91Èȱ¬

So a galloper called Alcopop stands a good chance of running away with the Melbourne Cup. Talk about a journalistic gift-horse: the love of gambling and the love of booze all in one, and the opportunity, on this highest of high holy days, for a blog that sums up the nation.

Alas, with Australia slipping down the global drink league table, the boozy stereotype doesn't really fit anymore. So how about the long-held view that Australia is a nation of punters?

On that front, it's surely guilty as charged if the latest figures from the Productivity Commission (who came up with that name? Wollemi, please help) are to be believed. Last year, they showed that three-quarters of Australians had some kind of flutter, whether it was having a punt on the horses, buying a state lottery ticket or dropping a few dollars in a "pokie" machine (Australian slang for a one-arm bandit). Admittedly, these numbers are swelled by once-a-year gamblers like myself, whose annual trek to the bookies comes on Melbourne Cup Day. But they're high nonetheless.

Between 2006-2007, Australians lost $18 billion in gambling - a staggeringly large figure (by way of comparison, the Australian government's recession-busting stimulus package was $42 billion). And according to the Productivity Commission, Australia has 500,000 problem gamblers.

The pokies are one of Australia's great addictions and afflictions. Of the $18 billion lost gambling, $12 billion of that was pumped into the pokies. Of those who play them, 15% are thought to be problem gamblers, and they account for 40% of the losses. By law, the clubs and pubs have to promote responsible gambling, with "health warnings" on the pokies. But some of the mega-clubs are open from ten in the morning until four in the morning, which allows for virtually round-the-clock gambling.

Politicians such as the long-time anti-pokies campaigner, South Australian Senator Nick Xenophon, are calling for reforms. He wants to set the maximum bet on the pokies at $1, for instance.

But the problem is that the governments here are as addicted to the pokies as the punters. During the 2006-2007 financial year, Victoria received 13.1% of its revenues from gambling. New South Wales, which is the home of half of the nation's pokies (about 100,000 of them), received 9.4% of its revenues. In Western Australia, the figure is lower because pokies are banned expect in casinos.

So what, if anything, should be done? Russell Crowe failed in his attempt to ban the pokies from his rugby league club, the South Sydney Rabbitohs, and the anti-pokie reformers are up against some very powerful vested interests and a very popular pastime.

PS Anyone got a good tip for the Melbourne Cup? Kevin Rudd won with Efficient in 2007, which seemed appropriate...

PPS To follow up on Moresby-Parks' invitation to eat fish and chips on the Sunshine Coast, I would, of course, be delighted. And the same goes for any food-related invites...

UPDATE:

So much for my sentimental bets: the prospect of a 13th Melbourne Cup win for Bart Cummings, the legendary 81-year-old trainer who won his 12th cup last year 43 years after winning his first. Viewed and Roman Emperor were nowhere to be seen, and it was Shocking that galloped to victory (though I did recoup some of my losses on Mourilyan, which came in third). Hope you had more success...

And on the day that a horserace immobilised the nation, the Reserve Bank of Australia tried to arrest inflation. Another rate hike, this time by 25 basis points. It's the first time Australia has seen the cost of borrowing rise in consecutive months since March 2008. Some had predicted a steeper rise, but the bank clearly wants to contain inflation without choking the recovery. Some kind of rate hike was the surest bet on Cup Day. It may well hurt people in the mortgage belt, but you could hardly call it shocking...

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• - What's this?

I thought at the end of this month, I should do a series of blog shorts - updates on subjects raised by this month's blogs; additional information that I should have included first time round; stories or pieces which have caught my eye but didn't really lend themselves to the blogosphere. So here goes:

ASYLUM SEEKERS:
So first to the running story of the month: asylum seekers and the vastly different political reaction aroused by 'boat people' rather than 'plane people'. Confessedly, I should have included more figures in that blog, so here are some more details. In 2008, more than 96% of refugee status applicants arrived by plane - 'plane people' outnumbered 'boat people' by 4768 to 161. Admittedly, there has been a tenfold increase in the number of boat people already in 2009, but the figure will still be nowhere near the number arriving by air. 'Plane people' are also deemed less deserving overall - 40-60% are granted protection visas compared to 85-90% of boat people. Again, a big difference.

Given that Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull seem to tailor a lot of macho-speak on boat people for public consumption, here's some more evidence that the public and press would tolerate greater compassion. This is an editorial from , a tabloid which prides itself on having its finger on the pulse of public opinion. 'We are not being flooded by refugees. Australia's borders are not under threat. There is no armada of boats preparing to sail our way... This issue is pure politics and both sides are fudging the truth.'

And here's Denis Shanahan, the political editor of making a similar point. 'Raw politics is making the arrival of boatpeople a divisive issue once more when it shouldn't be, and the Rudd government is as culpable as the coalition when it comes to emotive catchcries and racist innuendo.'

AUSTRALIA AND AFGHANISTAN:
The number of comments in response to the Afghanistan blog reinforced its central theme: that there isn't much public debate about Australia's presence in the country. Since then, the defence minister John Faulkner has revealed that he has asked military chiefs to see how Australian diggers could complete their role 'in the shortest time frame possible' - which was interpreted as a signal that Australia might withdraw earlier than the three to five years which the government has spoken of before.

I offer this as nothing more than a hunch, but I suspect the Australians would not have announced this unless the Obama administration had decided to reject the main thrust of General Stanley McChrystal's demands for an Iraq-style 'surge'. Certainly, it would be unusual for an Australia government to diverge from White House thinking on an issue so central to the alliance.

BIG AUSTRALIA:
The idea of a Big Australia of over 30 million people gets a super-sized 'No', judging by your commentary. In a week when a report from the federal parliament suggested that Australia's , the Big Australia policy seems even more implausible without a complete rethink about the much-vaunted Aussie way of life.

CODE DEAD:
On the battle of the Australian sporting codes, the Australian Rugby Union has conducted a study of its 'brand health'. It revealed that rugby union is the 'least entertaining, innovative, grass roots-orientated and social'. Crowds from test, super 14 and club matches have declined. In 2006, 617,555 attended Test Matches. This year the figure was 386,287.

ASIDES
• I was intrigued by the story of how Kath and Kim, the first ladies of Australian suburbia, have apparently 'They weren't our best sales people, Kath & Kim, and it created a negative feel for what is the world's most flexible grape,' said the head of Foster's.
• Here's yet more evidence of how , popularised by hit shows like Master Chef, is attracting international acclaim.
• No doubt you have seen this already, but here is a story revealing the to provide backdrops for live news bulletins.
• And a personal aside: I finally managed to see the end of a play I started watching six weeks ago. Cate Blanchett in - uninterrupted this time by any prop malfunctions (a flying radio drawing blood from the leading lady). Mesmerising stuff, and richly deserving of all the rave reviews.

WHAT IS COMING UP?:
There is much to look forward to next month. That great immobilising sporting festival, the Melbourne Cup (that same day the Reserve Bank of Australia is almost certain to raise interest rate for the second consecutive month); the tenth anniversary of the failed Republic referendum; and the much-anticipated arrival of the golfer, Tiger Woods. In mid-November, Kevin Rudd will also apologise to the 'Forgotten Australians'.

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• - What's this?

, I was struck, as ever on journeys through the outback, of the vast Australian emptiness - a sparseness of human life which is explained, of course, by a statistical gap. This is the world's sixth largest country in terms of acreage, but only the 52nd in terms of population - 22,026,000 according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and rising fast.

Over the next four decades, the population is expected to rise to 35 million - a 60% increase. Kevin Rudd said this week he welcomes a "Big Australia", despite publicly voiced concerns from the country's most high-profile civil servant, Treasury Secretary Ken Henry, who said it would "test the limits of sustainability". Handled correctly, said Henry, Australia could look forward to a "period of unprecedented prosperity" - a golden era - but he's clearly worried about a fast-paced population surge.

Given that much of the growth will come from immigration, the subject obviously touches on racial attitudes, the topic of the last three blogs. But I want to shift the focus of debate to the issue of sustainability, and whether the Australian people are quite as enthusiastic about a "Big Australia" as the prime minister.

Perhaps it is worth imagining what a Big Australia would look like. Melbourne's population would almost double for a start, rising to over 7 million. An extra 4.5 million people would end up living on the coastal strip between Sydney and Brisbane. On the urban fringes of major cities, the creep of cul-de-sacs would become a headlong rush. Chronic water shortages are already a fact of life across the country, so Australians would presumably have to get over their aversion to drinking recycled water and step up the construction of desalination plants, which are always controversial.

The Sunshine Coast in Queensland already has a 'No Growth' policy, since it reckons it has reached a saturation point. The Gold Coast, which has been Australia's fastest growing region, suffers from an infrastructure lag - the accident and emergency department at the Gold Coast hospital, for example, is said to be the busiest and most overburdened in the country. It was not designed to serve such a large local population.

Sydney already suffers from major road and rail problems, and is becoming a sprawling metropolis. One of the more remarkable facts about the city is that its geographic centre is at the Olympic Stadium in a place called 91Èȱ¬bush, which is almost an hour's drive from the beach.

Kevin Rudd favours a population boost because he thinks it is good for national security and, presumably, national prestige - especially when some European countries are heading in the opposite direction. Rudd clearly wants Australia to have an enhanced diplomatic role, regionally and globally. A "Big Australia" would mean that its diplomatc punch would be more commensurate with its size.

Australia is the most sparsely populated developed nation in the world, with only 2.9 people per square kilometre. Certainly, there is enough space, but are there enough resources?

PS One of the many joys of getting out into the outback and bush is that you are exposed to a very different news agenda from the Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne axis. So I particularly enjoyed the "Zap me with a Taser pleads politician" story from South Australia. The state Liberal leader Isobel Redmond said she wanted to be zapped to make the case for putting tasers in the hands of the South Australian police. "I have had three babies," Ms Redmond said. "I can tell you, five seconds of excruciating pain is more than bearable if you've had three babies. But I wouldn't want to do it on a full stomach or a full bladder."

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Why is it that asylum seekers who attempt to reach Australia by sea provoke a very different political reaction from those arriving by air?

So far this year just over 1,700 unauthorised immigrants have arrived by boat, a tenfold increase on 2008. But the number is dwarfed by those arriving by air - over 50,000 who tend to overstay their visas, thus becoming unauthorised immigrants, and then avoid detection. These "plane people" hardly raise an eyebrow. Not so the "boat people", like the 250 or so Sri Lankan Tamils intercepted by the Indonesian navy following a personal plea from Kevin Rudd to the Indonesian president.

It's a paradox that demands explanation.

Perhaps planes have a civilising impact on public opinion. If you can afford a ticket to Australia, maybe the reasoning goes, then you have more of a claim to stay here. Perhaps it is because many of those who overstay their visas are white. Perhaps it is simply that the television cameras are not normally on hand to capture their arrival - unless they happen to belong to Channel Seven's Border Security, one of Australia's most popular primetime shows.

Certainly, the boat people tend to provide much more arresting imagery: their floating shanties captured on a long lens and set against the azure seas of the Indian Ocean.

Because the arrival of boat people lends itself to the dramatic requirements of television and newspaper front-pages, it can easily become the subject of political theatre. And certainly, there has been something slightly vaudevillian about the political reaction from Kevin Rudd and the opposition leader, Malcolm Turnbull. In the words of Phillip Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald, they have "engaged in their own he-man contest over asylum seekers". In essence, they have tried to out hardline eachother.

Both seem to have learned from the 2001 "Tampa" election, when John Howard outmaneuvered the then Labor leader Kim Beazley over the asylum seeker issue. Nowadays, it appears to be received wisdom in Australian politics that you have to be tough on asylum seekers, and particularly boat people, if you are to remain politically viable. In America, supporting the death penalty is deemed a similar requirement for presidential aspirants.

So the political blows traded over the boat people have had the feel of a professional wrestling match, where the moves seem choreographed beforehand, the confrontation seems rather phony and the wrestlers are not so much playing to the grandstand as the cheap seats at the back. Two men who do not naturally articulate the voice of middle Australia are seemingly trying their damnedest to articulate the voice of middle Australia - and, to many, it sounds a bit forced and inauthentic.

So a question in what I promise will be the last race-related blog for the time being: does Rudd and Turnbull's rhetoric truly reflect the dominant strain of Australian public opinion on the boat people question, or is there something almost Pavlovian about their political posturing?

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• - What's this?

In his award-winning novel, The Slap, Christos Tsiolkas writes in the authentic voices of Australia's new polyglot surburbia, the home of Greek-Australians, Italian-Australians, Indian-Australians and other relatively newly-arrived immigrants. It also features an indigenous Australian, Bilal, who has converted to Islam.

The book takes its title from the punishment meted out at a suburban barbeque when a particularly irritating child, the offspring of Anglo-Australian parents, is disciplined by someone other than his parents. Given its iconic setting, it reads like "a satanic version of Neighbours", according to the blog . It has fast become the most talked about book in Australia.

But don't judge this book by its title, for it is not primarily about the rights and wrongs of smacking errant children. Nor do I necessarily agree with the publisher's blurb that it is about "love, sex and marriage, parenting and children, and the fury and intensity" - a discourse on the "modern family". Instead, it is Tsiolkas' closely-observed take on race and multi-culturalism in modern day Australia.

Told from the conflicting viewpoints of eight protagonists, none of whom are portrayed as Aussie archetypes, the book provides insights into the tensions, anger, frailties and prejudices of an inner suburb of Melbourne in the Howard era - although it could just have easily been written in the present. As George Megalogenis wrote in a brilliant essay in the Australian Literary Review, its central observation is that "middle Australia is becoming more brown than white". You can read Megalogenis .

Launching into the novel with high expectations, I was disappointed with The Slap. The writing is deliberately harsh and confronting, but arguably gratuitously so in parts. In its rendering of the tensions of suburbia, whether familial, generational or racial, I did not find it particularly artful or subtle.

Yet as the discussion in my book club revealed (there's an admission), the solitary member whose family hails from a Mediterranean country (there's another admission) thought it was brilliant. I've spoken to other first generation Australians who loved it, because they instantly recognised the voices. Perhaps for the first time, an Australian novel spoke to them and of them. In it, they heard a literary voice which they have not necessarily been exposed to before.

Certainly, it's instructive to read and reflect on the novel in the context of the Hey Hey blackface row. For one, racial attitudes are inverted. It is the Anglo-Australian family which is portrayed as the social outcasts, and widely viewed as the second-class citizens. Uncouth vulgarians, scoff their friends, colleagues and neighbours.

To use a word that I would never utter at home, but which is part of everyday speech in Australia, this is a book where the "wogs" end up on top. To give voice to that word in Britain, of course, is to immediately identity yourself as a racist. Yet in Australia, it has come to carry little, if any, malevolence - and certainly not for Australians who happily describe themselves as "wogs". For sure, it started out as a derogatory slur directed at immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Before their arrival, "wog" was more commonly used to describe a medical ailment or germ. But now the term has been embraced by many Australians who can trace their bloodline to southern and eastern Europe as an expression of their identity. Indeed, For some, it has become a proud boast.

The commenter, irisav, was onto to this when she or he noted: "The [racist] perception also relates to the cultural sub-text of words. For instance in Australia the term 'w-g' can be used derogatorily, affectionately or as part of cultural ownership/pride."

It's interesting to ponder on how a term of derision came to be adopted by those being derided. I do not know the answer. Perhaps you can help? But I dare say humour was part of it. Part of the Australian way is to not take yourself too seriously. And perhaps part of the assimilation process for southern and eastern Europeans was to show Anglo-Celtic workmates and neighbours that they were prepared to embrace that side of national life. What better way to demonstrate their own sense of humour and self-deprecation, what better way to show they belonged, than to turn a slur on themselves?

If there is a high level of low-level racism in Australia, as Waleed Aly suggests, I often think it stems from the kind of "humour" that does not necessarily have a high degree of malevolence but does suffer from a high degree of insensitivity and flippancy. It is the kind of "it-was-only-meant-as-a-joke" racial slur, easily brushed away with a laugh or a friendly punch to the upper arm. JP Wallace put it really well: "[I]t is a very mild kind of racism, more a patronising ignorance than any kind of virulent, potentially violent xenophobia..." Rosco 737 touches on the same theme: "The blog has the wrong title. It should be 'Is Australia un-ashamedly un PC?'. To which the answer is a resounding YES."

Thanks for all your comments. I read every one. I loved parragirl picking me up on the use of the adverb "unusually" in the title of the blog; I take on board Wallsy's observation that new arrivals can be racist, too; surtr catches me out on the claim that the Hey Hey skit was a "testament to the changing face of modern Australia" (because of the "performers" mixed ethnicities), since the same doctors performed much the same skit on the show 20 years ago. Wollemi is helpful, as ever, on the history. More deserve to be quoted again, but I'm running out of space, and I dare say you are running out of time and patience.

As for a final word on The Slap? For me, it was not the great Australian novel. But to many, it was the new Australian novel, and I suspect that explains much of its commercial and critical success.

PS: I've blogged before on how Australian polticians often try to out-hardline each other when it comes to boat people heading this way. That has been the big running story this week, of course, and it's an off-shoot of the same debate. A number of you commented on that in the Afghanistan blog, so feel fee to weigh in again.

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• - What's this?

The most pressing foreign policy issue of the day is what to do about Afghanistan. Within weeks of entering office, the Obama administration announced a troop surge of some 21,000 soldiers, and indicated it would be looking to its allies, including Australia, to bolster their own commitment.

Now, a complete rethink is underway in Washington prompted by mounting casualties, an Afghan presidential election that was both messy, fraudulent and disputed, and a pessimistic assessment from President Obama's new commander in the country, General Stanley A McChrystal. The General has raised the spectre of the failure of the mission in the absence of a surge of some 30,000 to 40,000 extra US troops. It is within that context that Britain has just significantly boosted its presence.

Harry Truman had the quagmire of Korea, Lyndon Johnson had the quagmire of Vietnam and Obama appears to fear a similar fate in Afghanistan. After all, it has long been known as the graveyard of empires, an oft-quoted phrase that looms large in the minds of Taliban insurgents.

Australian forces, of course, have fought in all three of these conflicts, partly because of the government of the day's belief in the righteousness of the cause, but mainly to keep in strategic step with America. When it comes to putting troops on the ground, Washington has had no more loyal ally than Canberra.

The Australian Defence Force currently has some 1,400 personnel on active duty in Afghanistan. Almost 700 are involved in mentoring and reconstruction, which is to say training the Afghan National Army and helping to build much-needed infrastructure. Then there are some 300 special forces soldiers actually fighting the Taliban. Their ongoing role, mission, and even their presence will be heavily influenced, if not ultimately determined, by the outcome of the policy review within the Obama administration.

There has not been much public discussion surrounding Australia's presence in Afghanistan, and certainly the debate here has been nowhere near as heated or vitriolic as in Britain, America, Germany, Canada or Italy.

This is largely explained by the number of war dead. Australia has suffered eleven fatalities (I'm aware here of a horrible journalistic tendency to minimise these kinds of numbers, when the loss of even one individual can be impossible to bear for families and friends). At the time of writing, the US has lost over 850, Britain 221, Canada 130, Germany 39 and France 35.

Part of the reason why Australia casualties have been lower is that the large majority of its forces are not actively involved in combat, much to the frustration of many diggers on the ground (although some infantry patrols involved in "mentoring" Afghan National Army units have been ambushed by the Taliban).

Perhaps another explanation for why Afghanistan does not generate the same headlines here as elsewhere is that the ADF has limited the access of Australian journalists to the battlefield. Before coming to Australia, I used to report frequently from Afghanistan, and the embed process granted us extraordinary access to frontline US and UK soldiers. We were allowed to watch them fight the war up close.

Admittedly, the embed process has its flaws. There is the inevitable danger of feeling sympathy towards the soldier who inevitably ends up offering you protection, and expressing that in your reports - a journalistic form of Stockholm Syndrome, if you like. But the ADF has shied away from such openness and access, as reported last week.

Ahead of the Afghan presidential election in August, the ADF allowed three Australian journalists to go on embeds, a first-time experiment. But even then, The Australian newspaper's defence correspondent, Ian McPhedran, complained that they were kept away from the sharp end of the war - a decision which the ADF says was to protect their safety. By contrast, the Pentagon does not think that personal safety issues should limit the access of journalists to the battlefield. If journalists are prepared to take the risk, the Pentagon reasons, than that is up to them.

When Afghanistan has been openly debated in Australia, the defence specialist Hugh White from the Australian National University has often been in the forefront of the discussion. Back in July, he had this to say of Afghanistan: "The government cannot justify committing troops unless there is a reasonable chance they can succeed... I don't believe there is a reasonable chance they can succeed. I do not think the government is persuaded that there is a significant chance of success in Afghanistan." So is he right?

Or do you side with former Prime Minister John Howard who last week told Fox News in America, during a trip to meet the former US President George W Bush, that Australia should increase its troop presence to avoid handing victory to the Taliban?

Kevin Rudd has argued that Afghanistan should not be allowed again to become a safe haven for al-Qaeda, whose attacks have killed Australians and inspired Jemaah Islamiah to carry out attacks like the Bali bombings. Like other Western leaders, he also fears the consequences for an already unstable Pakistan if Afghanistan, its neighbour, becomes even more unstable.

So, put crudely, is Australia's mission becoming increasingly dangerous and pointless, or does Canberra and its allies owe it to the people of Afghanistan to finish what they started and to contain, if not defeat, a resurgent Taliban?

PS Thanks for your comments on race. I thought I would get back to them over the weekend in a blog I've been meaning to write for weeks on Australia's most talked about book, The Slap. The two subjects dovetail very neatly...

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The Channel Nine show Hey Hey It's Saturday was a staple of 1970s Australia. Last week's blackface skit, which has generated so many unfavourable international headlines, also had a distinctly retro and unreconstructed feel. Racist, too, according to the shows many detractors.

For those who missed it, the variety show aired a talent segment in which five men appeared in frizzy black wigs and with their faces daubed in black make-up purporting to be the Jackson Jive. Half-way through the song they were joined by another person impersonating Michael Jackson, whose face was painted white.

The American singer Harry Connick Jr, a guest judge on the show, signalled his immediate offence by scoring the performance "0". Later, he was invited back onto the live broadcast, where the host, Daryl Somers, apologised for causing offence. Connick Jr, who hails from America's Deep South, explained that the skit would have been unacceptable in his homeland. "Black minstrels" have long been a taboo, since they remind people of the Jim Crow era, when the races were separated in the American south from the cradle to the grave.

This controversy has not so much revived the debate about whether Australia is unusually racist as prolonged it. Australia is already in the public stocks over the attacks on Indian students.

The White Australia policy. The condition of indigenous Australians. Pauline Hanson. The Cronulla riots. The opposition to Islamic schools in mainly-white areas. As I've written before, Australia certainly is easy to stereotype as an unusually racist country. There will also be many who think that John Howard's political success partly stemmed from stoking the prejudices of Middle Australia, whether over asylum seekers or his prolonged reticence on the rise of Pauline Hanson.

From the sometimes paranoiac reaction to the arrival of relatively small numbers of boat people on its shores to employment surveys which show that job applicants with Anglo names fare better than Australians with Chinese or Middle Eastern bloodlines, a persuasive case can quickly be assembled.

There's also a counter-argument: that the bigger, more optimistic story about race in post-war Australia is how successfully immigrants from all over the world have successfully been assimilated without any great backlash. Proponents of this point of view would argue that Hansonism was a short-lived phenomenon and that there has been no repeat of Cronulla. Oddly, the doctors who performed the skit on Hey Hey It's Saturday are testament to the changing face of modern Australia. It included a Sri Lankan-Australian, an Indian-Australian, a Greek-Australian, an Irish-Italian-Australian and a Lebanese-Australian.

Earlier in the year, at the height of the Indian student controversy, the Melbourne-based academic Waleed Aly, wrote in The Monthly, which offers a very balanced and carefully modulated assessment. And though he misrepresents 91Èȱ¬ World's coverage of the 2007 federal election, we will forgive him that transgression. He is emerging as one of the country's most eloquent public intellectuals.

Elsewhere, Waleed Aly has said that Australia has "a fairly high level of low-level racism," which seems to me, at least, a very neat summation.

For what it's worth, Australian politicians often appear to have a more pessimistic assessment of the level of racism in their own society, and do little to counter it. Kevin Rudd is normally quick to comment on the water cooler issue of the day, and often adopts a populist stance. His condemnation of the photographer, Bill Henson, for using semi-naked adolescent models, was an obvious case in point. But he has not weighed in on the "blackface" row.

Julia Gillard had this to say during a visit to America. "Obviously, I think whatever happened was meant to be humorous and would be taken in that spirit by most Australians," comments which seemed to misunderstand American racial sensibilities on the subject and to have been intended more for domestic Australian consumption.

Perhaps Kevin Rudd does not want to get on the wrong side of public opinion on the issue. Or perhaps he agrees with those who stereotype Australia: that a racist undercurrent still flows fairly deep.

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• - What's this?

Australia is currently the recipient of so many plaudits that is getting almost embarrassing.

On the economic front, the "wonder from down under" goes from strength to strength. This week it became the first G20 country to raise interest rates from the emergency level. Unemployment actually went down, bucking the global trend and surprising local economists who had all predicted a small rise.

The Aussie dollar has almost reached parity with the US dollar, while , according to the World Economic Forum, though Britain still sits top of the global league.

It is not so much a case of spotting green shoots of recovery. June is bustin' out all over.

Add to that the announcement this week of the country's first female Nobel laureate, the molecular biologist, Elizabeth Blackburn, who won the award for medicine.

Or Australia taking the silver medal on the global quality of life index, coming second only to Norway (Britain came 21st some readers will no doubt be delighted to learn).

Kevin Rudd also returned from the G20 summit in Pittsburgh claiming a diplomatic triumph, since that international forum has now leap-frogged over the G8, a group which does not include Australia.

I've written before about how the cultural cringe, an ingrained sense of inferiority, has been replaced by Australia's cultural creep, a growing influence around the world.

But I think the prominence given to these kind of stories over the past few days in the Aussie press, and the pride with which they are reported, highlights a trait that does hark back to the "cringe" era: the desire, the need even, for international recognition and acclaim.

On page one of A Secret Country, John Pilger speaks of his first job in journalism, which was to hang around Sydney's wharves and airport to ask visiting celebrities what they thought of Australia. They were expected, he writes, "to play a game and make a statement affirming all that was good and sublime about "Godzone"."

I've found myself asking the same question of visiting friends and family members, hoping, I suppose, for the same positive response. It is self-validating. Or perhaps it is related to the country's geographic isolation: people travel so very far to get here that you want them to feel the trip was worthwhile.

So I ask this question because I am still searching for the answer myself: when it comes to international acclaim, is Australia especially needy?

This week, of course, Australia has also been the butt of some strong international criticism, especially in America, over the . More on that later...

UPDATE: There are strong threads currently underway on the booze and sporting codes front, with some very funny and clever comments. "In the school of Greatest Boozy Reputation, Australia may be a high school graduate, but Britain is a university professor," says question-the-motive, who I suspect may well be right. Ever professorial him- or herself, Wollemi reminds us how the wave of post-war southern European immigration enriched and enlivened Australian culture, and especially its cuisine.
"The coastals would throw up if they consumed half of what a bushy consumed," says Petesyc, which sounds very much like a challenge. Meanwhile, the size, shape and names of beer glasses is something I am still trying to get to the bottom of. With that lame stab at humour, I'll wish you a good, hangover free, weekend...

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• - What's this?

The slot on the front page of our website which appears to be reserved for unusual stories from down under was filled the other day by.

The rev-heads who gather each year for this 1000km race, a kind of antipodean Le Mans, are being faced again with a beer limit: 24 cans a day over the 72 hour motoring carnival.

The story seems to fit and fortify the traditional stereotype of Australian males, as a bunch of beer-swilling boozers. But does it stand up to close scrutiny?

Certainly, much is made of the spectacular booze-up which unfolded after the First Fleet came ashore at Sydney Cove in 1788, and it not only provides one of modern Australia's foundation stories, but has been embroidered into the country's self- and international image. The long accepted view is that Australia likes a drink.

From the heavy sponsorship of professional sport to some of the most entertaining advertisements on Aussie television; from the political power of the booze lobby to the publishing success stories of various wine guides and atlases, alcohol is ubiquitous.

Tales of heroic drinking performances - David Boon or Bob Hawke - are part of the sporting and political folklore.

When people conjure up a mental image of the Australian good life, something chilled is often in the picture. After all, what could be more Australian than blowing the froth off a few cold ones. Booze seems to be not just a social lubricant but a societal adhesive.

So a new book, Under the Influence: A History of Alcohol in Australia, by the historians Ross Fitzgerald and Trevor Jordan, makes confounding reading. It shows that Australia's love affair with the bottle has always been exaggerated, and that it is a mistake to view Australia's history through beer goggles.

For a start, Australia ranks 20th in the global alcohol consumption league. As Fitzgerland and Jordan note, 'barely 50% of Australians are motivated to drink on a daily or weekly basis. One in 10 Australians [has] never drunk a full serve of alcohol, another 7% are ex-drinkers, and a third of the population [enjoys] a drink now and then.'

The figures on Aboriginal drinking habits also defy the stereotype - 15% of Aborigines have never drunk alcohol (the national average is 13%). The book also shows that only 33% of Aborgines are regular drinkers compared with 45% in the population as a whole. But here's the rub: of the regular Aboriginal drinkers, 68% drink at dangerous levels.

That is not to say that alcohol is not a major problem in Australia. Ross Fitzgerland, the co-author of the book, fears that alcohol abuse and misuse is increasing 'exponentially'. Binge-drinking amongst young women alone has increased by 200% since the turn of the century.

New South Wales' chief policeman reckons that Los Angeles has fewer alcohol-related incidents than Sydney or Newcastle, New South Wales.

So over to you. Does Australia still deserve its boozy reputation? Or put another way, who is more representative of the modern-day country? Bob Hawke, who as a student famously sank a yard of ale in world record time, or Kevin Rudd, who claims to have been drunk on only three occasions during his life?

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Having devoted the last blog to the rather modest trappings of the Australian Prime Ministership, I watched over the weekend as a Black Hawk military helicopter flew low over Sydney harbour, hovered in the bowl of the city's Olympic stadium and then dipped its nose to salute Kevin Rudd, who was perched in the stands.

'The Black Hawk will bow to the Prime Minister' were the words of the Vegas-style master of ceremonies, as he described this mid-air manoeuvre, a phrase which got some rather quizzical looks from the fans seated close to me.

The dramatic entrance of the helicopter, which dropped a rugby ball from the skies, was all part of the pre-game build-up to the NRL Grand Final, pitting the Melbourne Storm and Parramatta Eels, the climax of the Australian rugby league season.

For the second time in three years, Melbourne won the trophy, which speaks of the fast-changing geography of Australian winter sports. Had someone predicted 20 years ago that a Victorian team would achieve such dominance in what was then an alien sport, the men in white coats would have come crashing through the doors.

Now it is the Melbourne Storm, the men in purple acrylic, who are doing the gate-crashing. They have become the powerhouse team in a New South Wales and Queensland-dominated sport.

Indeed, 85% of the people playing rugby league live in New South Wales, which has 10 professional teams, and Queensland, which has three. For Melbourne, Victoria's sole professional outfit, to win the Grand Final is akin to the Dallas Stars winning ice hockey's Stanley Cup in 1999. Just as there ain't much snow in Texas, there isn't much rugby league in Victoria.

Still, for all its success, the Melbourne Storm does not enjoy much of a hometown following, which speaks of the dominance of Aussie Rules Football in the country's second city. In 2008, the Storm's average attendance was 12,474, which is miniscule in sports-barmy Melbourne. Still, the NRL lives in hope that Victorians will eventually embrace the game.

At the moment all the Australian winter teams are seeking to expand their geographical footprint. Aussie Rules Football is looking to set up expansion teams in western Sydney and Queensland's Gold Coast. Rugby Union is setting up a franchise in Melbourne, which will compete in an expanded Super 14 competition. The NRL is eyeing up the Central Coast of New South Wales and further sites in Queensland (soccer in Australia, remember, is a mainly summer sport).

This begs a number of questions, both large and small. Are there enough Antipodean animals left for the new teams to be named after? Is the market big enough to absorb this fast-paced level of growth? And, ultimately, will one of the winter codes wither or, even, die?

As the full-house at this weekend's Grand Final showed, rugby league is the most resilient of sports. The phrase 'annus horribilis' does not even begin to describe the nightmare season which the game has had off the field, from sex scandals to alleged corruption scandals, from domestic violence to the kind of behaviour that would make members of even the most uproarious American frat house avert their eyes (the Sydney Roosters forward Nate Myles was suspended for six weeks for defecating in a hotel corridor).

For all that, the on-field product has rarely, if ever, been better. Big hits and great tries, which is what rugby is all about.

Aussie Rules appears to go from strength to strength, and although I missed the Geelong/St Kilda clash in the grand final at the MCG, I heard it was a thriller. Of all the codes, it is the one which can look to expand with the greatest confidence, even if most of its profits still come from Victoria, its fiefdom and home. Remarkably, AFL is the fourth most well-attended sport in the world, with an average attendance of over 38,000. Only American football, cricket's Indian Premier League and the German Bundesliga boast higher average crowds (the English premier league is fifth on the list).

Confessedly, I am a rugby union man, a product of where I was born (Bristol) rather than where I went to school. I cannot ever imagine altering my long-held view that, when played at its highest and most flamboyant level, rugby union is the most entertaining and stirring winter game. But the problem facing rugby union in Australia, as in the rest of the world, is that it is rarely played at the highest and most flamboyant level. It has become a kick-fest rather than a try-fest, which is testing the patience of even its more die-hard fans.

This season's Super 14 was dismal, as was most of the Tri-nations series between Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Experimental laws designed to make the game more expansive and exciting have been ditched in the higher echelons of the game, and the quality of play has suffered as a result. Often this season, I have found myself watching rugby league matches and enjoying them far more than rugby union, which I know from friends and fellow fans is a fairly common experience.

My hunch is that Australia will be able to sustain all three codes at the present highly-professional, highly-sponsored and highly-renumerated level. Others are not so sure. So if one code dies at the professional level, which one will it be?

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Coffee which lives up to that billing, and meals that offer much more than just the representation of food - friends, it is good to be back in the Great Southern Land, even if my car appears to have turned from silver to bronze.

In a week where the region has suffered such unspeakable awfulness, I offer this blog as little more than some light relief. It flows from a trip to Washington, where I have spent the last few days.

With its wide avenues and boulevards, its monumental architecture, and its well-placed sense of self-importance, it is a city which has always inspired and intrigued. And that grandeur is reflected in its politics and statecraft.

So whereas Australian prime ministers travel around in the front seat of a white Holden, a gesture of egalitarianism, American presidents boast multi-vehicle motorcades, the length of which are designed to convey the full measure and majesty of their power.

"Hail to the Chief" greets Barack Obama on his entry into a room, whereas on the rare occasions when Kevin Rudd receives a musical tribute it comes in the form of "Waltzing Maltilda" played at foxtrot pace.

Successful US presidents are memorialised in stone and marble, whereas Aussie PMs might get a suburb named after them in Canberra. Better that than the fate which befell Harold Holt, the prime minister who went missing in the surf. He actually has a memorial swimming pool in Melbourne.

Washington inspires rousing television dramas with stirring background music, like the West Wing. They assume the motives of the main players are honourable and pure. Canberra has produced The Hollowmen, a half-hour comedy where cynicism pervades everything.

US presidents take the oath office on Capitol Hill, one of the most glorious pulpits that America has to offer. Kevin Rudd formally took over as prime minister in a frugal ceremony in the front parlour of the governor general's mansion.

In America, the preference appears to be for large personalities with sometimes epic back-stories. Australians seem happy with leaders who lack charisma and candescence. By the same token, American leaders tend to be more ideological and visionary, while Australians are typically pragmatists. Whereas the Americans hope for greatness, the Australian preference is for competent managerialism.

When I covered the 2007 Australian election campaign, I was surprised that there were not more rallies and razzmatazz. Balloons and bunting were in short supply. But the tradition here is for modesty and understatement.

So aside from the names, the House of Representatives and the Senate, there is not a great deal of "Wash" in Australia's "Washminster" model of government. And I strongly suspect that is the way most people like it.

When it comes to politics, Americans warm to poetry, whereas the Australians have long favoured prose.

UPDATE: Loved all your suggestions on the rebranding of Australia. There appear to be some underemployed copywriters reading this blog. I will pass on the link to Tourism Australia, and, who knows, perhaps you'll be getting a call. Manifest in your comments are most of the traits and qualities which make Australia so attractive to outsiders: the humour, the lack of pretension, the simple beauty of the landscape and that self-confident sense of self-deprecation...

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