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At last, an Australian government has presented for public consideration an intelligently conceived framework for a national carbon emissions plan. Has Gillard broken her pre-election 'no carbon tax' promise? Does it matter?
Syd Tutton, national president of the St Vincent de Paul Society in Australia, died on Sunday. He was a fighter for social justice, uninterested in personal recognition, making light, for example, of the Papal Knighthood he received in 2009, threatening to ask the Vatican for a horse to go with the title.
Irrigated agriculture systems, like electric grids and city roads, trigger a government's duty of care to the human communities that they sustain. Particularly when they were built with the blood, sweat and tears that went into building our Murray-Darling Basin irrigation communities.
You don't get many words out of him, and when he does speak they always end in a question. 'It's gonna cost a lot to get new tyres, knowata mean? You're better off getting re-treads, knowata mean?' In our society there are hundreds of jobs that barely rate a mention, and armies of unsung workers who keep it functioning and well-oiled.
Every year we mine about a billion tonnes of iron ore. If we keep this up for five billion years, we will have dug up the whole earth to a depth of about 10 km. Here is a guide to how human existence might continue until the sun dies.
The Howard years made me feel ashamed to be Australian, and I felt about his electoral defeat the way East Germans felt about the Berlin Wall coming down: as a kind of cleansing. Rudd disappoints for a different reason.
Concepción, the second largest city in Chile, was worst affected by the weekend's earthquake. I was there little more than a month ago, visiting old comrades and my sister and her family. At the moment of writing I have been unable to contact them.
I clearly remember what I was doing the day Nelson Mandela walked free from prison. The behemoth apartheid state shifted so thoroughly and so smoothly that even the erratic events of the past 20 years have done little to diminish South Africa's reputation as a miracle nation.
Everyone from Roger Federer to Kim Clijsters would know that when you're in the top 100, tennis is a mental contest. It's when you walk around the outside courts at the Australian Open that you discover the players who really set tennis apart from other sports.
The performers, in white-face make-up and baggy trousers, have two minutes to catch a driver's attention and elicit a few rands. Their skill is as remarkable as the cultural and racial ironies of their performance.
Turnbull's and Hockey's personal dilemmas are now great. Could they in good conscience stand as Liberals in the next election, which they will know was provoked by the machinations of climate change denialists and carbon lobbyists whose views now control the Liberal Party?
My conversion moment came while walking along a busy interstate highway in Spain, crowded with trucks that were passing me every second, blowing me off my feet and filling my lungs with their exhaust gases. I knew then that we cannot go on like this.