91Èȱ¬

A fleeting overnight stay in Canberra or the chance to secure your place in history? Quite. Presidential decisions do not come much easier than the last-minute postponement of Barack Obama's visit to Australia and Indonesia earlier this month, so that he could remain in Washington to focus on minting his health care proposals into law. As the Vice-President Joe Biden rather famously put it, in language that could easily have slipped from the lips of an Australian politician, it really was a very big deal.

According to the news diary here, March was supposed to be dominated by the visit from Barack Obama, the scheduling of which had delighted the Australian government because it had come so early in a first-term presidency. With an election in the offing, Kevin Rudd could have paraded a leader with whom he has struck up a genuinely close personal relationship - a friendship which has added weight to Australia's diplomatic punch.

As it turned out, many commentators have taken the White House's decision to Down Under as evidence of Canberra's diplomatic irrelevance, especially since the trip had already been downgraded to a one-night, one-city stay. Unhelpfully for the Rudd government, the change in flight plan for Air Force One came on the back of the postponement of a visit from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defence Secretary Robert Gates because of the Haiti earthquake. Again, the impression here was that Washington did not seemed overly concerned about disappointing Canberra, and the story was of how Australia had been slighted.

This was also supposed to be the month that Australia's influence also became manifest in Beijing over the . Australian diplomats started March hoping that they would have gained full, unfettered access to the entire trial, and that the court in Shanghai court would have veered on the side of leniency in its sentencing. After all, as soon as it became clear that Stern Hu would face trial, the working assumption here has been that he would be found guilty.

However, even though Kevin Rudd said that the world would be watching, China did not seem overly perturbed about obscuring the view. Then came then verdict, which the Australian government has publicly said was unnecessarily severe. Both are setbacks for Australian diplomacy, an area where the country has in recent times taken great pride in punching above its weight.

Of course, the postponement of the Obama visit sits rather unhappily with the diplomatic wrangling in the run-up to the Stern Hu trial, which the news diary had also suggested would be a big story of the month. Canberra wanted consular access to the entire trial. Beijing refused point blank. Again, the commentary has been about how easy it is to disappoint Australia, or, in this instance, to say no.

So imagine for a moment how March might have unfolded. President Obama would have come to Canberra, delivered a speech extolling the mutual benefits of the ANZUS alliance and shown, through his body language and kind words, how much he values his chummy relationship with Kevin Rudd.

Let's also imagine that Beijing had granted Australia's request for complete access to the trial of Stern Hu, and the court in Shanghai had handed down a lighter sentence.

Then we might have been talking about how Australia had entered a new era of regional influence at the beginning of the Asia-Pacific century. Of how it had new-found clout in Washington and new-found leverage in Beijing.

As March came to an end, we could have been talking about the enhanced power of Australia's diplomatic punch - a punch that was becoming commensurate with the country's growing strategic influence in this corner of the world. Instead, we saw a presidential no-show and a further souring of the relationship with Beijing - a diplomatic swing and a miss.

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There's been a stout-worded response from the Australian government to the handed down against the former Rio Tinto mining executive, Stern Hu.

This would have been one of the most carefully-calibrated statements of foreign policy since the Rudd government took office, because it clearly wanted to register its disapproval at the severity of the punishment but not in a manner that risked a full-blown diplomatic row.

In recent months, Canberra has worked hard at mending fences with Beijing, which underscored the delicacy of the diplomacy.

Within hours of the verdict, the formulation that Foreign Affairs minister Stephen Smith delivered to reporters was that the sentence was "tough - very tough". The soft-spoken minister expressed disappointment on two counts: first, the severity of the sentence and second, the fact that the portion of the trial dealing with the alleged theft of commercial secrets was held behind closed doors with Australian diplomats kept outside.

In a stiff rebuke of the Chinese legal system, Mr Smith said that Beijing had "missed an opportunity" to show more openness and transparency. This was an "incorrect decision" that was "not in China's interests". He said that the process raised questions that the international business community would want answered - strongly implying there would be commercial fall-out from the trial.

On the allegations of accepting bribes, Mr Smith said that there was substantial evidence, aside from Stern Hu's admission of guilt on this count, of criminal wrong-doing. Still, he stressed that he thought the sentence was unduly harsh.

Senator Bob Brown, the leader of the Australian Greens, has called for Stern Hu to serve out his sentence in an Australian prison. But although Canberra and Beijing have been working on a prisoner exchange agreement, it has not yet come into effect.

It will be interesting to gauge the public reaction. Up until now, the Stern Hu case has failed arouse any great passion. Certainly, there's been none of the outrage that surrounded the case of David Hicks, an Australian convicted in a military tribunal at Guantanamo Bay of "providing material support for terrorism". Perhaps it will come, but I have yet to hear any great outcry on talk-back radio, or from the tabloids. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that Stern Hu was born in China and did not become an Australian citizen until 1994.

For its part, Rio Tinto has put as much distance between itself and its former employees as quickly as possible. Within hours of the verdict, it sacked its former employees for what it called "deplorable behaviour". The Anglo-Australian mining giant also said that an external audit conducted after the men's arrest did not uncover any evidence of illegal activity: "Rio Tinto has concluded that the illegal activities were conducted wholly outside our systems".

Rio Tinto made no comment on the severity of the sentences, and the company's chief executive, Tom Albanese, expressed the hope that the guilty verdicts would not prevent it from continuing to build its relationship with China. Like we said last week, Rio Tinto is hoping it's business as usual.

You can get Rio Tinto's

UPDATE, TUESDAY 0600BST:

I just wanted to give some morning-after reaction to the Stern Hu verdict. Here's from the business journalist, Ian Verrender, published in the Sydney Morning Herald print edition under the headline, 'Hu just roadkill on the economic superhighway".

Both echoing and amplifying one of the central criticisms of the Australian government, the paper editorialises that "what has been lost... is any previous respect for China's efforts to improve the professionalism, transparency and rationality of its judicial system". The Australian says that the verdict sends a "clear signal that China will not countenance corrupt practices from foreigners or nationals alike", and also criticises the lack of transparency.

In a short editorial, the Melbourne Herald Sun says the sentence "appears harsh", and notes that the Chinese government "missed an opportunity to demonstrate openness in its dealings with a major trading partner".

As if to demonstrate the lack of an obvious tabloid angle on this story, Sydney's Daily Telegraph does not editorialise on the sentence and relegates the story to page 5. The front page is dominated by a story about calls for stronger drink laws. At the foot of the front page is the headline: "100th Boat Arrives: PM's Refugee Crisis Deepens >>p2-3".

The tabloid television news shows, meanwhile, are still focusing on the allegations of misconduct on the set of Hey Dad!, a 1980s television sit-com.

Driving to work this morning, the most outrage to emanate from my radio was generated by the news that international Twenty20 cricket will now move from the Sydney Cricket Ground to the Olympic Stadium at 91Èȱ¬bush (many Sydneysiders regard this as the outskirts of the city, but it has become its geographical centre because of the creep of the cul-de-sacs into the countryside). "A soulless game played at a soulless venue," in the words of one caller.

One of the most interesting strands of the Stern Hu story will be how Rio Tinto responds to the finding from the judge in Shanghai that Stern Hu passed on what the court regarded as commercial secrets to the company. By sacking the four men, Rio Tinto obviously moved quickly to distance itself from its former employees, and the charges against them - the Anglo-Australian mining giant described their behaviour as "deplorable". But the statement released in the aftermath of the verdict has not addressed the issue of the theft of commercial secrets. The statement notes: "Rio Tinto is unable to comment on the charge regarding obtaining commercial secrets as it has not had the opportunity to consider the evidence. That part of the trial was held in closed court and no details of the case were made public until the verdicts and sentences were announced today."

As I write, Rio Tinto is in the process of going through the ruling and formulating its response. I will keep you posted.

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A meaningless gesture designed primarily to expiate white guilt? Or a necessary and welcome acknowledgment of the traditional, indigenous owners of the land?

Many official, corporate and cultural functions in Australia begin with a brief statement recognising the "first Australians" as the country's traditional owners. This, for instance, is how Kevin Rudd started a recent speech before an Australian Medical Association parliamentary dinner in Canberra: by "acknowledging the first Australians on whose land we meet, and whose cultures we celebrate as among the oldest continuing cultures in human history".

But Tony Abbott, the new opposition leader, earlier this month sparked a strong-worded national debate by arguing that the practice has become an empty gesture.

In an , Mr Abbott noted: "I guess this is the kind of genuflection to political correctness that these guys (government ministers) feel they have to make." Sometimes, he noted, it was appropriate, "but certainly I think in many contexts it seems like out-of-place tokenism".

The famously outspoken Mr Abbott has been accused of reopening the culture wars, the ongoing debate over how Australians should regard their history, and of playing "dog whistle" politics in an election year.

But disregarding the politics for one moment, what about the substance of his argument?

"It's not tokenism, it's actually recognition," according to Glen Kelly of the South West Land and Sea Council in Western Australia. "In Nyoongah culture, and, I dare say, in Aboriginal culture across Australia, it's very important that when you visit someone else's country that you recognise the people who are there and get ceremonially introduced and accepted to that country."

Here's an alternative view from Sue Gordon, a retired indigenous Australian magistrate who was a founding member of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. "When different governments first started it, it seemed like it was paternalistic," she told The Australian. "I understand in most states and territories it's policy, they've got to do it. When things are dictated I often think, well, is it genuine?" Darryl Pearce of the Alice Springs native title body Lhere Artepe echoed that view when he noted there was often a "hollowness" in the gesture on certain occasions.

Others have highlighted what they see as the intellectual inconsistency of Mr Abbott's position. He supports the saying of the Lord's Prayer at the beginning of each parliamentary sitting and embraces the rituals of Catholicism (he trained, for a time, to be a priest) - empty gestures to some, vital articles of faith for others.

Noel Pearson, one of the country's most widely respected indigenous leaders and thinkers, that Mr Abbott is playing to the Australians who think that their indigenous compatriots have been given too much. "The people who resent Aboriginal Australians taking their fair share are as resentful about immaterial things as they are about material resources."

He went on: "It is time to realize that the core of anti-Aboriginal thinking is the figure of thought that 'the Aborigines have been given too much X', where 'X' would be something tangible, material, political or cultural. At the same time, he said the acknowledgments could sometimes be 'tedious or silly or tokenistic."

"We all see and hear things that make us cringe sometimes. The sensible thing is to be gracious and let other people do what they think is proper."

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The Rudd government has a new strategy to win the upcoming federal election. It is to encourage Tony Abbott, the famously outspoken new opposition leader, to speak as much as possible.

Last week, the government used its parliamentary majority to move a motion compelling Mr Abbott to immediately orate for ten minutes on the topic of healthcare. When the time was up, the government allotted him an additional five minutes, presumably in the hope that he would impale himself on his own tongue.

In the same week, Kevin Rudd challenged Mr Abbott to a televised debate on health reform. Again, the thinking appears to be that the more exposure he gets - and I'm not talking about his penchant for appearing in Speedos, or budgie smugglers - the more opportunity there is for self-sabotage.

Kevin Rudd has been forced to mount a counter-attack because of polling figures which show that his prime ministerial approval rating has for first time slipped to below 50%. That and state elections in South Australia and Tasmania which saw big swings against Labor.

The focus on healthcare is partly substantive, in that the Rudd government has just unveiled a .

But it is also strategic. Healthcare is one of those touchy-feely issues that conventionally favours Labor. The government also has a published policy, whereas the opposition has yet to reveal its proposals. As an added bonus, the healthcare debate has diverted attention from the disastrous home insulation scheme and the ongoing debate over climate change, which, in the short-term at least, has hurt the government.

For this televised debate, broadcast on Tuesday lunchtime from the National Press Club in Canberra, we not only got to see Mr Rudd and Mr Abbott, but our old friend, "the worm". This is one Australian animal that I am more than happy to report on, for it gauges audience reaction to what the leaders have to say.

The worm clearly judged Mr Rudd the winner. Indeed, the prime minister regularly found its g-spot. It liked Mr Rudd delivering the folksy stuff about how reliant we all are on public hospitals, it responded particularly well to the words "waiting lists too long", and loved his invocation of Australia's fairness doctrine (it was off the scale for his second mention of the phrase "fair go", which is always a winner in these climes).

The worm appeared to take offence at Tony Abbott. It did not like his jokes - I'm at a huge disadvantage, he claimed, "because I'm not capable of waffling for two minutes like the prime minister" - and was repelled by his negativity. Such was its downward trajectory, that at one point the worm looked like it was going to leave my television screen altogether and seek refuge in my home stereo system.

Kevin Rudd seemed to appreciate that television debates are fought in lounge rooms. Tony Abbott's put-downs were better suited for parliamentary consumption - the sort of caustic one-liners that delight the backbenches but do not really work for people sat watching on their sofas.

The rules of the Australian worm are do not go negative, do not talk in policy jargon, talk about real people, tell homespun stories and never mention the word "tax.". Doubtless the same rules apply elsewhere.

For a fuller, worm-free, account of what was said, here are a .

Post-debate coverage can admittedly by terribly worm-centric, but for what's its worth the Channel Nine invertebrate called it 71 to 29 in the prime minister' favour. But it is worth pointing that the worm favoured Kim Beazley in 2001 and Mark Latham in 2004. Both went on to lose the election.

Throughout this year the Liberals have lampooned Kevin Rudd for being "Prime Minister Blah Blah", but the government seems to think that Tony Abbott will talk himself out of a job. Judging by the outcome of this debate, the government's strategy may have yielded its first outright success. After three months of negative headlines, the worm may have turned.

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Since the time of writing, Stern Hu has "made some admissions", in the words of the Australian consul general in Shanghai, involving two bribes totalling almost $1m.

But there's a good deal of conjecture here about whether this should be interpreted as a genuine expression of guilt, or part of a pre-trial strategy to limit the sentence against him. Given that the Chinese authorities decided to press charges, the working assumption here has been that Stern Hu and his co-accused would be found guilty.

I also promised to update you on what Tom Albanese, the chief executive of Rio Tinto, had said during his speech in Beijing, which was delivered on the very day that his employees went on trial in Shanghai. Here it is:

"Our commercial ties go back 50 years and [for] most of that time we've enjoyed a strong relationship with China," Mr Albanese said in an economic forum attended by international business leaders and Chinese government officials.

"Only in the last year did we come across some difficulties, which we are working hard to resolve. Last year we did see four of our employees detained in Shanghai," he went on.

"This issue is obviously of great concern to us, as it would be for any company operating in China. I can only say we respectfully await the outcome of the Chinese legal process."

His comments amplify one of the main points of the blog that both the Australian government and the Anglo-Australian mining giant have tried to minimise the commercial and diplomatic fall-out, and have adopted a policy of normalisation - or, put another way - business as usual.

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The trial has started of Stern Hu, the Australian national and Rio Tinto executive who, along with three colleagues, is facing allegations of bribery and corruption in a courthouse in Shanghai.

Foreign reporters have been barred from covering the proceedings, and there will not even be an Australian consular presence for parts of the trial which the Chinese say touches upon sensitive commercial information. So although Kevin Rudd has said that the world will be watching, the Chinese authorities have obscured the view. Transparent this trial most definitely is not.

Stern Hu was the Anglo-Australian mining giant's lead negotiator in the annual negotiations over iron ore prices with Chinese steel mills. Many in Australia complain that his arrest was an act of retaliation from the Chinese authorities after the collapse last year of a A$20bn bid for a stake in Rio Tinto from the government-owned Chinalco.

The policy throughout from both the Australian government and the Ango-Australian mining giant, Rio Tinto, has been to minimise the diplomatic and commercial fall-out. Since Stern Hu's arrest last July, Rio has not only tried to maintain its highly-profitable commercial relationship with China but actively sought its expansion.

On Friday, on the very eve of the trial, Rio and Chinalco announced a joint venture to mine iron ore deposits in Guinea, West Africa. Moreover, at the same time that his colleagues will be on trial in Shanghai, Rio's chief executive, Tom Albanese, will be a guest of a Chinese government think tank in Beijing in a forum devoted to enhanced global cooperation. I'll update you on what he says on the subject of the trial. Up until now, Rio has issued statements protesting the innocence of its four employees, but kept to a minimum its public statements.

The thinking of both Rio and Kevin Rudd would appear to be that this softly-softly approach is the most sensible way to deal with Beijing, and that being more openly critical would ultimately prove counterproductive.

Yet for some foreign policy commentators here, the episode has offered up a profile of Australian diplomatic impotence. Here's Greg Sheridan, the foreign editor of . "Governments in Canberra are always scared of annoying Beijing, and have a well-earned reputation for poltroonery in Washington, Delhi and Tokyo." Poltroonery is cowardice. As Sheridan points out, neither Kevin Rudd or his deputy Julia Gillard met with the Dalai Lama when he visited Australia last December, a conciliatory gesture towards Beijing that does not appear to have been reciprocated in the handling of Hu's case.

This blog has observed before that Australia is geographically, diplomatically and economically well-placed to play a key role as the Asia-Pacific century continues to play out. Its positioned to act as an interlocutor between China and America, in much the same way that Britain has often acted as a bridge between the US and Europe. The topic of China was set to loom large, for instance, during the now-postponed visit from Barack Obama.

Yet the Stern Hu case has shown the limits of Canberra's influence in Beijing. Australia may well have the most Sino-centric Prime Minister in its history, but Kevin Rudd's much-vaunted fluency in mandarin does not appear to have translated into genuine sway with the Chinese government.

With the Obama visit now provisionally rescheduled for June, Greg Sheridan has come up with an interesting way to test the weight of Australia's diplomatic punch. "[H]ere is one simple way for the American president to gauge whether Rudd has the slightest influence with the Chinese. If Stern Hu is still in jail, then it will be clear that Australia's influence in Beijing is as close to zero as you could possibly imagine."

PS Lots of politics over the weekend, especially for readers in Tasmania, where it looks like Labor has lost power, and South Australia, where it looks like an embattled Premier, Mike Rann, has just held on. It could be a few more days before we know the final results, so I plan to blog then.

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The Oxford education. The energetic commitment to running, cycling and physical self-improvement. The penchant for eye-catching photo opportunities. A common birthplace: London. And the more pressing fact that both will soon appear before their electorates at the head of a resurgent conservative party. Tony Abbott, the Liberal leader, and David Cameron, the leader of the Conservative Party, also share a common goal: the removal of Labour governments whose prime ministers are political soul mates and regular texters.

Curiously, Tony Abbott needs less of a swing than David Cameron to win power and the electoral arithmetic works much more in his favour. Yet it is the British conservative who stands much the better chance of victory, partly because the winds of change are at his back. In Britain, no Labour government has ever won four successive victories (no Labour government had ever won a hat-trick of victories, for that matter). In Australia, you have to reach back to the Great Depression for the last single-term government.

So if these two opposition leaders were to swap notes on the eve of their respective campaigns, what might they say?

For a start, it's not such a fanciful question. At the last British general election the Conservatives imported the Sydney-based Liberal political consultant Lynton Crosby, in the hope that he could do for Michael Howard what he had done for John Howard. Crosby was a key architect of an election strategy built around immigration, a winning issue in Australia but not, as it turned out, in Britain.

The oft-heard criticism of David Cameron is that voters don't really know what he stands for, that he does not come across as a conviction politician. By contrast, Tony Abbott is often accused of having too many convictions and of lacking a self-edit function when it comes to expressing them. So perhaps Abbott would advise Cameron to be more forthcoming about the deep-held beliefs which animate his politics and, conversely, perhaps Cameron would advise Abbott to be a bit more selective when it comes to laying bare his political soul (and perhaps his flesh, as well).

On the subject of his political core values, Abbott claims to be the ideological love-child of John Howard and Bronwyn Bishop, a politician from the right of the party. Tellingly, David Cameron has described himself as the true heir of Tony Blair. Perhaps Abbott would tell Cameron to be less of a poll-driven pragmatist and more of a true-blue conservative. Perhaps Cameron would give Abbott precisely the opposite advice.

David Cameron's "Vote Blue, Go Green" motto would not sit too easily with Tony Abbott's one-time assertion that climate change was "absolute crap". So perhaps he would urge his Australian counterpart to clean up his environmental act. But Abbott could counter, as we have noted in previous blogs, that his criticisms of the Rudd government's emissions trading scheme not only secured him the leadership but helped put the Liberals on an upward trajectory.

Cameron might offer useful suggestions on how to appeal to female voters, a particular area of vulnerability for Abbott. He might also recommend that the modern-day Liberal Party should more closely resemble modern-day Australia in its ethnic make-up.

In turn, I suppose, Abbott might tell Cameron he needs to be more Broken Hill than Notting Hill.

Or perhaps they won't confer at all. Cameron, you sense, was more of a Turnbull man, a politician who not only went to the same university, but even the same college.

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I wonder whether we will come to look at the Rudd prime ministership in terms of its BC phase, and what happened thereafter. "BC" stands, of course, for "Before Copenhagen".

Kevin Rudd seemed at the top of his game in the run-up to the climate change summit. The opposition was in turmoil, the conventional wisdom was that Tony Abbott's climate change scepticism would condemn his party to political oblivion and the Australian prime minister was set to play a key role in Denmark. From the government's viewpoint, it was full steam ahead towards the climate change election.

Yet Copenhagen was deemed a failure, Kevin Rudd was not such as consequential figure as he would have hoped and climate change scepticism has become increasingly intellectually and politically fashionable ever since.

So as I head back to Britain for a short break, perhaps the big running story in Australia since Christmas has been how Kevin Rudd's popularity has slipped.

The home insulation debacle has hit the government hard, though this week's poll - and I've never been in a country, by the way, where polls shape the news to quite the same extent - suggested not quite as badly as the prime minister feared. Still, he has been in full self-flagellation mode for much of the past fortnight, saying sorry at every turn, and on Australia's highly influential commercial talk-back radio shows, to boot, a medium he has shunned since entering office.

The economic growth figures for the last quarter - a very healthy 0.9% rise in GDP for the December quarter - have given the government some much-needed favourable headlines. Yet the higher-than-expected growth also means that interest rates will almost certainly rise a couple of times before the next election.

Anyway, I wanted to revisit some of the blogs over the past few months, and to deal with some of your comments:

10 Projections for 2010

I still stand by them, although the whaling row with Japan has provided the biggest diplomatic spat, and Peter Garrett, the main author of the disastrous home insulation scheme, has generated more headlines than the Nationals Senator Barnarby Joyce - but only just....and the coast is now pretty much clear for Senator Joyce to accelerate ahead.

Running It up the flagpole

With 118 comments and still counting that one really got you going, as identity questions so often do. Peter Fitzsimons of the , and a fervent campaigner for a new flag, recalled quite a neat story the other day. A bunch of Aussies are on their way to Lansdowne Road in Dublin to watch the Wallabies play Ireland. How does it feel to have the Brits occupying a corner of your flag, asks one of the locals. How does it feel to have the Brits occupying a corner of your country, comes the Aussie reply.

Bran Nue Dae

Could it be a commercial success, we asked. Yes, is the answer. It took $A2.6m ($2.4m: £1.6m) in its first week at the Aussie box office.

Multi-racial Melbourne suffers blow to reputation

That blog got the most comments, which is the yardstick often used to judge the success of a post, but not necessarily a good one. You wanted more figures and you wanted more context for the figures. Between 2007-8, the Victoria police recorded 1,447 robberies and assaults against Indians. The Victoria Police say Indians are over-represented in robberies. I'll try to get more.

Slow death of one-day cricket

The one-day international crowds just kept on getting worse, and then the Twenty20 bash-fests were sell-outs. I confess to not being much of a fan of the microwave form of the game, but the home-run-style hitting of young gun David Warner is a wonder to behold. Was DiMaggio that good for the New York Yankees?

Australia in a nutshell

I really enjoyed your comments about where Barack Obama should visit to get experience Australia in a nutshell.

I loved Euroloo's suggestion of the local Westfield. Michael W, I could not agree more with you more about the improving beer situation in this country - and thank goodness. Just as in America, the micro-breweries are a saving grace. Jane Salmon suggested Tarongo Zoo in Sydney, which may well be spot on. I'm being told the first family will, indeed, pay a visit to the zoo for the obligatory koala photo-opportunity.

Going back further, we asked whether voters would take to an American-born politician, Kristina Keneally, as the Premier of New South Wales, the country's most populous state. Well, a recent poll suggested she has become the most popular state premier in the country, although the Labor party in NSW is seen still as toxic.

I should have blogged on the counter-terrorism white paper which the Rudd government released earlier this month. Kevin Rudd has been accused of exaggerating the threat of "home-grown terrorism" to divert attention away from the home insulation debacle. It's a subject, I'll return to.

I should also have blogged about the government's annual report on indigenous affairs. Obviously, we filed on that story, and, again, it's not as if the problem is going away. I also want to do more cultural stuff, honest Whitlamite. There's so much good culture around at the moment. ACDC, the Adelaide Festival, Opera Australia's Tosca, Baz Luhrmann's A Midsummer Night's Dream, another Opera Australia production. Bliss is coming up, an operatic adaptation of Peter Carey's novel. Then there is the much-anticipated arrival of the great Tom Jones.

On that note, I'm off to the green, green grass of home. Catch you later, as they say in these climes.

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Former Australian prime ministers have been much in the news. Malcolm Fraser has just published his memoirs, much of which are a fairly savage attack on his Liberal successor, John Howard, for jettisoning his tolerant approach towards boat people, among other misdemeanours. Paul Keating has been the most public face of a controversial new harbourside development in Sydney designed by Sir Richard Rogers, the British "starchitect" who was partly responsible for the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Its Meccano-style, skeletal skyscraper is being heralded as Sydney's "third icon", completing a trifecta that includes the bridge and the opera house. Yet many Sydneysiders think it is a hi-tech eyesore, especially since it encroaches into the harbour.

Then there is John Howard, who is now set to become the head of International Cricket Council, the world governing body. It is tempting to say that he will be become cricket's global supremo, though that job belongs, of course, to the head of the Indian cricket board, the BCCI. Still, it's a high profile role, and will be bestowed upon Mr Howard more for his political proficiency than his skills with bat and ball, which you can take great delight .

Staying with well-known cricket tragics, , the British satirical magazine, used to run a series called "101 uses for a John Major", a hilarious collection of cartoons which was modelled on "101 uses for a dead cat". What, you wonder, are the "101 uses for a former Australian prime minister"?

There's no equivalent here of post-presidential philanthropy, certainly on the scale or ambition of the Carter or Clinton models. But, as we have noted before, Australians have much narrower expectations of their elected leaders, both in office and seemingly beyond.

In his life post-politics, Bob Hawke is known best for his business endeavours, parlaying his contacts book into a lucrative career in international; consultancy. Paul Keating, still only 52 when he left office, has also been successful in the realm of business.

Occasionally, he also brings his brutal broadsides in the public square, on issues ranging from architecture to the resiting of the capital. Mr Keating, a Sydneysider, thinks Canberra should relocate to his home city. John Howard has been busy drafting his memoirs, delivering occasional lectures and watching a lot of cricket. Malcolm Fraser has probably been the most active on the world stage, becoming chair of the Commonwealth Eminent Persons Group along with a couple of UN panels.

The strong rumour in Canberra is that Kevin Rudd hopes one day to become the Secretary General of the United Nations, and views the Australian prime ministership as much as a platform as a pinnacle. His critics would doubtless argue that his skills set better fits the honorary life-presidency of, say, the Institute of Australian Actuaries.

Should former PMs just fade away, and be left to compose their memoirs? Or should they take on more active diplomatic, public and charitable assignments? If so, what are the 101 uses for a former Australian prime minister?

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Just as Tigermania was taking hold in Melbourne last November, a Sydney-based British reporter was dispatched to the city by the American tabloid, the National Enquirer, and told to look out for an attractive women wearing knee-length boots and a distinctive belt. She was reportedly "stalking" the world's number one golfer.

Sure enough, the reporter spotted a woman meeting that description checking into Tiger's hotel, the Crown Towers, and digital photographs were taken to record the moment. For the National Enquirer, the snapshots were a smoking gun, since the woman was not a "stalker" at all but one of Tiger's alleged mistresses - the first to be "outed" in the scandal which pummelled his reputation, threatened his career and jeopardised his marriage.

The irony is that during his stay in Melbourne, his first trip to Australia in over a decade, Tiger had presented himself as a model professional. Lured to Victoria with the sweetener of about $A1.5m ($1.35m: £900,000) in taxpayer's money, he happily promoted Melbourne's sandbelt golf courses. Then he went on to win the Australian Masters' tournament, proudly donning the winner's yellow jacket at its end. It proved to be his last tournament before his self-enforced break from the game.

Now Victorians are being asked to consider whether taxpayer's money should be spent on hosting Tiger again.

It is an election year in the state, and the question has been raised by Peter Ryan, the leader of the Victoria Nationals and the deputy opposition leader. It follows news that the Labor state government is considering offering Tiger public money to come back.

"I think that there is a reticence in community about doing that and I think the premier should hasten slowly," Peter Ryan told the last week. "I mean like it or not, people who fulfill a role such as that which Tiger Woods does are role models. They mightn't choose to be so but they are. I think it can very fairly be said that when he was in Australia last year, he conducted himself in the public eye accordingly."

"I think there was universal acclaim for the way in which he presented himself. We now know of course, that other things were occurring in different areas of the man's life and I think therefore that people have a sense of being let down."

On economic grounds alone, financing Tiger's return seems like a no-brainer. The golfer turned out to be a one-man stimulus package during his last trip, and the state government calculated that he had injected more than $A34 million into the Victoria economy. But this is being posed now as a moral question.

The Labor state government has accused Mr Ryan of being a moral policeman. Others have noted that his comments tap into a puritanical streak which has long been evident in Australia in general and Victoria in particular - a censorious impulse which Australians called wowserism.

Certainly, the debate over whether Tiger's off-course behaviour should disqualify him from receiving taxpayer's money take us into curious territory, and raises all sorts of questions about moral equivalence.

Should the same rule be applied to other visiting sports stars? And to what extent? The upcoming Australian grand prix takes place in Melbourne at the end of March, at huge expense to the taxpayers of Victoria. Should the visiting drivers be scrutinised for wrong-doing, and the funding be conditional?

Should it be applied to foreign dignitaries, whose visits often come with a huge security bill?

And what of home-grown sports stars, who often receive public subsidies indirectly?

Or is this simply an instance of wowserism gone mad?

Tiger has recently been dropped by Gatorade, AT&T and Accenture. Should the taxpayers of Victoria follow suit?

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