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To Canberra, for Senate hearings into a non-binding plebiscite. What a riveting combination, I hear you cry, as you manoeuvre your mouses to click on the next story. But this is the course which the Republican movement believes could ultimately lead to an Australian head of state, and thus might be the start of something significant.

The hearings, the first on the question of an Australian Republic for five years, are the initiative of Senator Bob Brown, the leader of the Australian Greens, whose conservationism does not extend to the monarchy. His plan is to get Australians to vote in a non-binding plebiscite, as opposed to a constitution-changing referendum, on the simple question of whether they favour an Australian head of state.

If the nationwide plebiscite decided "Yes", the idea would be to press for a full referendum to change the constitution, something which is notoriously difficult to do (remember, only eight referenda have passed since Federation).

The strategy behind the move, of course, is to unite Australian Republicans, who were divided at the 1999 referendum between those who favoured a directly-elected president and those who wanted an appointed president.

So many of the Republican stars are in alignment right now. Kevin Rudd is a Republican, so too is Malcolm Turnbull, the former leader of the Republican movement and now the leader of the opposition.

All of Mr Turnbull's main rivals, including former treasurer Peter Costello, support an Australian head of state - though not all of his party, which for him is a major stumbling block.

There was almost universal support for a Republic at last year's 2020 Summit - a gathering in Parliament House of business and community leaders, celebrities, academics, etc, admittedly hand-picked by the government.

But many of those participants have felt aggrieved that in its formal response to the 2020 summit's ideas and proposals, a Republic has not been put on the government's "to do list". (Of the 1,000 ideas that came from the summit, the Rudd government pledged to "immediately begin work" on just nine).

On the future of the monarchy, the government was non-committal saying that it favoured constitutional reform "where appropriate".

Many thanks for your comments and observations on Anzac Day, which I thought produced one of the best threads for a while. So here's a related question to consider: why the Anzac spirit has never translated into an overwhelming Australian head of state spirit?

Clearly, there's a widespread sense that Australian diggers were treated as cannon fodder by the British during World War I, and that the Australian people were left in the lurch by Churchill during World War II. Yet one of the paradoxes confronted by the Australian Republican movement during the 1999 debate was that Australia's veterans groups were one of the main bulwarks of the monarchy.

Clearly, nobody would blame Queen Elizabeth for the sins of Winston Churchill. Yet neither war seemed to produce much of an anti-British backlash. In fact, some of the histories suggest quite the opposite: that the bonds of kinship were strengthened. Comments please...

UPDATE: Sydney has had yet another power cut, which this time affected Sydney Fashion Week. Black-out is apparently the new black.

On that subject, I know I've been giving Sydney a hard time. The truth is that were I to write down everything I like about the place, the list would run the length of the cliff-top walk from Bronte to Bondi.

But there are frustrations and, on that subject, this caught my eye. It comes from that old sage Phillip Adams: "New South Wales? New? There's nothing very new about South Wales. It's become Elderly South Wales, even Old. It's rheumatic, arthritic and shows signs of Alzheimer's. Its political condition is so parlous, so terminal, that perhaps it's time to put it out of our misery."

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"I had the distinct impression I was witnessing the end of a ritual, the last gasps of a ceremony which had lost most of its meaning."

So wrote the award-winning Australian journalist, Craig McGregor, as he watched the commemorations to mark Anzac Day in 1968.

"It is dying on its feet for lack of wars to sustain it," he observed. By the mid-1970s, at the fag end of the Vietnam War, Anzac Day merited little coverage in the pages of The Australian, which appeared to bear out his prediction.

Now though, Anzac Day, along with the Anzac story which helps popularise it, seems stronger than ever, and the day itself has "taken on the character of a quasi-religious festival" - in the words of the social commentator Hugh Mackay.

According to the veterans' organisation the RSL, the parades and dawn observances are attracting ever-swelling crowds.

Perhaps this revivalism provides evidence of a "new traditionalism" in Australia, which former prime minister John Howard was especially keen to encourage - and often help choreograph - and Kevin Rudd has been happy to sustain.

I always enjoy watching the annual Anzac Essendon/Collingwood Australian Rules football at the MCG, along with the military ceremony which precedes it. What I had not realised was that this modern-day tradition stretches back only as far as 1995. Like the veneration of the baggy green cap, it's a recently invented sporting custom.

I've written before about how war-time histories are one of the biggest growth areas of the Australian book industry - and just look at the number of walkers keen to tread the Kokoda Trail in Papua New Guinea, where Australians fought the Japanese in World War II.

Back in 2001, the number of walkers was 76. Last year, there were more than 5,500. Trekking along the Kokoda trail is all part of a revived Anzac spirit - and, tragically, as we have seen this week a treacherous one at that.

The politicisation of Anzac Day is really interesting, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. The former Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating wanted to reorientate the focus of the Anzac commemoration towards the Kokoda Trail and the Asian theatre. This emphasised how Australia had been left in the lurch by Winston Churchill, and fitted in with his prime ministerial narrative: the idea that the country should loosen ties with Britain and to look more towards Asia.

John Howard, however, wanted to revert back to the primacy of Gallipoli and the Anzac legend which flowed from it.

For a prime minister who always bridled at what he called the "black armband", or self-flagellating, view of Australian history, there were obvious attractions in the story of Gallipoli.

One commentator noted that the Anzac legend helped suppress "parts of Australian history that are difficult to deal with".

The Australian historian Martin Crotty has some really interesting things to say. He calls Gallipoli "an almost biblical creation story, a national equivalent of the Book of Genesis". By this assessment, it offered a more heroic narrative than the arrival of the first fleet in 1788, and the destruction of indigenous lives and culture which that led to.

And certainly it offers a more awe-inspiring starting point for many Australians than the sometimes lifeless negotiations which took the continent from being a group of separate colonies to a unified nation back in 1901.

As for my favourite description of Anzac Day itself, I think it comes from Donald Horne, the author of the Lucky Country, and speaks of the egalitarianism that is always celebrated on this sacred day.

"Death is a leveller," he wrote, and thus Anzac Day is perhaps best interpreted as "an expression of the commonness of man".

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In a week when the highest rating Australian stories on the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ News website concerned those snakes on that Qantas plane (I plead guilty, I filed on that one) and something about wombat toilet paper (not guilty), I'm glad that we did that piece on race, and that it generated so much comment. (not that raising the comment hit-rate was the intention, Anonymous Californian - if you really want to light the touch-paper, you mention Olympic medal tables and run links from the sports pages.)

Much as I love blogging, I willingly accept there's a superficiality about them, and they're not the ideal place to discuss such a sensitive and complex topic. But they're one of the few ways we have of soliciting your views, and on a subject like this I really think they are worth canvassing.

Whitlamite notes that 'no consensus has been reached [and] no credible conclusions made', which is true, of course. But the same applies to any other thread on any other blog. That seems to be an unfair standard to apply to any form of journalism, from the 500 word blog to the 5000 word essay to the full-blown studio debate.

Inevitably, these kind of discussions are also going to be impressionistic and feeling- rather than fact-driven. As PaulCrossleyiii notes, 'I don't really know how you'd measure racism.' For that reason, anecdotal evidence (like Robert's encounter in that supermarket in Brisbane to Britontour's experience in that Melbourne museum) can be just as valid as cold statistics. International comparisons are also historically and culturally fraught, as a number of you pointed out.

For all that, there's one fact that is worth restating, and it's this: almost half of all Australians were either born overseas or had a parent born in another country. Certainly, this often comes as a surprise to many people living outside of Australia, and perhaps many living here, as well.

As for the latest 'official' take on racism in Australia, it is worth taking a look at most recent findings from the Australian Human Rights Commission, which you can access .

On the question of the parameters of the debate, and whether it should take in the indigenous experience, my sense is that it is unavoidable. Is not discussing racism in Australia without raising the legacy of white settlement akin to discussing race relations in the United States without considering the modern-day impact of slavery or segregation? These are not parallel debates, it seems to me, but inexorably entwined.

Here are a couple more observations, for what they are worth. I thought that when I came to Australia I would spend much more time reporting on race relations than has actually been the case. I arrived a year after the Cronulla riots, when the Howard government's proposals for a citizenship test had clearly stoked a good deal of resentment, especially among Lebanese Australians, many of whom believed it was a manifestation of a creeping 'Islamophobia' in Australia society that had been fuelled by 9/11 and the Bali bombings.

Two years ago, for instance, I regularly find myself reporting from Lakemba in Sydney, the home to many Lebanese Australians. But race-related stories have fallen down the news agenda, which probably reflects our shifting preoccupations and an easing of tensions. In recent weeks, for instance, the biggest headline to come from Lakemba was that it has just been named as Sydney's best suburb for property investment, which is perhaps indicative of how our news priorities have changed.

Certainly, the tendency right now is to assess the state of the nation by looking at its economic health rather than its communal relations.

Has there been an easing of racial tensions since Cronulla? I suspect there probably has been, whether it is because of the efforts of local community groups (Surf Life-Saving Australia successfully recruited a number of Lebanese Australia surf life-savers, for instance), the widespread public revulsion at the scenes of violence there, or the failure of groups like the Australia First Party to establish any kind of political foothold in places like Cronulla.

Many would doubtless argue that a change of government has also played a part. I suspect that if we had had this discussion two years back, the debate would have been far more heated and anguished. Over to you.......

PS: Fast on the heels of the women who paid for a new tattoo with her cash hand-out from the government comes - the man who spent it on a .44 calibre revolver.

Economic indicator of the week: Kevin Rudd has finally used the R-word, and said that the Australian economy will go into recession.

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Researching a film on the end of the resources boom, I've been reading a little more of the history of the mining industry in Australia. Like those gold mines themselves, its a real treasure-trove of anecdotes, reminiscences and fables, many of which help make sense of the Australia of the present. As Guy Pearse notes in his recent Quarterly Essay, Quarry Vision, much of Australia's "cultural furniture" was put in place by the gold rush of the 1850s.

First off, Australia's population trebled. It "sowed the seeds multiculturalism," as he puts its, by attracting so many workers from so many different countries. The arrival of Chinese immigrants also led to a wave of xenophobia and nativism, encapsulated by the Bulletin's infamous masthead slogan, "Australia for the white man and China for the chow," and enshrined in the "White Australia" policy.

All of which brings us to the last blog on the surge in asylum seekers. Thanks for your comments, especially those which were so detailed, considered and insightful. Wollemi noted: "I don't buy the accusations that Australia as a society is xenophobic" - which is the subject I want to open up for fresh comment.

I suppose if you wanted to construct an argument that Australia was and is unusually racist and xenophobic then here is you where might start. You would remind people that the White Australia policy lasted until the late-1960s, and enjoyed bipartisan and popular support. You would raise the treatment of the Stolen Generations and the gap in living standards between black and white Australians. You might highlight the rise of Pauline Hanson, and note that John Howard won the 2001 election by arousing xenophobic fears after the Tampa and inaptly-named "children overboard affair" (no children were thrown overboard). The Cronulla riots would feature, and it's always easy to co-opt a sound-bite from daft people saying daft things - like the woman in Camden, New South Wales, who said she was opposed to the opening of an Islamic school in her neighbourhood because she was worried that local children would end up speaking "Islamic". You could make the argument that some of the commentary during the latest asylum seekers debate has been paranoiac and disproportionate.

And here's how you might begin to construct the counter-argument. Australia is one of the most multicultural countries in the world, with a polyglot population which lives in relative harmony. Given the fast-paced demographic changes after the war, and the massive influx of immigrants, you could make the argument that the process of assimilation has been remarkably smooth and the backlash reassuringly weak. You would note that Hansonism was a short-lived political phenomenon and its one-time figurehead is now a figure of fun. You could argue that John Howard would not have remained a viable national politician had he not apologised for his comments back in 1988, during his time on the opposition benches, when he called for Asian immigration to be 'slowed down a little.' You would highlight the big-screen turn-out across the country and the scenes of big-screen joy when Kevin Rudd said "Sorry". And you could make the case that Cronulla was an aberration: one of the reasons it was so shocking was because it was so unexpected, the argument would run.

Over to you...

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The details still are sketchy about what caused the explosion on board a boat carrying refugees seeking asylum in Australia that had been intercepted by a naval patrol boat 600km from Broome, but it has brought into sharp focus the ongoing debate about border security - that Australian perennial.

This is the sixth boat carrying asylum seekers to arrive in Australian waters this year, and the 13th since the Rudd government ended the Howard government's controversial Pacific Solution, and softened its policies towards refugees. In the past two weeks, some 200 people have been detained.

So is the opposition right to claim that the Rudd government has gone soft on asylum seekers, and that Australia has let down its guard? Or is the recent surge part of a global phenomenon, as Australia's Foreign Minister Stephen Smith suggested this week when he addressed a people-smuggling conference in Bali. Smith claimed that the increased number of boat people was the result of the ongoing conflicts in Sri Lanka and Afghanistan and the global economic downturn.

Certainly, the latest figures from the UNHCR, the United Nations' refugee agency, reveal an increase in global refugee numbers: asylum applications to industrialised nations went up by 12% last year. With the number of asylum seekers increasing last year by 19%, Australia was above that global average, but saw nowhere near the influx of countries like Japan (95%), Italy (122%) or Finland (181%). You can

Still, government officials have conceded in private that the end of the Pacific Solution, which was brought in after in the run-up to the 2001 election, is being used as a marketing tool by Indonesian people-smugglers.

No wonder the Australian government is so keen for Indonesia to push through new laws enabling the criminal prosecution of people smugglers. Jakarta has signalled its willingness to do so, but the legislation has yet to be enacted.

Border security has long been a highly-contentious issue, and Mike Steketee of The Australian argues that the public and political response is often hyper-ventilated and disproportionate.

"The debate on refugees in Australia is stuck in a time warp," he claims. "Why are Liberals still talking up the threat of a few boatloads of people wanting to settle in Australia? Presumably because that is how they were conditioned by John Howard and Philip Ruddock [the former immigration minister] in the wake of September 11. Perhaps there is a more venal purpose as well, such as whipping up xenophobia."

But here's a very different take from Andrew Bolt, a columnist at the Melbourne Sun-Herald.

"John Howard's 'inhuman' policies stopped not just the people smugglers but the deaths at sea. If some of these boats lured here by Kevin Rudd now sink, how truly 'kinder' is he?"

In an update on his blog, he asks: Comments please...

On a very different tack, I offer up my economic indicator of the week: that great barometer of the global economic climate - the queue of coal ships waiting outside Newcastle on the New South Wales coast.

I saw it for myself earlier this week, when I visited the world's largest coal export facility, and there were fewer than 10 ships lining up. At the height of the mining boom, there were as many as 70 huge vessels. At night, locals say the lights on the ships made it look like Newcastle had an extra suburb.

Talking of lights and suburbs, Sydney has gone four days without a blackout.

UPDATE: After being accused by the opposition of going soft on asylum seekers, Kevin Rudd has weighed into the border security with some unusually strong rhetoric.

"People smugglers are engaged in the world's most evil trade, and they should all rot in jail because they represent the absolute scum of the earth," he has said.

"People smugglers are the vilest form of human life. They trade on the tragedy of others and that's why they should rot in jail and in my own view, rot in hell. We see this lowest form of human life at work in what we saw on the high seas yesterday. That's why this government maintains its hardline, tough, targeted approach to maintaining border protection for Australia."

The authentic voice of a prime minister expressing genuine outrage? Or a stab at raw populism as he tries to harden up his border security credentials?..

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Last month, Sydney led the world in the Earth Hour event, a campaign aimed at raising awareness of global warming by encouraging people to turn off their lights for 60 minutes. The billowing white sails of the Opera House were shrouded in darkness. So, too, the normally-floodlit girders of the harbour bridge.

In the three weeks since, Sydneysiders have experienced four involuntary black-outs, as the power supply has gone on the blink. So I am writing this blog in semi-darkness, wondering why it is that I have now experienced more power outages in the past two weeks in Australia's most populous city than I did in almost three years living in Delhi.

Perhaps this is an unfair comparison. Delhi has recently opened an impressive new metro network, which is still a pipedream for most Sydneysiders. It is run by a popular government which recently won re-election because of its success in modernising the city.

The Indian capital is also being transformed by ambitious new infrastructure projects hurriedly being built in time for next year's Commonwealth games. Sydney, meanwhile, is suffering still from a post-Olympics slump.

Delhi is in the midst of India's revolution of rising expectations. Many Sydneysiders just seem reconciled to the uninspiring reality that they live in a malfunctioning city - a beautiful and vibrant one, for sure, but an underachieving metropolis nonetheless. 'Gotta love this city,' is the catch-phrase of the Sydney Morning Herald columnist, Peter Fitzsimons. But the city's creaky infrastructure is making it increasingly hard for many.

The past month has seen a rash of unfavourable headlines. Yet another ferry ran aground in the harbour - there were thirteen incidents involving the city's ageing fleet during the last financial year, once again highlighting the findings of a report which called for its modernisation.

There was the bikie-killing at Sydney airport, which revealed surprising gaps in security at the city's most important gateway.

Then there was the failure of the city's expensive new emergency warning system installed in the central business district to tell people what to do in the event of terrorist attacks or natural disasters. When the power failed, the state government finally learnt that it did not have a back-up generator to fall back on.

At the risk of being run out of town, many of the answers to Sydney's problems are found 881km to the south: in Melbourne. The roads and highways are impressive, the trams and trains seem to work efficiently and the city has clearly benefited from more than a decade of private and public investment. Alternatively, the New South Wales government could look to Brisbane, another thrusting and flourishing city.

Then, of course, there are the cities of Britain, all of which are shimmering, trouble-free utopias: modern-day Babylons, each and every one of them.*

I know this blog is Sydney-centric. But the city's problems are of national import, both economically and politically. Remember, the next time the voters of New South Wales will go to the polls is at the federal rather than state election. So local federal Labor MPs may take the blame for the failures of the Labor state government. For a party which returned to power on the back of big gains in New South Wales and Queensland, this is a real concern.

As the Australian economy worsens, the popularity of the Australian government continues to rise. That makes some sense of the comments from people I have spoken to at the top of the ALP who reckon the biggest threat to the government's re-election comes not from the GFC but from NSW.

And with that, the lights have come back on........

* Just kidding, Whitlamite.......

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Booze is to the back page of Australian newspapers right now what China is to the front. Many of the major sports stories at the moment start with the bottle or in the bar, just as many of the news stories originate from Beijing.

Take the case of the Australian swimmer Nick D'Arcy, who pleaded guilty to inflicting grievous bodily harm on his fellow swimmer, the Commonwealth Gold medallist Simon Cowley after a boozy night in a Sydney bar. Cowley was left with fractures to his jaw, eye socket, cheekbone and nose, and D'Arcy was left with his swimming career in jeopardy. He was blocked from competing at the Beijing Olympics, and again at the forthcoming World Championships.

Nick D'Arcy admitted to a problem with binge drinking: "I feel like I've got to catch up, like I've got to get all the drinking in that everyone else got in, in the 12 weeks or so that I haven't been drinking (during training),'' he said. 'I get absolutely sloshed. I do lose some of the impulse control that I do have when I am sober.'

This week we also learnt of the death of the cylist Jobie Djaka, who had been fighting a long battle with depression and alcoholism. And this weekend will also see the comeback of Brett Stewart, the one-time poster boy of Australian Rugby League, who this week pleaded not guilty to sexually assaulting a 17-year old girl. Stewart had received a four-match ban from the league for breaching the code of conduct regarding consuming alcohol in public places - in this case, the Manly Sea Eagles pre-season launch event held at a harbour-side bar.

Alcohol bans on players. Booze-free days. Breathalyzer tests to ensure that players do not drink over a pre-agreed level (which is what Russell Crowe's South Sydney Rabbitohs do). Various strategies have been thought up to combat booze in sport in general, and rugby league in particular.

But many insiders believe that the culture of sport has to change, whether it means limiting alcohol advertising and beer-related sponsorship deals or publicly questioning the sanctification of legendary sporting boozers.

Consider the hero-status of the former Test cricketer and present test selector David Boon. Is he best remembered for a) scoring 7,422 test runs at an average of 43.65 or b) consuming 52 cans on a flight from Sydney to London ahead of the 1989 Ashes at an average of 2.26 every flying hour? Now, of course, you can get the 'Boony doll,' the mascot of one of Australia's best-known brewers and one of the sponsors of the national team. The adverts - you can You Tube search them - are hilarious.

Of course, there will be others who will argue that Australian sport is basically holding up a mirror to Australia society - a country where one in eight people is thought to drink at 'dangerous levels,' and where 230,000 children have a parent or carer who drinks excessively.

+ I promised not to mention Rudd again for a while, but I enjoyed his appearance on local radio earlier in the week when he found himself fielding calls about how people were planning to spend their $A900 cash hand-outs from the government. One woman said she planned to spend it on a new tattoo.........

With that, I'll wish you all a Happy Easter.

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It seems that virtually every front page story about Australia these days has some kind of Chinese dimension.

Only last week, we reported from the Western Australian communities of Ravensthorpe and Hopetoun, which have been completely devastated by after just eight months of operation.

The main reason? The slowdown in China has led to a collapse in the price of nickel.

When Pacific Brands recently shed 1,850 Australian jobs it was because the company decided it was cheaper to make its underwear and smalls in China.

Defence Secretary Joel Fitzgibbon has been fighting off calls for the resignation because he , Helen Liu.

Then there's the decision pending from the Australian government over whether China's state-owned Chinalco should be allowed to take its holding of the mining giant, Rio Tinto, up to 18%.

At a whopping Aus$23bn (£11bn), this would represent China's biggest single foreign direct investment and lay down another milestone in Beijing's inexorable rise.

Then there is the related story of how Chinese spies allegedly tried to during the initial stages of Chinalco's bid, and also allegedly targeted the phone and computer of Kevin Rudd during a trip to the Beijing Olympics.

For the first time, of course, Australia is being led by a Sinophile, who managed ahead of the last election to parlay his fluency in Mandarin into favourable headlines and poll numbers.

Curiously, the pollsters identify two big spikes in Rudd's approval ratings in the run-up to the election: the first, after it was reported that he'd had a drunken night out at a New York strip club; and second, when he addressed the Chinese delegation at the APEC Summit in flawless Mandarin just weeks before the 2007 election.

Now, though, there is a fear in the prime minister's office that his relationship with Beijing could turn into a liability.

How else do you explain the decision by his image makers and media handlers not to tell Australian reporters about his pre-G20 meeting at The Lodge in Canberra with Li Changchun, who serves as the Chinese propaganda minister?

And what about his reluctance to sit next to the Chinese ambassador to London during a ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ interview in London last month, which Mr Rudd suggested was simply because he wanted to sit alongside his old mate, David Milliband, the British Foreign Secretary.

Admittedly, I've heard of speed-dial diplomacy, but sofa diplomacy?

Seemingly, the Australian prime minister is desperate to avoid being tagged "the Manchurian Candidate".

"" is how the Sydney Morning Herald characterised things over the weekend.

No doubt there will be those who think it makes perfect sense for the Rudd government to realign and recalibrate its foreign policy to reflect the growing economic and diplomatic power of China. There will be others who worry that he's getting too close.

And should people here be worried that Kevin Rudd's meeting with the Chinese propaganda minister made headlines in the Chinese media but was the subject of what was essentially a media black-out here in Australia?

+ A final word for the time being on Kevin Rudd - I promise. Moresby-Parks asks why I haven't yet been to Nambour, the prime minister's birthplace? The answer is that I have been there, and was disappointed by the lack of tributes to the town's favourite son.

This, after all, is the land of the Big Banana and other over-sized landmarks. So perhaps the town centre could be enlivened by a giant pair of titanium spectacles or even a mound of ear wax? Other suggestions are more than welcome...

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A fireside chat in the Oval Office. A visit to Number Ten. An audience at Buckingham Palace. And one of the biggest headline from Kevin Rudd's two-week trip abroad is a "mile-high meltdown" from when he tore into an air hostess on board his VIP flight to Papua New Guinea earlier in the year. The "hostie" could not provide him with a special non-red-meat meal, apparently, so he reportedly spat out the prime ministerial dummy and reduced her to tears.

At his post-summit press conference in London, Rudd apologised - as he did, apparently, at the conclusion of his flight from Port Moresby.

Given that part of the focus of the G20 was to curb executive excess, the incident seems particularly unfortunate. After all, his RAAF plane ("Kevin 1", anybody?) reportedly costs $A28,000 an hour to run.

But perhaps it also highlights two issues which might dent the stratospheric approval ratings which we were discussing earlier in the week. The first is his travel. The second is his temper.

Rudd's positive approval ratings don't exactly nosedive when he jets off abroad, but the "Kevin 747" tag is a piece of excess baggage which his image makers would be happy to lose.

Given the distances and logistics involved, it's inevitable that trips to the US and Europe will take him away for a significant amount of time. Many of these trips are also clearly essential if Australia is to continue punching above it weight on the diplomatic circuit. But many Australians do not see it that way.

Some no doubt feel that Rudd is too easily dazzled by the big lights of Washington and London - even though it's really the big brains of Washington and London that he seems to enjoy. Perhaps there is something of the tall poppy about it, as well. I've written before that people don't seem to mind him being a tall poppy at home, but are less sympathetic when he ventures abroad and becomes a peripatetic tall poppy.

Perhaps there's a nagging sense that he sometimes seems more energised by his job when he is outside of Australia rather than within it - the feeling that Australia is not really big enough to accommodate his talent. Your comments please.

As for the mile-high meltdown? We all have tempers, but his is particularly interesting because it stands at odds with the public geniality which he tries to project, and which partly explained his political rise (those chummy, regular early morning appearances on Channel Seven's Sunrise programme were vital in showing that he could appeal to middle Australia). A while back, a Labor insider described to me a meeting with the Prime Minister at which he erupted into a "child-like tanty" [a tantrum] when someone crossed him. The episode speaks of a politician who has always found it easier to command respect for his intellectual prowess rather than attract genuine affection.

Wayne Goss, the former state premier of Queensland and Rudd's former boss, had this to say of him: "Kevin has worked hard at becoming normal. He's come close but I don't think he'll ever quite get there. But I don't think you want a Prime Minister to be normal, do you?" Over to you on that one.

On the travel front, it is perhaps worth remembering that Robert Menzies, that arch Anglophile, spent a considerable amount of time in London during the first two years of the war, and wrote in his diary on his return in April 1941: "A sick feeling of repugnance and apprehension grows in me as I near Australia." He went on, of course, to be the country's longest serving prime minister.

UPDATES: For those who prefer reportage to blogs, we've just paid a visit to the towns of

We've also been to the Northern Territory to report on the row over .

Thanks, as ever, for your comments. To Wollemi who suggested that I had underestimated Hawkie's legislative accomplishments by overlooking ATSIC and Medicare, I'd suggest that both were extensions of reforms instigated by Gough Whitlam, who created Medibank and the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee and the National Aboriginal Conference.

For those who think that I mischaracterized Queensland by calling it "arguably Australia's most conservative state", I offer this assessment: Queensland is "a state which could never make up its mind whether it wanted to be California or Louisiana....The home of innovation or the bastion of reaction". It comes from Australia's most famous Queenslander, one Kevin Michael Rudd.

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