91Èȱ¬

Pardon my smugness, but I feel like one of those kids who has just got his mitts on one of Willy Wonka's coveted golden tickets.

This particularly golden ticket, a Christmas gift from friends, grants entry not to a chocolate factory but A Streetcar Named Desire. Tennessee Williams' Pulitzer prize-winning play opens this week in Sydney starring Australia's first lady of the stage and screen, Cate Blanchett. So what better way to restore some much-needed dignity, poise and elegance to this blog than to consider the saintly Cate, and what she has come to represent.

Blanchett's Blanche is set to become one of the highpoints in what has already been a strong cultural year for Australia, both here and abroad.

Geoffrey Rush has already dazzled Broadway, and won a Tony to boot, for his performance in Exit the King, an absurdist comedy which he first appeared in at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne. Warwick Thornton's Samson and Delilah, the haunting love story of two troubled Aborginal teenagers, took the Camera D'Or for first-time film-makers at Cannes. The blind Australian aboriginal singer/songwriter Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu has become something of a global sensation, and earlier this month provided the inaugural "number one" for with his brilliant album Gurrumul. It has already gone double platinum. Why, Huw Jackman even compered the Oscars, burnishing his reputation as the world's most likeable Aussie.

Australian cinema is having a stellar year, with Samson and Delilah, Balibo, Beautiful Kate and the re-release of the seventies classic Wake in Fright- even if, as , they are struggling to compete with imports from Hollywood.

It has also been a strong year for Australian literature, with The Slap (which I'll come to soon) winning a clutch of awards. That is one of the many reasons why the debate over territorial copyright reform has become so heated. Australian authors and publishers cannot believe that an Australian government headed by a bookish Prime Minister is prepared to countenance what they would see as the destruction of one of the country's great cultural success stories: the boom in home-grown authors and books since the early 1970s.

Trawling through a second-hand bookstore the other week, I came across the original essay by Arthur Phillips, an Oxford-educated Melbourne schoolmaster, in which he coined the phrase "cultural cringe". Written in 1950, it was actually sparked by a programme on the ABC called "Incognito", where the same piece of music was played by an Australian and a foreigner, and listeners were invited to guess which was which. "The programme's designer has rightly a disease of the Australian mind," wrote Phillips, "an assumption that the domestic cultural product will be worse than the imported article". Phillips thought the cringe "is a worse enemy to our cultural development than our isolation," and that Australian writers and artists were often overwhelmed by "the intimidating mass of Anglo-Saxon culture".

Interesting stuff, but a museum piece, right? If Phillips were around today, surely he would be struck by the cultural confidence of Australia rather than any lingering sense of cringe. Perhaps he would even go further, and write with pride of the country's cultural influence abroad, whether in the acting of Geoffrey Rush, the writing of Tim Winton, the singing of Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, the theatrical and operatic direction of Neil Armfield or the poetry of Clive James.

That, for me at least, is the meaning of Cate Blanchett: she is yet another reminder of how the cultural cringe has been overtaken by Australia's cultural creep.

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• - What's this?

Writing a final blog about the Ashes - and I promise it will be the last instalment - feels like wondering across the empty stage at some repertory theatre in the 91Èȱ¬ Counties, as the removal men are hauling the giant bean stalk into the truck, and the wardrobe department is packing away Jack the Giant Killer's costumes.

The modern-day series has become an uproarious pantomime, where many of us enjoy adopting traditional, seasonal roles and engaging in some rowdy audience participation.

Perhaps it is more accurate to describe it as Pavlovian pantomime, given how easily various national impulses are triggered. For when it comes to the Ashes, many of us are products of classical conditioning, a form of associative learning (and here, I plead guilty) where the nursery was Headingley in '81 or the WACA in the age of Lillee and Thommo.

Or perhaps many of us suffer from a sporting variant of Tourette's Syndrome, and fall prey on these occasions to verbal tics that are repetitive, stereotyped, usually derogatory and often obscene.

To truly enjoy the victory, we seem to want the vanquished to suffer horribly in defeat, which exacerbates these twin conditions.

For what it's worth, I think the hoopla surrounding the Ashes is starting to tell us more about modern-day Britain than modern-day Australia.

For a start, I suspect it reveals once more how we have become a country of exaggerated emotional responses, whether it is how we react to the death of a Princess or the musical abilities of a Scottish songstress.

Thankfully this time, Andrew Strauss and the ECB have been more restrained, and his honest assessment of England's achievement was endearingly level-headed. 'When we were bad, we were very bad,' he said. 'When we were good, we were good enough.'

Under the headline, Australians Wake to a Country in Mourning, reported earlier in the week that Australian television presenters were wearing black armbands, which is precisely how we as Britons want Australians to react. But it isn't true.

Why do we want to believe it? Perhaps the false notion that Australia suffers enormous angst and pain whenever it is beaten by the Old Country is deeply comforting for a post-colonial nation which is suffering from the neglect of other former dominions.

After all, India is too busy becoming a superpower to dwell on the legacy of the Raj; America is defined by the revolution which ousted the British rather than its subjugation beforehand; and Canada's insecurities are a product of 'small neighbour syndrome' rather than being the last North American outpost of the British Empire. Australia is unique: a country where the rivalry with Britain continues to arouse great passion.

As a nation, I suspect we are rather flattered by the continued attention of our Australian cousins, for it is heartening to think that we can still rely on their abiding enmity and peevishness. The Ashes therefore allows us to indulge in some good, old-fashioned colonial condescension.

It is soothing, if misplaced, to think that the Aussies are motivated by a desire to 'balance the historical ledger', since it implies an outstanding deficit and a perpetual state of borrowing. Here is it interesting to study the repertoire of the Barmy Army, with its 'God Save Your Queen' and 'You All Live in a Convict Colony'. I wonder sometimes whether these songs, along with the fervour with which they are ritually performed, now reveal more about our own national insecurities.

It does not help that since the Ashes started, Newsweek has run a cover story piece on ', which came hot on the heels of Time magazine's admiring front-cover profile of Kevin Rudd. Nor that that the Australian prime minister has become one of Barack Obama's 'best mates', according to Kurt Campbell, the US Assistant Secretary of State for the Asia-Pacific region, news that would have resonated in Whitehall if not the Western Terrace at Headingley.

For sure, some Australians do have a habit of contributing to their own stereotyping, and some of the worst offenders occupy senior positions in sport. During the last rugby world cup, the Australian rugby chief John O'Neill spoke of a national hatred of England, and its 'born to rule' mentality. Four years earlier, John Howard was extraordinarily graceless when he presented the victorious England rugby team with their trophy and medals.

Then there was John Coates' oft-quoted reaction to being overtaken in the medals table by the Poms in Beijing - not bad, he said, for a country with 'very few swimming pools and not much soap'. Again, it's this Pavlovian pantomime: the seasonal adoption of supposedly crowd-pleasing roles.

Much as I enjoyed the series and delighted in the result, I look forward to resuming normal sleep patterns and spending my office wager windfall (a mighty Aus$50). I'm already looking to next year's series, but in true Panto spirit, I guess it's time to put the last one behind us.......

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• - What's this?

Fast gaining traction in certain corners of the Australian media is the theory that England has just staged the "Great Ashes Heist": that Andrew Strauss and his team were a pretty average outfit who won the series through time-wasting, dodgy umpiring, the assistance of foreign-born players and a doctored pitch at the Oval.

Just as the CIA tried to see off Fidel Castro with exploding cigars, the ECB tried to kill off Australia's hoping of regaining the Ashes by ordering up an exploding pitch. So for the more populist wing of the Australian press, Bill Gordon, the groundsman at the Oval, has become public enemy number one; the central figure in a carefully planned conspiracy.

However hard the Aussie media tries to peddle this line, I'm not sure how many of their compatriots will buy it. Victory may have been the default position here for much of the past 20 years, but Australian cricket fans now regularly have to countenance defeat - in India last year, against South Africa at home earlier this year, and now in England. Most supporters aren't looking for excuses, and realise that Ricky Ponting and his men were authors in many ways of their own defeat.

Time-wasting at Cardiff in that match-saving final wicket stand? Why, ask mystified Aussie fans, did Ricky Ponting persist with bowling a part-time spinner, Marcus North, at the death rather than handing the ball to one of the quicks?

A doctored pitch at the Oval? It was the same track for both teams, and it was Australia, having studied the wicket, who decided not to go into the final test without a recognised spinner.

Bad umpiring? It evens itself out over the course of a series, and not many people would regard the lamentable decisions which went against Marcus North and Stuart Clark in the first innings at the Oval as pivotal moments in the match.

As for foreign-born players? Had he been fit in body, mind and spirit, the Australians would surely have loved to field the once-dynamic all-rounder, Andrew Symonds. He hails, of course, from Birmingham.

More persuasive in the "Great Ashes Heist" theory are the statistics from the series. As Jonathan Agnew has already noted, Australia scored eight hundreds to England's two and it's an Aussie bowler, Peter Siddle, who sits atop of the wicket-takers list. And if you made up a composite side, Andrew Strauss would be the only English batsmen sure of his place in the top five (although it's worth remembering that had Kevin Pietersen been fit, he surely would have been a dominant presence).

What will happen now to Ricky Ponting? There is universal regard for his batting here in Australia, but his captaincy has always attracted criticism. This is a huge blemish on an extraordinary career: only the second Australian to lose two Ashes series in England, and the first for more than 100 years. I've long thought Ricky Ponting gets an unfairly bad press, and have always found him charming, accessible and interesting in private. But there are times when he contributes to his own stereotyping, with some fairly peevish behaviour on the pitch, and he won't be able to rely on a groundswell of public goodwill.

I suspect that many of the callers to talk-back radio over the coming hours will be demanding his scalp, and asking how it is that country which only two years ago was the world's sole cricketing superpower has now slumped to four in the global rankings.

I am more than happy to include a flavour of the coverage that prompted this blog, and more than happy to say that much of the coverage has been admirably even-handed and generous. For what it's worth, I reckon that in Malcolm Conn and Mike Coward, Australia has two of the best cricket writers going, and in Gideon Haigh it has the undisputed champ.

So here's some of the coverage which prompted the blog:

On the criticism of the pitch and the groundsman/curator, here's , and .

And .

On the . Curiously, there's also one on
.

On the future of Ricky Ponting, The Age asks: 'Is this the end of Ricky Ponting' and The Australian is conducting an online poll.

But Malcolm Conn is , as, err, I did in the blog.

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• - What's this?

This promises to be an especially high holy sporting weekend, with Australians engaged on two traditional fronts: the Ashes at the Oval and the Bledisloe Cup in Sydney. We've spent a lot of time in recent weeks talking about Australia's relationships with Britain, America, Indonesia, and, most recently, China, but we've never explored the great trans-Tasman rivalry with New Zealand, a terrible lacuna.

Rather like the Ashes, the Bledisloe probably speaks more of the two nation's points of convergence rather than divergence. As everyone knows, the Aussies and Kiwis fought alongside each other in World War 1, which obviously explains the derivation of the term ANZACs, and even competed in the same team at the 1908 and 1912 Olympics under the banner of 'Australasia.' The preamble to the Australian Constitution speaks of New Zealand joining the new Federation, even though Wellington had already made it abundantly clear that it had no wish to do so.

This week John Key, the new-ish New Zealand prime minister, has been holding talks with Kevin Rudd in Canberra, at which they agreed to explore the creation of a new ANZAC force, and the possibility of joint deployments. (https://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/08/20/2661939.htm). They also entered into a Bledisloe wager, with Kevin Rudd promising to wear an All Blacks tie on Monday if the Wallabies lose, and John Key promising to do the same in reverse. Surely this fixture merits more than that. Personally, I think John Key should be forced to sing Waltzing Maltilda wearing a pair of budgie-smugglers (Eds note: swimming trunks), and that Mr Rudd should gather his cabinet on the forecourt of Parliament House in Canberra to perform the haka (wouldn't the environment minister, Peter Garrett, do a spectacular haka?), but hey.

Some of the most recent immigration figures show that thousands of Kiwis are heading to Australia. 2007 saw the highest net outflow to Australia since 1988, which helped explain a government advertising campaign aimed at luring them home. In recent times, more Kiwis have been heading here than Poms, which brings to mind what has to be one of the most fabulous sledges of all-time: that golden quip from the former New Zealand Prime Minister Robert Muldoon, who said that when a New Zealander comes to Australia it raises the IQ of both nations. (Admittedly, here I need to tread carefully, since my ticket to the Bledisloe came courtesy of my mother-in-law, who was born on the other side of the ditch but has since become one of the most patriotic Aussies I know.)

Why, the Wallabies even have a Kiwi coach, the immensely likeable Robbie Deans, whom many New Zealanders, especially from the South Island, thought should have taken charge of his native team.

For all the similarities, the rivalry obviously remains intense. Clearly there are many Australians who think that New Zealand suffers from 'small neighbour syndrome.' Conversely, clearly there are many Kiwis who have little doubt that they live in the best and most beautiful country on the planet.

There are many New Zealanders who reckon Australia could learn from them, whether it's in the international marketing of a faraway country (the 100% Pure New Zealand is widely seen as the gold standard in the tourism industry) or indigenous affairs. And curiously, just as various Australian models are often heralded by public policy think-tanks abroad, New Zealand is also looked upon as a laboratory of reform. Right now, there's talk, for instance, that the British Conservative Party leader David Cameron will seek to emulate New Zealand's 'Beehive' model of government, where top ministers are all housed in the same building, should he become Prime Minister.

Perhaps there are some Aussies who would like to see their own country adopt a Kiwi-style foreign policy, with its proud independence and occasional pugnacity. Perhaps there are Kiwis who envy Australia's close ties with Washington, and its commercial links with the emerging giants, China and India.

As with the Muldoon jibe, the rivalry can produce moments of delicious high humour. Here, for instance, are two clips from the ABC show The Gruen Transfer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8Q36-9UUQE and (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AIppqNePdM), where two ad agencies were asked to come up with a campaign advocating the invasion of New Zealand.

Finally, here's something else that the Aussies and Kiwis are in agreement on at the moment - and that's the deterioration in the quality of international rugby following the end of the experimental law variations (ELVs), which encouraged a faster, more running game and less kicks at goal.

So far the tri-nations series has seen a yawn-fest of aerial ping-pong punctuated with kicks at goal from the South African fly-half (or five-eighth, as they known here), Morne Steyn. It's what many in the southern hemisphere think of as the northern hemisphere form of rugby.

So here's hoping for something different from the Bledisloe: a half- decent advertisement for such a glorious game.

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• - What's this?

In the newsrooms of the northern hemisphere, August is ritually known, of course, as the 'silly season,' the time when daft stories receive undue prominence for the simple reason that not much else is happening.

Here in Australia, at the fag end of the southern winter, it has been more like the serious season. August has seen a steady stream of major stories, from the defeat in parliament of the emissions trading scheme, the centrepiece of the Rudd government's environmental strategy, to the interim report of the Royal Commission into the Victorian bushfires, which detailed a litany of bungles and breakdowns at the highest levels of the emergency services (no working fax machine, no available computer, no one in overall charge).

There were the arrests in connection with the alleged terror plots in Melbourne, and the awfulness of the air crash which killed 13 people, nine of them Australians, en route to the Kokoda Track in Papua New Guinea, a place which may be starting to rival Gallipoli in the minds of younger, more Asia-orientated Australians.

But the running story of the month has been the rapid deterioration of Australia's relationship with China. Two issues have been particularly problematic: the visit to Australia of the Uighur leader, Rebiya Kadeer, and the charges levelled against Australian mining executive, Stern Hu, who works in the Shanghai office of Rio Tinto.

It seems that every other day this month I have been filing on one or other of those stories, from the efforts of Chinese diplomats to stop the organisers of the Melbourne Film Festival from showing a documentary about Rebiya Kadeer's life to the effort to stop her speaking at the National Press Club; from the allegations aired in the Chinese media about Stern Hu stealing state secrets to the downgrading of those charges to stealing commercial secrets.

I've blogged about the relationship with China before, but the point is worth emphasising again: that most people expected Kevin Rudd, the Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister (that phrase almost merits a special function key on my laptop, since I use it so often) to forge a much closer relationship. But relations between Beijing and Canberra have reached what some analysts are calling a 10-year low.

If you will excuse the Chinese culinary pun, a relationship which promised to be so very sweet has turned unexpectedly sour.

It is in the mutual self-interest of both countries to sustain cordial relations. China needs Australia's resources; Australia needs China's custom. So I guess it should come as no surprise that in the midst of this diplomatic downturn, PetroChina has just agreed to buy $A50 billion of liquefied natural gas from a yet-to-be-developed gas field off the coast of Western Australia.

But the centrality of resources to the relationship can also be deeply problematic. After all, much of the heat of the present overlapping disputes stems from the failure of the Anglo-Australian mining giants to reach agreement on the price of iron ore exports to China.

As an aside, you get the feeling that Delhi's strong and active response to the spate of assaults on Indian students in Melbourne and Sydney may have been influenced partly by the Rudd government's refusal to sell uranium to India.

For all that, the main point of this blog was to get back to you on your comments from the past few weeks. Some really strong strands on everything from the future of the Australian publishing industry to whether Aussies are sporting or not.

On the film Balibo, (/blogs/thereporters/nickbryant/2009/08/revisiting_east_timor_deaths.html) a number of you made the point - Parragirl and Brumby2 - that I concentrated on the five Australian-based journalists to the exclusion of the East Timorese. A fault of the blog, admittedly, but not of the movie, as some of you may now have had the chance to see. As for the idea that the story of the Balibo Five is relatively little-known? I stand by that. And Brumby2 I promise you that I knew of the Balibo Five well before the movie, having covered the outcome of coronial inquest two years ago (incidentally, one of the Brits, Brian Peters, comes from my home town, Bristol, where Balibo received an advance screening for the families).

Loads of good commentary from The True Aussie Sporting Spirit /blogs/thereporters/nickbryant/2009/08/its_a_sad_day_when.html. Perhaps I was too generous, as paulcrossleyiii, (someone who I often look upon as an ally) suggests (take off the rose-tinted specs for a minute mate!) and should have mentioned the claims of racial abuse from the visiting Sri Lankan and South Africa teams in 2003 and 2006. Foraggio makes a similar point, and highlights the rather graceless manner in which John Howard handed over the rugby world cup to Martin Johnson in 2003. Again, good point.

Still, I do think the 'win-at-all costs' Aussie way gets a bit overdone, and that a premium is attached to good sportsmanship. Just look at the Brownlow medal, which does not go to the best performing player in Aussie Rules, but the 'fairest and best.' If, any stage of the season a player is suspended for foul play, he is deemed ineligible. I've yet to rest my case on this one, but it's another factoid for the jury to consider.

Obama stardust for teflon Rudd? /blogs/thereporters/nickbryant/2009/08/obama_stardust_for_teflon_rudd.html didn't get many comments. Politics blogs rarely do. But one additional point to make is that Malcolm Turnbull faces an almost impossible conundrum. One of the main things people seem to dislike about him is his hasty ambition, and that is a very hard thing to disown or decouple yourself from when you are trying to become Prime Minister after just five years in parliament. How do you downplay your ambition when you want to become the PM? A tricky dilemma.

A few updates. On the book debate, I understand the matter will be discussed on 17 September in cabinet. I'll keep you posted.

And, of course, there's another date for your diaries in September - the open-top bus tour of the victorious England team....although have you seen the weather forecast for The Oval? Talk about raining on our parade.....

https://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25949120-5001505,00.html

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• - What's this?

Many will view the movie Balibo as a long-overdue addition to Australia's cinematic canon, and one that could well make a significant global impact given the starring role of one of the country's most bankable actors, Anthony LaPaglia.

With gripping drama, it tells the surprisingly little-known story of the Australia-based journalists --two Aussies, two Brits and a Kiwi - who lost their lives ahead of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Gary Cunningham, Greg Shackleton, Malcolm Rennie, Brian Peters and Tony Stewart. Collectively, they are known as "Balibo Five," after the border town where they were killed on 16 October 1975. Anthony LaPaglia plays the Darwin-based journalist, Roger East, who was persuaded by a then little-known rebel leader, Jose Ramos-Horta, who is now East Timor's president, to investigate the deaths.

The official Indonesian explanation is that the journalists were killed in crossfire between the Indonesian army and Fretilin rebels - a version of events that has long been accepted by successive Australian and British governments.

The film Balibo presents a very different narrative. It maintains that the journalists were executed by Indonesian troops on the orders of the their commanders, to prevent them reporting on the pre-invasion incursions.

It is based on a book, by the journalist, Jill Jolliffe, and is true to the findings of a coronial inquest in Sydney 2007, which ruled that the journalists were executed as they tried to surrender to Indonesian forces. "The journalists were not incidental casualties in the fighting, they were captured, then deliberately killed despite protesting their status," wrote coroner, Louise Pinch in her report. The inquest recommended war crimes charges be brought.

I've seen a preview of the movie, and found it incredibly stirring. I suspect it will leave many viewers with a very powerful sense of injustice.

One of my few reservations came right at the end, just before the credits started to role. There were the obligatory "what has happened since" chunks of text after the final scene had played out. But strangely, they did not make any reference to the Indonesian government's official explanation, the Australian government's acceptance of it, or the coroner's findings.

Nor did it mention that despite being handed down more than 18 months ago, the Australian government has not yet given its own response to the coronial inquest. Instead, the attorney general referred the case to the Australian Federal Police, which has remained silent on the issue. The director Robert Connolly says the "cover-up" of the Indonesian, Australian and British governments would make an ideal sequel.

It is widely thought that the government of Gough Whitlam tacitly agreed to Indonesia's invasion of East Timor because it viewed the Fretilin rebels as communists, and did not want another "Cuba" so close to its shores. Given the oil and gas deposits in the Timor Sea, it preferred to negotiate with Jakarta rather than Dili.

Now, the Australian government shows little or no enthusiasm for revisiting those events, because it does not want to sour diplomatic relations with the Indonesian government, according to the families. Nor does the British government. It is waiting to see what the Australian government does next, and plans no independent action of its own - this despite the fact that two Britons were amongst the dead, and their families have been prominent in the ongoing campaign for justice. It was the Bristolian, Maureen Tolfree, the sister of Brian Peters, who managed to get the case brought before the coroner in Sydney.

Anthony LaPaglia has said he hopes this movie with accelerate the campaign for justice. "I understand why the families have fought for 35 years," he told us last week. "And I'm on board now." But will it make a difference?

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• - What's this?

It's a sad day when the comments tally at the bottom of this blog looks healthier than an England scorecard. Alas, that is what has happened over the past few days at Headingley. What Ravi Bopara would give right now for the quick-fire half-century of "The end of Australian books," or even the brief cameo of "The Intellectual Health of the Nation"?

The Australian papers have had three days to compose their headlines - the game was effectively lost, of course, by lunchtime on Friday in Leeds - but they are workmanlike rather than inspirational. Superlative headlines, I guess, are usually heat-of-the-moment rather than slow-cooked affairs. "Ashes to Ashes: England's Hopes in Tatters," says the Sydney Morning Herald. says The Australian. "Pure Joy," says the Melbourne Sun Herald, featuring a picture of Ponting playing with his baby daughter. Sydney's tabloid The Daily Telegraph is arguably the best: "Pommelling: Australia Humiliate Old Enemy."

Were there an off-field Ashes for headline writers, surely the urn would not travel far from Fleet Street. "Bop of the Flops" is The Sun's take on Ravi Bopara's dismal performance. "Strauss Hits the Boos," accompanies the story on the England captain being heckled by the Headingley crowd.

The English headlines also point to a statement of the obvious - that there's much more passion surrounding the Ashes in Britain than in Australia, where Ashes have not really caught fire. Day/night might ultimately be the way forward for Test cricket, but night/night cricket can be a rather sleepy and somnolent affair.

So just as Australia did not suffer any great national convulsion when it lost at Lord's, I have yet to witness any exuberant national celebrations following the team's lop-sided victory in Leeds. No one is flicking through the yellow pages to find the number of an open-deck bus operator, nor shredding spools of green and gold ticker tape in anticipation of a victory parade through the canyons of Sydney's central business district.

At a barbeque over the weekend, I expected to be roasted by some Aussie mates over England's monumental batting collapse the night before. But few had even stayed up to watch it, and happily the sausage count ended up being higher than the sledge count.

With the rugby and Aussie Rules seasons soon to reach their climax, the winter sports continue to take precedence over the cricket. I'm still a bit gob-smacked that the ABC has not sent it own commentary team over to Britain (nor has Aussie television), and is relying on the 91Èȱ¬'s Test Match Special (augmented with ABC's chief cricket commentator, Jim Maxwell). But if you had tuned in on Friday night expecting to hear Aggers, Blowers and Tuffers, you would have ended up listening the rugby league or the AFL commentary instead.

No doubt fans in Australia would have paid more attention if the quality of the cricket had been higher. Certainly, I reckon most Aussies would have preferred to watch an England side which contained Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Flintoff, and thus struggled to achieve a win, rather than watching an injury-weakened side which produced a lop-sided victory. By the same token, I reckon England fans would have enjoyed Shane Warne more than Nathan Hauritz, even if it reduced the chances of winning.

There was in the British papers over the weekend by the former England cricketer, Ed Smith, talking about English cricket's "cultural cringe" - "that everything Australian should be copied. First sledging, now booing: they do it to us, so let's do it to them. The English seem only to copy the worst characteristics of the New World, as Auberon Waugh argued, while never emulating its optimism and enthusiasm."

Interesting argument, and one of Ed Smith's reference points is the Melbourne Cricket Ground's infamous Bay 13. But I reckon the loutishness and boorishness of Aussie cricket fans is commonly exaggerated. True, there's no shortage of sledgers, and Australia's most famous barracker, Yabba, has recently been memorialised in bronze in the new stand at the Sydney Cricket Ground. But boos are directed at the security guards who confiscate the beach balls, rather than visiting players. So heavy is the policing these days at the MCG that Bay 13 - there are actually four Bay 13s in the various tiers of the newly-developed stands - is no longer the den of hostility of days of old.

For what it's worth, my abiding cricketing memory of the southern summer was watching the crowd at the SCG as it gave the South African captain, Graeme Smith, a standing ovation for coming out to bat with a broken hand in a valiant effort to save the Third Test.

As for the MCG, instead of constantly citing Bay 13, perhaps it is time to step outside to peruse the bronze statues that encircle that great sporting cathedral. There's Lillee at his terrfiying best and Bradman with his bat aloft. But there's also a statue depicting the moment in 1956 when the middle-distance runner John Landy stopped mid-race to check on Ron Clarke, who had been tripped by another runner, and then helped him to his feet. Is that not the true representation of Australian sport?

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Though partially eclipsed by the counter-terror operation in Melbourne, two things happened this week which could influence Australian politics for many moons to come.

The President of the United States sought to align himself more closely with the Australian prime minister; and the leader of the opposition sought to distance himself from a once-obscure civil servant who he misguidedly thought had handed him the keys to The Lodge.

On the very day that the Australian media was consumed with the five arrests in Victoria, the report was released on the Ozcar affair, the rather improbable row over whether Kevin Rudd and his treasurer, Wayne Swan, granted special favours to one of their mates from Queensland, a car dealer who had leant the prime minister a ute.

Kevin Rudd was exonerated; so, too, was his treasurer; and it was Malcolm Turnbull, the opposition leader, who found himself fielding hostile questions from reporters about the fake e-mail concocted by a Treasury official, Godwin Grech, which started the whole row.

An already nervous and agitated man, Mr Grech is presently in a psychiatric ward in Canberra, which might give some indication of his mental state. Nothing he might have heard from Malcolm Turnbull would have lifted his mood. He pretty much heaped the blame for the mess on Mr Grech, who had first authored the dodgy e-mail and then handed it to Turnbull.

Peter Hartcher, the political editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, takes up the story: "Instead of trying to restore the confidence of voters, he conducted a narrow, legalistic exercise to exonerate himself. Where he needed to demonstrate a leader's largeness, he produced a lawyer's smallness. It was a missed opportunity by a man who cannot afford to miss any."

Turnbull currently has an approval rating in the 30% range, and less than a year after he took over from Brendan Nelson, there is talk of a plot to oust him. In this land of egalitarians, few people seem to warm to a man viewed by many as an elitist. After all, he not only represents the richest constituency in Australia, Wentworth in Sydney's Eastern Suburbs, but resides in its wealthiest street.

Were the blue-chip Eastern Suburbs ever to launch a secessionist movement, and declare independence from the rest of Australia, Turnbull would be an almost shoe-in for its new head of state. But it's his problems courting the city's blue-collar Western Suburbs, the home of the Howard battlers, which speak of his problems with Australia as a whole.

Perhaps people don't like what many see as a sense of entitlement, a born-to-rule mindset (even though he does not come from blue-blood stock). Perhaps he is seen as too pushy and impatient. Perhaps he is seen as the loftiest of tall poppies, and thus ripe for the felling.

Earlier this week, Mr Turnbull had a chance at public rehabilitation when ABC's Australian Story went to air - a tell-all, fly-on-the-wall, 30-minute show which allows its subjects, to a certain extent, to be the authors of their own narrative.

Happily for Australian Story, its cameras were rolling when the Ozcar story broke. Unhappily for Malcolm Turnbull, its cameras were rolling when the Ozcar story broke. On hearing the potentially cataclysmic news that the e-mail had been concocted, the first response of one of his press guys was to google the word concocted. Proof perhaps that Kevin Rudd's "education revolution" has not extended down the corridor to Malcolm Turnbull's office.

All this as Barack Obama continues to declare his love for Kevin Rudd, his new best friend. Signs of this budding romance came in a suitably romantic setting, Rome, on the fringes of the G8 summit, when Obama picked Rudd to accompany him at the podium in a press conference about climate change (think two bullet points about programmatic specificity rather than two coins in the fountain).

And proof of their mateship has come from Kurt Campbell, the US Assistant Secretary of State for the Asia Pacific Region. He was speaking on ABC's 730 Report: "One of the things that's been interesting in this new political generation, that President Barack Obama, when he spends and looks around the globe, one of the people he feels most comfortable with, to talk about climate change, about the role of government in modern societies, issues associated with the rise of China, the person he thinks about when these issues comes up is Prime Minister Rudd.

"And so for those of us who care a lot about the US-Australian relationship, we are extraordinarily pleased that there is not only a personal chemistry between these two men, but a meeting of the minds on the issues that frankly I believe are at the centre of global politics."

As the orchestra in the background reaches its mighty crescendo, Kurt Campbell goes on: "Really in many respects, for President Obama, Prime Minister Rudd is already one of the his best mates."

It is regularly remarked upon how Kevin Rudd is Teflon-coated. Now he has been sprinkled with Obama stardust. The US president has clearly decided who he thinks will emerge the winner from the next Australian federal election.

So two questions: what explains America's apparent affection for Kevin Michael Rudd, and what explains Australia's apparent disaffection with Malcolm Bligh Turnbull?

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"Were Australians shocked to hear of the alleged terror plot?" a number of presenters in London have being asking, as we have continued to cover the counter-terrorism operation in Melbourne. The answer, I think I am right in saying, is an emphatic no. But I would like to hear from you if you think we got that wrong.

Admittedly, this is a difficult subject on which to blog because the case is now active - that's to say men have been charged with terror-related offences and we cannot publish anything, including your comments, which would prejudice their trial (the same rules would have applied, by the way, had they had been charged with shop-lifting). But we can talk more generally about perceptions of the terror threat in Australia.

Clearly, terrorist violence on Australian soil is extremely rare. There was an unsolved attack in 1978 near the Hilton Hotel in Sydney, but not attacks have been carried out here since 9/11.

Still, many Australians have been killed abroad since then, most recently in the hotel bombings in Jakarta last month - the latest in a series of attacks in Indonesia.

Having not been here for the 2002 Bali bombings - back then I was covering the Bush administration's response to 9/11 in Washington - it's hard to get a clear sense of the full enormity of their impact. Speaking on the first anniversary of the attacks, in which 88 Australians were killed, the then-Prime Minister John Howard argued that the attacks had altered the "psyche of the nation," and "ended any sense of careless abandon that Australia may have had". The Australian Federal Police notes on its website: "The attacks in Bali then made it clear to Australia that we could be a target of a major terrorist incident - something most Australians would previously have dismissed."

Commonly, Bali is referred to as "Australia's September 11," but that may have more to do with the journalistic desire for a neat and simple headline rather than an accurate statement of fact. Again, I would like to hear your thoughts.

John Howard used the domestic threat of terrorism to justify his government's support for the Bush administration, and the presence of Australian diggers in Afghanistan and Iraq. In March, 2003, in an address to the nation announcing Australia's participation in the Iraq war, he argued: 2Australia has been a terrorist target at least since the 11th September 2001. Australia is a western country with Western values. Nothing will or should change that. That is why we are a target. Remember that Bin Laden specifically targeted Australia because of our intervention to save the people of East Timor."

Some will doubtless argue that his comments were borne out by the bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta in September 2004. Others would contend that his unrelenting support for the Bush administration made Australia more of a target.

Some will argue that the Howard government was correct to bring in new anti-terror laws, which were minted into legislation in 2005, since the Australian Federal Police had warned that the present statutes could not protect Australians against London-style suicide attacks. But others will argue that there was a political motive behind these measures: to heighten the climate of fear at a time when national security issues benefited the Liberal-led coalition more than Labor.

Certainly, Australia has witnessed a number of homegrown terror plots. In 2006, a Sydney court sentenced Faheem Lodhi to 20 years in prison for plotting a bomb attack on Sydney on an unknown target, possibly the electricity grid. Last September, six men were , whose potential targets included the Aussie Rules grand final in Melbourne, the city's rail network, and John Howard.

Still, Australia has seen no need to raise its current national security threat level. Currently, the level is at moderate, as it has been since 2003 when the alert system was introduced. That indicates that an attack is feasible.

Without going into the case now before the courts, I wonder what is your sense of the threat?

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