on top of a hill and commands the heights beneath which people lived -and still do live. But to see the real treasures go down the hill to the narrow streets where you can see an extraordinary counter-Reformation church that is absolutely covered in arabesques and curliqueues, saints and other decoration relevant to the 17th century, which was when a lot of the then-centre of town was built.

There is a gigantic central square bordered along one side by the huge 16th century church and monastery of St Francis, which began to be constructed in 1550, less than a generation after the city of Quito was founded by the Spanish.

The Old Town is still occupied and it is still used for routine commerce, although business signs all use the same size font so as to mute their appearance to suit the architectural environment. The streets are narrow, making transport a bit difficult. But they are all rectilinear, revealing the need for order imposed by the people who originally laid them out. And they are integrated with the routes of the larger city of 2.2 million people: you can get on a trolley car in the Old Town if you want to travel back up the city to the newer centres around the Mariscal or Parque La Carollina.

Getting around in Quito: watch your step

There's a sign up the front of the bus telling you where it will go but if you're a traveller you just ask someone which one to get on. Once on-board I went to the front of the bus and told the spruiker where I wanted to go - about two kilometres down one of the city's main avenues - and paid my 25 cents (in Ecuador they use US currency) then found a place to stand and hung on. You need to hang on because the driver accelerates at a furious pace all the time: it's a binary situation, either full bore or stopping dead.

A young woman tells me where to get off the bus and I descend to the pavement then walk back to the street crossing. It's another main thoroughfare and as usual the pedestrian signals aren't working. There's a traffic cop there directing the cars and I go to the middle of the road to wait. Finally I get across and walk down the cracked pavement to where I'm heading. Side streets are packed with cars that inch up to the main road and rev their engines as they wait for a chance to enter the flow; watch your step when you cross these small streets, they have no signals.

Quito is challenging at these times. There are other things too. You wonder what ghosts live in the mountains surrounding Quito. Are they like the little boy who came into the Dunkin Donuts today as I bought my cappuccino and chattered incomrehensibly and seemingly by rote some incantation aimed at soliciting a few cents from me, or a dollar? Or the little boy who walked up to me square-legged as a toreador outside the restaurant as I smoked a cigarette after lunch and asked me for food, a shoe-shine boy? Was it because the police seemed to disappear as soon as it started raining? In any case, there seem to be ghosts in Quito come down out of the mountains to scavenge among the mortal souls who populate its cracked streets.

The income disparities are striking. My hotel is in the CBD centre and there's a big mall across the road called Quicentro that is full of high-end shops like Tiffany's, the US jeweller's. Families and young couples - all holding hands - walk through the corridors in step with the piped music - all of which is from the West - and look at each other and into the shop windows. You see all kinds of faces: pure European and mestizo, Andean and black. Everyone is dressed well and the supermarket is doing a booming business, but on the other hand there are security guards in most stores and also men in hats and dark suits standing around in the corridor doing nothing but watching the throng pass by.

Outside my hotel there are street kiosks staffed by Andrean traders who look poor and on the pavement just outside the hotel is a woman in Andean dress sitting on the ground next to a small tray on legs that is filled with snacks and cigarettes. At a kiosk you can buy cigarettes individually and they keep a lighter on a string for the convenience of patrons. And everywhere outside there are police, some in black uniforms, others with uniforms that tell you they are traffic police, and others in brown uniforms; such a plethora of police out here on a sunny Saturday morning keeping the peace.

A man drives past the hotel in a gleaming Mercedes.

In a restaurant one night in the famous Mariscal district I saw a young man and a young woman sitting together at a table eating their food with one hand while, all the time, they held hands under the table. They ate burgers and chicken wings, as we did. On the street the procession of police cars and cops on off-road bikes is incessant. Sometimes they have their lights flashing, and the rhythm synchs strangely with the stereo in the restaurant playing Steely Dan.

War on Terror is a millennial task

It's becoming clear that it's not just the US administration that has confused political speech with terrorism, with the UK's police now using similar language to justify detaining the partner of Glenn Greenwald, the journalist responsible for the stories based on files released by whistleblower Edward Snowden. It's easy to find this kind of talk within the US administration, of course.

What a short-sighted society fails to see is that not only is religion a powerful force but that its close ties to individual identity make it a force for broader social change. In the past, governments like that of Elizabeth I, in England, resorted to espionage in times of climatic religious upheaval to try to control this force: the picture is of Elizabeth's premier spy, Francis Walsingham (1532 - 1590). The queen's problems with religious zeal stemming from the Lutheran heresy, (which began in 1517 when the German monk nailed a sheet of paper to a door) hardly abated even with her death in 1603 and continued, in Britain at least, even past the 1688 political settlement that had attempted to draw a line under the issue of the state religion by importing a Dutch king to sit on the English throne. Reforming enthusiasm predates Luther, of course, in England with the scholar John Wycliffe (1320 - 1384), but it was the intermingling of religious practice with national concerns, and with war, during the Renaissance - the era of the printed book - that caused monarchs such grief. On the other side of this window of time, it wasn't until the first decades of the 19th century when Catholics were once again allowed to hold certain offices, that the madness was finally put to rest. The madness continues in some places even today, of course, especially in Northern Ireland where sectarian violence remains a concern for British and Irish authorities.

So if you wanted to you could talk of a 660-year conflict in Europe. While it no longer threatens the stability of civilisation, and did not do so during Wycliffe's time - it would need the new technology of printing to do that - the matter of conscience and of the role of established religion was a thing of millennial import for several hundred years and for monarchs like Elizabeth I it meant the use of spies, secret courts, secret funds, torture of innocent people, the cutting off of ears (cropping) as punishment for speech, anonymous publications, and many other activities designed, on the one hand, to express solidarity with those who spoke against the state, and, on the other, to curtail the actions of those who threatened the cohesion of the state.

It all seems a little outre and odd now but in a few hundred years how will we view the responses of governments to whistleblowers in our own age of religious enthusiasm, an age when, again, we see individuals risk life and reputation in order to participate in a struggle for identity. The first time, the trouble was brought on by the effort to wrest away from the established church the right of access to the Bible in the vernacular. This time, it is due to the way that globalisation mixed with post-WWII liberation ideology has convinced some that their very selves are under threat by forces beyond their control, and they want to reassert control. Islam is a way of life, not just a set of amusing narrative precepts, but in fact a codified guide to living, and many things that are swirling in from the West threaten to alienate people from rigid adherence.

It is this rigidity of response to the issues arising from the clash of civilisations that causes the biggest problems on both sides of the fence, and that ropes innocent people into a conflict over which they have no control. In the case of whistleblowers and journalists we can see that it is not permissible even to talk about certain elements of the modern religious wars. Now, we don't crop ears, of course. What we do is engage in the media in a war of words designed to sway public opinion on favour of our position in the debate. We slur reputations. We might even throw someone in jail for 30 years. But the madness is the same, and we are all involved whether we like it or not.

Australia spies on its neighbours from diplomatic posts

From places like this, the embassy in Jakarta, Australia spies on local internet, radio and phone traffic, we're told by the Sydney Morning Herald's Philip Dorling.

Fairfax Media has been told that signals intelligence collection takes place from embassies in Jakarta, Bangkok, Hanoi, Beijing and Dili, and High Commissions in Kuala Lumpur and Port Moresby, as well as other diplomatic posts.

Codenamed 'Stateroom', the program is linked to Australia's legacy status as a member of the Five Eyes group of countries: the US, the UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The leak that reveals the extent of Australia's spying on neighbours is contained in a document produced by Edward Snowden.

The National Security Agency document also observed the facilities were carefully concealed: "For example antennas are sometimes hidden in false architectural features or roof maintenance sheds."

The Department of Foreign Affairs would neither confirm nor deny the charge of spying but last month I reflected on the likelihood of Australian involvement in mass surveillance. Whether the Australian signals intelligence agency is also spying on its own citizens is yet to be revealed.

Paywalls on media websites will become more common

Once upon a time people used to pay for their news like this. Some media outlets still use paper and seem to see a future in sticking with the medium. Others are stuck in a slow decline but refuse to let go of print due to their reliance on that kind of advertising for revenues.

Online, major news companies that have set up a paywall are still playing around the margins, seeing reliance on ad placements as a losing game as volumes increase and income slides. The most common form of paywall is the monthly subscription although some media outlets offer only an annual rate. Recently, the Australian website Delimeter has started offering a three-tier set of packages: monthly (of course) but also annual and per-view. It's the last one of these that is most interesting for me as I go down the same track; I announced three weeks ago that I would take this blog behind a paywall.

But there remains the matter of disincentive to commit. For many, the barrier required to set up an account on each website will just be too much bother, and publishers will lose income as a result. So I wondered if there was perhaps another way, a method that allowed readers to maintain a digital wallet that any number of media outlets employed for their websites. Wouldn't it be great if you could charge up your digital wallet with, say, $10 and use that money all day, or all week, until it exhausted itself and required topping up? Like the way you do it now with your car toll-road tag: just go to the website and add another $50 to your account so that you can continue to use toll roads in your local or distant travels.

If social media websites continue to refuse to help media companies by tolling users for links they follow to get to news stories (I wrote a spoof about this idea earlier this year) then media companies have no option but to start looking for better ways to collect payments for the stories they create. But if an enterprising group of people could set up a cross-site platform to enable readers to maintain a single account for all of the media they consume, readers' lives would get a whole lot easier.

The matter of bias

As I walked back home from the cafe yesterday I went past the lawn bowls club as usual, which got me to thinking of the matter of bias. 'Bias' is a term particular to the sport of lawn bowls; it refers to the way the bowling balls are squashed along a single axis, making them not quite round. This characteristic allows the bowler to make a line to the target down the green.

With only two exceptions bias in the public sphere among conservatives is motivated by ideology. Those exceptions are economic probity and the aesthetics of consensus. In other words, a conservative might without ideological input take a certain line on an issue if it is lower-cost or if it conforms to the feelings of the majority. All other justifications for conservatives are based purely on ideological considerations.

On the Left, on the other hand, bias is exclusively predicated on reason. A progressive will tend to favour a particular line of thought because it is rational in light of advances in ethical and moral etiology since WWII: human rights, the conservation of the natural world, inclusiveness, tolerance and such. Once you accept that the modern social compact has virtues by reason of one or more of these considerations, it is rational to take it the next step down the track toward the perfection that etiology implies. To wish to halt progress is to flirt with the aesthetics of consensus, and to swing into the camp of the conservatives, which is something that progressives abhor in general. However there are many flavours of progressive just as a conservative might take a progressive line on one particular issue while remaining wedded to the status quo with regard to others.

The notion of bias has, furthermore, an undeservedly bad name. Popular censure of bias is particularly prevalent in discussions of the media which, sitting between the major actors in the public sphere and the public itself, is assumed to require a perfect surface that does not distort messages in a perceptible way. Avoiding perceptions of bias is a major concern of all media outlets regardless of how openly they pursue their overt agenda. However it is a myth, and one that we are best to be jack of, where we should prefer fairness. Fairness assumes that the person doing the reporting is a person - which, in all cases, they are; dogs do not report stories in the media, for example - and also assumes that bias is implicit in the notion of personhood; we all have personal views on a wide range of public issues.

In lawn bowls the game would be unthinkable without bias on the balls used to play it. In the public sphere we should also take for granted that bias exists, but that the reporter whose work we are reading has striven to be fair to all parties in the case.

Liberal Party advocates for stupidity

The federal member for Kooyong was on lateline last night advocating for stupidity and it was done in such a knee-jerk fashion that you just KNOW it's official Liberal party policy. Josh Frydenberg, asked about experts linking the recent Blue Mountains bushfires with climate change, puffed himself out to the maximum extent - a phenomenon naturalists have long observed occurring in the species Politician doofuseus when they feel under threat, especially when it happens immediately before they say something particularly stupid - and evacuated his party's policy in this matter, which is to ask people to stop thinking when faced with a crisis.

It was political point-scoring to link the bushfires to climate change - this aimed obviously at the Greens' Adam Bandt, and despite the fact that the main proponent of the thesis works for the UN - and people should not do this "when firefighters are risking their lives", as if Mr and Mrs Goodfolk of Bexley can somehow PROJECT THEIR BRAINWAVES over great distances with the malicious intention of HAMPERING THE HOSEWORK of Marty Grundge struggling in the sooty thickets north of Leura.

I guess that the flight syndrome has to apply here, as in "IT'S AN EMERGENCY, DON'T WRITE AN ESSAY DROP EVERYTHING AND COME WITH ME!" But it's a particularly selfish wish on Frydenberg's part, since it's clearly incumbent on everyone in the broader electorate to use their brains to practical ends. Implying that the bushfires have nothing to do with climate change falls into this category since the Liberals are asking the Greens and the ALP to help them scrap the carbon price legislation the previous government brought in. People HAVE to think about climate change and it's obvious that having severe fires in October is going to make an impact on their aggregated frontal cortexes. Obvious to everyone except Frydenberg and his fellow deniers, who have decided that government is always right, the overwhelming majority of climate scientists globally are wrong, and that YOU SHOULDN'T TALK OUT OF YOUR HAT. Not while the firies are squirting water on nasty embers, anyway.

Liberals let down Australia badly over Utzon

I went on a tour of the Sydney Opera House in July and was struck by the way the host, a young woman, kept bringing our attention to the building's construction budget blowout, during the early stages of the tour. She kept coming back to it again and again. And later we saw a video that made reference to the Liberal Askin government that came to power in 1965 and that caused so much trouble for architect Joern Utzon that he quit the country and never returned. But in the film they just said "the new government" with no reference to its political colour.

And the same thing happened last night on the ABC newscast when notice was made of the 40th anniversary celebrations that are being held today. It was just "the new government" again. But it was in fact a CONSERVATIVE government - a penny-pinching philistine and thus typical conservative government that only has regard for money and nothing else - that dangerously let down the people of Australia in the matter of the Sydney Opera House.

It was the same kind of government we have had again and again in this country, except that the Howard government was a higher-taxing and higher-spending government than either of the Gillard or Rudd governments. I think it's disgraceful how we have allowed parts of the elite to rewrite history and remove the stain of shame from the Askin Liberal government, a government that did not deserve the kind of innovative contribution that Utzon made to Australia, and to the world. The Sydney Opera House has recall globally second only to Mickey Mouse. It is a building beyond the wildest dreams of aspiration of the majority of people, let alone a penny-pinching philistine Liberal government like Askin's.

It's time to start telling the truth so that we will know, in future, what we are really facing when the time comes to choosing between a conservative government and a progressive one. Without Labor the Sydney Opera House would never have been conceived. The Liberals almost killed it.

In future you will have to pay to read this blog

Some people will pay and others won't but it's really important to understand that, for me, this blog represents a journey and, more, the primary place I use for my writing. In January 2006 when it started I had just enrolled in a media degree at university. That took two years part-time to complete and the blog continued to exist afterward, through the years of the GFC and the economic recovery that has sputtered and lurched along since then. In early 2009 I quit technical writing and started working full-time as a freelance journalist, with my first story published in September of that year. And year after year I tried new things, such as adding titles for each post - in late 2011 - that have led to higher pageviews on the blog. I stopped freelancing in July 2012 and looked to the blog as the primary vehicle for my writing which led me to add, in May 2013, a 'donate' button where people could easily select to give me an amount of money - if they wanted to. But noone did. Not a cent has been received and as a result I am determined to take further steps to monetise the blog.

The result is that the blog will cease to be hosted on Blogger and will, instead, be part of my personal website (matthewdasilva.com). In addition, I am going to implement a paid-for model so that people who want to read posts on the blog will have to pay to do so. Of course, pageviews will drop significantly but I am fully prepared for this outcome. What I look forward to is receiving a quantity of income from the writing that has taken me so many years to develop to a level where it would be acceptable on any website in the world - or so I think.

To this end I will be working with my longstanding web developer, B-Side, who have done work on my website in the past to such a high standard. I hope that some of my readers will continue to read the posts that go on this blog. The name will not change, just the location, and the general tendency and subject matter of the blogposts will remain the same. The main thing that will change is my own understanding of the value that my writing represents in the broader scheme of things. And I also hope that my taking this step will encourage other writers to do something similar. For my part, I know that my writing has improved to a great degree since the first blogpost went up on 22 January 2006. The improvement will not stop but if there are certain things that you particularly enjoy about this blog let me know below. In the meantime I will be taking on new challenges - including the redesign of the blog - in my search for a decent livelihood from writing. It is what I love doing. See you down the track.

Money changes everything: Twitter and its IPO

If you're not paying for it you're the product ... As Twitter readies for its IPO and the potential for more "promoted tweets" looms like a sick headache for hundreds of millions of Twitter users globally the memory of what happened to HootSuite comes back to me. Many will not know how HootSuite, the Twitter application, changed its operation one day a few years ago. "Sticky" tweets in the way of ads stayed at the top of the user's feed and you had to pay a monthly fee now to get rid of them. At the time this happened I immediately changed my Twitter app to TweetDeck, which was subsequently bought by Twitter. So what's next?

Sitting at a point further along the marketing continuum is Facebook. Facebook users are by now accustomed to the ads that are perennially served up within the user interface. Some are accurate for the demographic - remember blithely telling Facebook your date of birth all those years ago when it was just supposed to be a fad? - and others are stupid beyond the comfort of click-through apologies. But recently ads are being served to me that show that Facebook is accessing my browser history logged at other places on the web, such as links received in emails and those served up in Google searches. Facebook is getting smarter as time goes on in its effort to maximise its monetisation of me.

Facebook is a bit of a closed shop for me, and it's mainly where I keep in touch with friends and people I know from real life. It's anyway a goofy interface, a crowded hogde-podge of features, functions and knick-knacks most of which are never used and sit there like happy automatons waiting to have their ears scratched. I tolerate Facebook like I tolerate a favourite pair of shoes that despite having run down at the heel and despite the immovable stains on the plastic uppers continue to serve as a reliable back-up in case the better pair are out of service due to damp, for example.

Twitter is the place where things really happen, and so the likelihood that the interface will become as goofy as Facebook's fills me with dismay. The old adage comes back now like a mocking call from somewhere near the back of the theatre: We told you so. I never wanted to believe that Twitter would turn into a cake stall, a shop window, an unwanted marketing brochure dropped in the mailbox, a full-body bus advert, a 30-second pre-play online video ad that makes you want to scream blue murder. A heavy feeling sits in the pit of my stomach when I think of what could happen. And the song returns to remind me: Money changes everything ...

All light and sound: the 2013 RAN Fleet Review

A large-scale popular display such as the Royal Australian Navy Fleet Review presented on Saturday night in Sydney has to please as many people as possible, for a start. As has become routine, the sails of the magnificent Sydney Opera House - a building with a global recall second only to Mickey Mouse - doubled as a cinema screen and on them were shown a sequence of images, often involving newspaper clippings, designed to provide a shorthand history of the RAN. The RAN's credentials thus extend from WWI through the better-known drama of WWII to mostly forgotten wars in Korea and Vietnam. Cyclone Tracey also featured: this was a big mission for the RAN in December 1974 when the force helped to evacuate Darwin after the storm flattened the town. The final phases of the display unfortunately resembled nothing more than a recruitment video designed to inspire the potential sailor with positive feelings like loyalty, pride, and gratitude.

The final image on the sails was the insignia of the RAN with the crown on top - you can see similar crowns on the insignia of the country's state police forces - signalling toward the overt symbolism of Prince Harry's presence at the review as the representative of his grandmother, the Australian monarch. Governor-General Quentin Bryce dutifully played second-fiddle to "the world's most eligible bachelor", a gentleman whose casual review-day attentions were much sought-after by young Sydney women.

The young women who did not get a chance to touch Harry's hurriedly-extended hand as he made his progress through the city's streets could comfort themselves by enjoying the palpable excitement generated by figurations of the most memorable naval event in Australia's history: the war against the Japanese in WWII. This section of the evening's hugely-exploded diorama served up to the audience on the ground in Sydney and - by way of the TV broadcast - to watchers elsewhere was set to the famous strains of part of Gustav Holst's The Planets orchestral suite, 'Mars'. The work was written between 1914 and 1916, we're told, and so dates from about the same time as the RAN was established in 1913. Holst's stirring and menacing music dedicated to the planet named after the Roman god of war - it's where we get the word 'martial' from after all, as in 'martial arts' - came at the same time as the fireworks being set off from boats at anchor at different planes along Sydney's amazing harbour made the night glow red. Spotlights mimicking searchlights added drama to the display.

A lone bugler playing a variety of tunes including the song Australians recognise from ANZAC Day parades - the Last Post - which are memorials for the dead, helped to turn the attention of the crowds and the TV watchers to the men and women who lost their lives in battle, and added a fitting long, solemn moment to the display.

Sailors interviewed by ABC TV after the display were all grins and yelps in their excitement at the show put on in their honour. Fathers and mothers lined up along the shoreline of possibly the best harbour in the world wiped away tears inspired by complex emotions. Children stood around quietly in exhaustion from all the activity - enough to equal their own inherent capacity for movement and sound. The TV anchors beamed with pleasure for the sheer size of the moment of shared community they had helped to create, and happily declared themselves speechless. The cooling air of the calm spring night, absent rain, slowly dispersed the clouds of smoke from the dead incendiary devices. A million people turned their attentions to the problem of getting home on crowded public transport. The black water of the harbour lapped quietly against the stone parapets at the Botanic Gardens and beneath the apartment blocks of Kirribilli. The long weekend continued.

Indonesian cattle land purchases in the Top End are quid pro quo

I thought it was a bit odd when not long after the election result was clear and Tony Abbott started to pursue the priorities he'd set out before the poll, that a story about plans for Indonesian companies to purchase Northern Territory cattle properties appeared in the media. Then less than three weeks after the election more stories emerged, with Abbott's Jakarta trip scheduled to go ahead the following week (this week). Now Barnaby Joyce, the agriculture minister who had eretofore been loudly protesting against such sales, has executed a neck-snapping backflip on the issue, and has moved in behind them.

It's been clever maneuvering by the Indonesians. After the Labor government shut down the live cattle trade to Indonesia in June 2011 Northern Territory cattle producers never really recovered as importers kept quotas well below levels that obtained before the crisis. As a result local property prices dropped sharply. In step the Indonesians, wallets in their hands. And with the new interest from Indonesia in purchasing cattle properties, property values will recover.

During his visit to Jakarta, Abbott slammed the previous government over its unilateral move to stop the live trade, in a concession to his hosts that cost him nothing. Now he has brought Joyce into line, allowing him to assign credit for the backflip to Northern Territory cattle producers themselves who, Joyce says, want the sales to go ahead. Of course they do. But it's fascinating to watch Joyce shift so rapidly from the agrarian socialism he has always believed in, to a spot in the limelight situated significantly closer to the main action taking place in the seats reserved for the supporters of big business.

Abbott has for his part moved closer to Julia Gillard's "Asian Century" template. The PM very loudly announced that a bevvy of business people would go with him to Jakarta in an effort to drum up trade between the two countries. Which is how it should be played. There are heaps of business opportunities available in Indonesia for smart Australian companies. Those who complain about the fact that an Indonesian company owning cattle land in the NT would pay no tax on live exports are missing the point. It's short-sighted and parochial to simply equate the national interest with tax receipts. Farmers and those living in rural communities know that foreign investment often brings with it higher levels of capital inflow as new owners work to improve properties in line with their wider business strategies.

Australia relies on foreign investment in so many parts of its economy that it simply could not function at the level its citizens have become accustomed to without it. Beyond this aspect of the case, however, is the simple quid pro quo. If Abbott wants Australian companies to prosper in Indonesia - where the population has now reached 250 million and where the same middle class that asks for Aussie beef commands significant, and growing, discretionary cash - then he has to be willing to allow Indonesian companies to pursue their own best interests on Australian soil. This is how the diplomacy of business works. And I would far rather see the quid pro quo working to the advantage of Australian businesses than merely underpinning Scott Morrison's silly and xenophobic asylum-seeker policies.

If the government shuts down, who needs a republic?

This blogpost started with a humorous tweet - "Let's shut the government down & immediately start it up again and hope that fixes the problem like with my wifi." - that appeared a couple of days ago in my feed where it had been retweeted by someone I follow, and it got me thinking about the events in Australia of November 1975 when exactly that happened, as the Washington Post reported. This story appeared in social media soon after I had remarked there that the differences between the two cases warranted examination in the media today. The events it recounts are writ large in the memories of many liberals because it was a progressive prime minister who was dismissed by the governor-general; Gough Whitlam - who is still alive - looks to most Australians like some sort of unfettered sage looming over the decades that have passed since those days long gone.

After I posted the link to that story on Facebook someone I know remarked that the US government shutdown was the reason he remained a monarchist, and I countered - because I personally would prefer to see Australia as a republic - that just because the US polity has the problems it does now would not necessarily mean that every republican model you constructed would be liable to the same phenomena. The guy said I had a healthy imagination, and: "Up till now I haven't seen anything that does the trick... but I remain open minded!"

Staying open-minded is part of the trick. As recently as December I came up against questions about Australia's political system from a skeptic. Although Australia is the world's fourth-oldest democracy we sometimes get reminded that the British Queen remains the head of state. Is Australia a real democracy? The question gets asked, it does. In the main, foreigners tend to be more censorious than locals. Yesterday someone used the word "neo-colonialism" in a tweet responding to one of mine: a Brit as it happened. But Australians are far more blase about the political settlement that has served the country so well for such a long time - elections began to be held in New South Wales in 1856. The country is the world's 15th-largest economy although its population is a mere 23 million. There has never been any major episode of civil conflict to mar the record. It is a liberal, pluralist, successful polity that continues to attract hundreds of thousands of immigrants every year who want to work, live and raise their families here; our bureaucrats and politicians - regardless whether they're conservative or progressive - encourage this inflow.

But still the question remains as to why the country does not choose to go it alone. Certainly, the drama in Washington DC currently must act as a disincentive. How much more civilised, many will say, to simply abolish the government, call for new parliamentary elections, and carry on. On top of the smug feeling our record in this space evokes there's also the matter that the British royal family is wildly popular in Australia, evidenced by the regular appearance of royals on the glossy covers of women's magazines. The flag has Britain's Union Jack set in the top lefthand corner. Australians are remarkably comfortable with the political settlement mainly because it has operated so well for so long. Students of Australian democracy might well point to episodes other than the one in November 1975 to show how the monarchy functions to adjust the progress of government in Canberra, but there has been no other major one to frighten children with.

In the final analysis the current Australian political settlement is a very reasonable one, and if there's any one characteristic that symbolises government in this country it is that it's reasonable. The can-do-anything imaginitiveness fostered by Americans' foundation myths is less overt in Australia, and for that reason probably more complex. The fact remains that when Australians asked for representative government the British monarchy complied. It has been complicit in the trick ever since. Nothing to see here, move along.

What does the Guardian need to do to survive?

New Yorker feature writer Ken Auletta's profile of the Guardian's Alan Rusbridger is, for liberals, a bit like a sweet treat with no health consequences: did spending 15 minutes reading the story on your screen impair your vision? The answer is emphatically no. Does the world desperately need the Guardian? The answer is: that depends. Auletta's approach is prima facie biased, for a start, admitting up-front that a media outlet led by a single person is the only way to go, but what can you expect from the New Yorker? For, given the likelihood that your business will be more than just scrutinised by those who have something to lose by your publishing stories - politicians and state functionaries occasionally drop by for a discrete chat, with all the menace that that mundane epithet implies - it seems that some sort of top spokesperson is advisable. Nevertheless, the Guardian's latest coup - the Edward Snowden stories - emerged from the keyboard of a freelancer based in Brazil, Glen Greenwald.

Assuming for a moment that the Guardian is indeed necessary for the survival of democratic polities - let's say the OECD or, more appropriately, the countries of the Anglosphere - there's still the issue of cost. Rusbridger has aggressively carried the UK brand globally - there are now websites operating out of the US and Australia, with possibly more to come (India, perhaps?) - and he's kept access completely free, which means he's relying on serving ads to readers. Auletta's story notes the Scott Trust, which bankrolls the newspaper, possesses 254,000,000 pounds Sterling in liquid capital. There's no mention of other assets the trust might own, but even on this basis you can count reliably on an annual income of just under 13,000,000 pounds (at a benchmark rate of five percent earnings on capital). Outgoings in the most recent financial year, however, were 31,000,000 pounds and Rusbridger wants to trim those losses:

[Andrew Miller, the director of the trust and the C.E.O. of the Guardian Media Group] admits that he does not foresee the newspaper earning a profit anytime soon. Rusbridger said, “The aim is to have sustainable losses.” Miller defines that as getting “our losses down to the low teens in three to five years.”

Given these figures, it's probably overly pessimistic to deduce that the Guardian will run out of money in three to five years, as Auletta's story says will happen, but clearly a new business model is needed.

If the paper's Australian website overtook Rupert Murdoch's Australian in pageviews within weeks of its launch, as Auletta's story reveals, there's still plenty to be optimistic about. The Guardian prides itself on being disruptive and this is why people read it so happily but the disruptive effect of the internet is equally harsh on those who fail the relevant test. It's not whether you deserve to survive that counts, it's whether you have the flexibility to survive. Rusbridger's maintaining the UK print edition seems to me to be a weak spot, acknowledging though that this vehicle is responsible for a significant quantity of the paper's income. But the approach of Rusbridger, while it appears to be very positive, may signal that it is time for him to go and to let someone who is more attuned to the online world, take over.

The US and Australian forays have been led by watching website traffic, but Auletta's story also tells us that Rusbridger spent time in the US as a reporter decades ago. Making the move to that market is therefore a step in line with his own personal biases. Going to Australia appears to me to be a toe in the water in advance of entries into other, bigger, markets such as India. But it's not just the places it operates that will determine whether the Guardian can stay afloat down the track. A new business model is going to become imperative.

The Guardian has reached out to its readers - many will remember the paper spruiking its open journalism idea in February last year; remember the three little pigs? - but it has held back from adopting a crowdfunding model, a model of income generation that has proved itself lucrative time and time again. Many Australians will be aware, very recently, of the success of the Climate Council in raising funds (it emerged from the Climate Commission, a government-funded body the new federal government abolished); five days ago it was reported they'd raised $1 million from the community alone. There's also the example of Kickstarter, the crowdfunding site that has helped to bankroll 49,000 creative projects since 2009. I'm not saying that the Guardian has to post each major investigation on Kickstarter, with a video, to get its book filled but these are the things that Rusbridger needs to think about if he wants to cut losses to below that key 13,000,000 pound threshold.

But I'm not sure that Rusbridger is up to it. His presence on Twitter, for example, is minimal and relies mainly - in fact, totally, as far as I have seen - on pushing story links to readers. There's no real engagement, nothing sticky that he's doing to make people follow him. Other editors with the paper are better at this. It's a generational thing, I believe. Rusbridger has done fantastic work for a long time and, yes, he's got spine. For the Guardian to survive though he must relinquish his post and hand over to a person who better "gets" the web and who also has that journalistic background. That person might think about ways to help develop more freelancers, too, in the mold of Greenwald. Brazil looks nice don't you think?

Book review: A Delicate Truth, John Le Carre (2013)

This lovely novel situates itself in two periods of time within recent history, starting with the aggressive post-9/11 hubris of New Labour. It opens with Paul Anderson, alias of Kit Probyn, an undistinguished functionary in the Foreign Office, acting as the ears and eyes on the ground in Gibraltar for Fergus Quinn, the foreign minister, in an official - but deniable - rendition/kill operation against a terror target. Operation Wildlife involves delisted members of the UK special forces and mercenaries from Ethical Outcomes, a Texas-based private intelligence and enforcement provider. The squadies go in but then Paul/Kit is whisked away.

The narrative then takes up with Toby Bell, a rising star in the Foreign Office, who works as private secretary to Quinn. Bell is suspicious of his boss and takes actions - including activating a listening device in Quinn's office during a planning meeting for Operation Wildlife - that serve to raise the levels of tension in the book. But then he, too, is whisked away and posted elsewhere. He never forgets Quinn though or indeed Jay Crispin, an employee of Ethical Outcomes he meets in Quinn's offices.

The story then takes up with Probyn on his Cornwall estate following his leaving the Foreign Office as Sir Christopher. Plum overseas postings after Operation Wildlife have set him up nicely with a state pension that he can enjoy in his retirement. But one day he comes face to face with Jeb Owen, one of the special forces soldiers from Operation Wildlife. Jeb has set himself up as an itinerant leatherworker with a well-equipped van, and he tells Kit in an oblique fashion that Operation Wildlife had deleterious outcomes that noone admitted to at the time. Were Kit's cushy postings awarded on the back of the murder of an innocent woman and her child? When Kit's wife Suzanna gets wind of the truth Le Carre sets in train a series of events that pull Probyn and Bell closer and closer together, and deeply involve also Kit's doctor daughter Emily.

Extraordinary rendition, extrajudicial murder, private defense contractors and the like have been elements of public debate for some years, notably in the follow-up to the 9/11 attacks when the US went frankly mental. Le Carre has woven such concepts into a story that implicates the UK government in very immoral - and also illegal - activities, in his new book. The final chapters contain some wonderful writing about how whistleblowers get routinely treated by government, and even at the end we do not know what's in store for Toby and Kit as the security forces arrive with their sirens wailing.

The book also plays around the margins of internal and public routes available to whistleblowers, bringing to mind the actions in the real world involving WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden. There is a wonderful scene when Kit approaches the Foreign Office with his concerns about Operation Wildlife and is treated very roughly by two grey bureaucrats intent on protecting their august institution and the politicians at its head. In fact the emotional and slightly unstable Kit is a wonderful character from Le Carre even if it's the more substantial and reliable Toby we are asked to barrack for in the end.

The unsettling Crispin and his various organisations that work closely with governments like the UK's is also a treat, although you do wonder if companies such as Ethical Outcomes can possibly be as sinister as Le Carre paints this one. But this is drama and so it doesn't matter. Also he does so often, Le Carre is able to render the larger, global action in terms of the relationships between private individuals. The stresses and anxieties that they feel come to the fore, and so this is both an unsettling and enjoyable book that served, at least in my case, to import for a limited period of time some of the anxieties of the War on Terror, into my living room. A great read.