I asked him about the prospects for a political agreement, since two years of negotiations have so far failed to produce one, and he was upbeat. I also probed him on what, to many international observers, is his highly anomalous position: urging others to sign up to an agreement while at the same time leading a country with the highest per capita emissions of any developed nation and the world's biggest exports of coal. Moreover, he's committed his government to an unconditional emissions target of just a 5% cut by 2020 - rising possibly to 15%, depending on what other countries do - which by international standards is small. He's also piling a lot of federal infrastructure money into the expansion of the coal export facilities in New South Wales and Queensland.

I was asked by Justin Webb on the Today programme whether Mr Rudd was a good man for the job. His friendship with Barack Obama certainly helps, I said - a senior administration official is on record as saying that Mr Obama feels more comfortable with Kevin Rudd than any other leader. His Mandarin might help him sway the Chinese - although it has not translated into warm relations between Beijing and Canberra. Quite the opposite, in recent months.

But three other things might stand him in good stead. First, his round-the-clock work ethic (he's been staying up late for video hook-ups with other key negotiators ahead of Copenhagen). Second, his fluency in, and enthusiasm for, jargon (there will be a lot of it at Copenhagen). And finally, his love of detail. Most people find it rather devilish. For Mr Rudd, it is something almost heavenly.

Here is an excerpt of the interview, so you can make up your own mind on what he had to say at the beginning of a week in which the Rudd government is hoping to push its emissions trading scheme through parliament...

Like Australia at the Olympics, I reckon he might just get in the top six. But, like Australia at the Olympics, he might struggle to maintain his lofty perch over the coming years.

Always a man for a headline-grabbing soundbite - remember his jibe at the Brits in Beijing that the UK medal haul was impressive for a country with so very few swimming pools and such poor standards of personal hygiene? Mr Coates this week flashed his teeth at the businessman David Crawford, the author of a new report on sports funding, who argued that it is not "sensible" for Australia to aim for a top five finish at the Olympics.

Crawford also recommended that more money should be spent on popular, high participation sports rather than being targeted at the elite Olympic sports.

In a rip-snorter of a press conference hours after the report had been released, this is how Mr Coates greeted reporters: "Good afternoon. Obviously this is going to be one of the last occasions I see you. The Olympic Games will not be important enough for your editors to bother sending you in future, if Mr Crawford is correct."

He then went nuclear, describing the report as "un-Australian".

Here is his quote, in full: 'It just seems un-Australian for me to settle something for second best. We gain tremendously in terms of international reputation by our performance at the Olympic Games. I thought that was recognised, it hasn't been by this panel."

You can hear a report on the press conference here, and it is well worth a listen and read an editorial from John Coates here.

With Britain devoting squillions to winning more golds at the London games, and rich club nations like France and Italy following suit, David Crawford says it is unrealistic for Australia to try to match them.

He's proposing that Olympic funding remain at its present level, rather than giving it the $100m boost that the Australian Olympic Committee is seeking.

As David Crawford points out, a niche sport like water polo actually receives more money than golf, tennis and bowls combined.

Having married into an Aussie family which can boast an Olympic gold medal, I know the value attached to that sporting bullion.

At my relative's 50th birthday party, we even got to relive the famed commentary from Norman May: "GOLD, GOLD for Australia, GOLD" - which described his medal-winning race at the Moscow Games, and which still to this day sends shivers down Australian spines (it's the Aussie equivalent of "They Think It's All Over").

Clearly, this has long been a country which has projected itself internationally by flaunting its sporting prowess - a statement repeated to the point of sporting cliche.

And remember, the Australian Institute of Sports was set up after the country returned from Montreal - horror or horrors! - without a single gold, when Malcolm Fraser, the then prime minister, hit the panic button.

But could the money, as Mr Crawford suggests, be better spent on grassroots, high-participation sports?

The government will deliver its verdict on the report later in the year.

With the Australian newspaper already calling the Crawford report "a national tragedy" would Kevin Rudd risk offending the great Australian sporting public by giving its findings the rubber stamp?

PS: A further example of the Ozification of world sport: Thierry Henry appears to have become proficient in the skills of Aussie Rules Football.

It was a rare privilege to be in the Great Hall of Parliament House, as Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull sought to right some appalling wrongs. It was an extraordinarily rich experience, and I hope we did not intrude on peoples' private thoughts and very public emotions.

We were close to Sandra Anker from Melbourne, a former child migrant shipped to Australia at the age of six, whose testimony many of you will have watched on television or online. 'Well done Australia,' she said as she stood to applaud Kevin Rudd at the end. 'Now its Britain's turn.' The loveliest of ladies.

What I particularly liked about the event was that it took on the personality of the hundreds of victims who gathered in the room - who cried, cheered, occasionally barracked and, collectively, seemed to derive great comfort from the soothing words of the prime minister and opposition leader.

I enjoyed the whoops of happy recognition when relatives spotted their loved ones on the big screens, and the spontaneity of the ovations for people, like Margaret Humphreys of the Child Migrant Trust, who have made seeking justice and redress their life's work. The victims owned the ceremony. They made it what it was. To use an Australianism, good on them.

The blog that appeared earlier in the week - Shamed into an Apology - was actually penned as a piece of brief analysis that was supposed to appear on the Sunday. It did not capture the special quality of the day, which was more about remembrance than recrimination. Whitlamite, who it is good to welcome back from semi-retirement, said it was day for healing rather than blame, and I could not agree more. But thanks for your comments.

After a couple of all-nighters in Canberra - on the big stories I work the Australian day, then the British day, and then repeat the whole thing again - I managed to make it back to Sydney in time to meet Jan Utzon, the son of Jorn, the architect of the Sydney Opera House.

He'd just opened the new western foyer, part of the ongoing attempts by the SOH to renovate and revitalise the building. Lovely bloke, who, like his father, has a quiet charm and charisma. I walked through the bowels of the building with him, watching him meet and greet Opera House workers who have clearly come to know and greatly admire him since his family was re-engaged by the New South Wales government in 2000. The Utzons are held in awe by the people who work in the building.

Regular readers of the blog know that I'm a bit obsessive about the Opera House, whose interior was finished by a local architect after Utzon's forced resignation. Will Jan live to see his father's glorious vision for the opera theatre finally realised? He certainly hopes so. He wants to be there on opening night in his very own front row seat on history.

My third treat of the week was to watch the recording of 'An Audience with Michael Parkinson,' a 90 minute monologue delivered without notes or an autocue, and punctuated by clips from some of his most famous interviews and near perfect grammar.

Like Richie Benaud, Parky is another unifying figure, national treasure both in Australia and Britain. In my fantasy dinner party, Parky would be an early inclusion on the guest list, and would probably have interviewed most of the others.

Sir Michael said that one of the main things which endeared him to Australia was that he rarely comes across the kind of Englishmen for whom he hasn't got much time. He didn't expound on that, but I dare say that thought will resonate with many of the Poms who have made their home down under.

Following a report from a House of Commons Health Committee in 1998, the British government said the child migrant programme, was "wrong" and expressed regret. The Blair government also helped fund family reunions, along with the Child Migrants Trust, which had been set up by Margaret Humphreys in the late1980s to help victims locate their surviving mothers and fathers, or siblings.

In the gardens of the British High Commission in Canberra, I asked the new high commissioner, Baroness Amos, why it had taken so long for the British government to say sorry.

She explained that a number of state governments in Australia had delivered apologies, that the Australian national government was on the verge of doing so, and that the time was now right for Britain to follow suit.

"We've always said that this was an absolutely shocking period in our history," she said. "And there was a lot of thinking that went on in relation to this... it has taken us some time."

She said that the Blair government expressed strong regret after the Health Committee report highlighted the appalling treatment that many child migrants had been exposed to - physical, psychological and, at times, sexual abuse.

"We're now going that one step further and apologising" she said. "And this is the next stage in the process."

But when I asked whether Gordon Brown would have apologised had not his friend and political ally, Australia's Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, decided to do so, she did not really have an answer. She rejected that formulation, but did not come up with a convincing counterpoint.

Many will form the view that the British government has decided to act because the Australian government has decided to say sorry - delivering a national apology to British child migrants at the same time as saying sorry to the so-called Forgotten Australians, tens of thousands of Australians who were abused in institutions and orphanages.

The child migrants that I have spoken to go further: they say that Gordon Brown has been shamed into apologising by the Australian government, which has exhibited what they described as greater "moral leadership".

His first visit to Australia in 11 years has the feel of a presidential and royal visit all rolled into one. But then, Tiger has the star power of Barack Obama (I think that a strong case could be made that Tiger helped pave the way for Barack by dominating, and thus winning widespread acceptance in what was long regarded in the US as a whites-mainly sport). He is the undisputed king of golf and, arguably, of world sport.

Awaiting him in Melbourne are an array of tiger treats. A suite at a posh hotel in the central business district which has played home in recent times to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Tickets to the hottest show in Melbourne - Jersey Boys. And the prospect of playing without the jarring staccato of hundreds of clicking cameras. The course has banned spectators from carrying them.

I happen to be in Melbourne covering another story and the front page of the city's tabloid, The Herald Sun, pretty much sums things up: TIGERMANIA.

Admittedly, there are numerous ways to spin this story. Should taxpayers' money be spent on Tiger's appearance fee? Seems like a worthwhile investment, seeing as the four days of the tournament are already a sell-out and that it reaffirms Melbourne's position as the sporting capital of the southern hemisphere, if not the world. State Premier John Brumby, who lobbied Tiger personally, claims his visit will be worth $19m for the state's economy. A figure plucked out of the air, perhaps? But it sounds plausible.

You could view it through the prism of civic rivalries. Sydney tried hard to lure Tiger, but he went with Melbourne instead - a familiar story since the 2000 Olympics, where the Victorian capital has outstripped its long-standing rival.

But I'm going to go with what I reckon is a legacy of the old "tyranny of distance" syndrome. The way that the country lapses still into "aren't we lucky to have a big celebrity visiting little ol' Australia" mode. As I write, I'm watching a news bulletin which is not only featuring Tiger Woods, but the arrival in Melbourne of Britney Spears.

And it's not just big-name entertainers and sports stars. This year we have already had "Christopher Hitchens week", when ABC handed over large chunks of its output to the visiting British polemicist. That followed "PJ O'Rourke week" earlier in the year, when the American satirist was granted the same airtime. Both are brilliant authors, but they hardly merit the red carpet treatment in a country with writers, public intellectuals and polemicists who can rival them. Early next year, we will no doubt witness Prince William week, as he makes his first visit to Australia since crawling around on a picnic rug in one of the happier photo-ops staged by Prince Charles and the then-Princess Diana (there is still a lively Republican referendum debate: ten years on the thread is still going on, by the way).

During my first Christmas in Australia a couple of years back, I was astonished by the blanket coverage devoted to Paris Hilton, who had jetted in to celebrate the New Year in Sydney. Why wouldn't she? The pyrotechnics are worth the trip alone.

The tyranny of distance used to come with a felony of international neglect. But that is no longer the case. As the world has got smaller, Australia has got bigger. Tiger's arrival down under, and the media-driven mania which has surrounded it, speaks of both.

My mother-in-law is an enthusiastic fan of the former prime minister, and was a near neighbour in north Sydney long before he became leader of the Liberal Party. So I passed on her commiserations, and then told him that her youngest daughter - who in her early teens had once served drinks at her parent's party fund-raisers - had recently agreed to marry me.

"What?" shouted the departing prime minister through the lip-shrill chatter of crest-fallen party loyalists. I repeated what I said, this time with less conviction, and got in return a look of puzzlement and a grunt of faint recognition. Then he moved past me to yet another Liberal diehard keen to tell him he was the greatest prime minister that Australia had ever had. I, meanwhile, retreated - wondering whatever possessed me to inject a note of personal happiness on a night of such abject political despair.

Last week, at a lunch organised by constitutional monarchists, John Howard seemed happier to be confronted by reporters. Indeed, he seemed to relish the exposure, for it was just like old times. With a thicket of microphones in front of him, he gave a robust defence of Australia's present constitutional arrangements - he is a true Burkean conservative, in the sense that he wants to preserve all that he deems workable and good, and is suspicious of unwarranted change - and his government's approach to asylum seekers. "We stopped the boats," he said with obvious pride.

Last week, he also sat down with the Sydney Sunday Telegraph and gave a more expansive interview in which he unleashed on Kevin Rudd. He branded his successor a "do nothing" prime minister who was all about spin and symbolism. He claimed that he had bungled the response to the surge in the number of boat people trying to reach Australian shores and had achieved little since becoming prime minister almost two years ago.

"The Rudd government comes up very short," said the former prime minister. "I can't think of a major thing it has done, except spent the bank balance that Costello and I left behind. Nothing else."

Howard was effectively accusing Kevin Rudd of political cowardice, which is a criticism you hear increasingly from supporters as well as a partisan detractors. Kevin Rudd continues to enjoy what, by normal standards, are stratospheric approval ratings (an average over the past two years of 68%), yet he has not leveraged much of that personal popularity by championing unpopular issues.

On climate change, as Mr Howard noted, his emissions trading scheme is close to what the Coalition was proposing at the last election, with cautious cuts and targets. He has done nothing to advance the republic, another contentious issue where he risks alienating the swing suburbs. The stimulus package was centred on generous cash hand-outs - a giveaway injection. After the symbolism of his much-vaunted "Sorry", indigenous groups have wondered what he intends to do to close the gap between white and black Australia. On the boat people, he has emphasised the toughness of his policies, rather than setting out the case for compassion.

The conventional wisdom is that Kevin Rudd is a poll-driven prime minister rather than a principle-driven national leader. His focus is on day-to-day managerialism rather than bold, long-term vision. Last week saw an interesting example of this. On the eve of a bad poll coming out, which showed Labour's lead over the Liberals had plunged, Kevin Rudd went on a media blitz with five hastily-arranged afternoon radio interviews and an appearance on ABC's 730 Report, one of the few truly national early evening news programmes. The prospect of a bad poll had apparently produced a flurry of prime ministerial panic.

Even many detractors of John Howard would concede that he was politically bold and daring, from his decision to back gun controls early on to the introduction of the GST, Australia's initially unpopular sales tax. Howard clearly thinks his successor is something of a political wimp. So is he right? Has Kevin Rudd emerged as a do-nothing prime minister?

PS: I found it hard to suppress a wry smile when Jonny Wilkinson slotted over a drop goal - or field goal, as they are called in Australia - in the early stages of the England/Australia game at Twickenham over the weekend. Memories of 2003. But Australia ended up on top, deserved winners with two tries to zip. Viewers in Britain might have wondered why so many Aussie players were sporting such pathetic, post-pubescent moustaches, some of which looked in danger of being blown away in the south-west London winds. It is, of course, Movember, the month when thousands of men groom moustaches to highlight prostate cancer, depression and other male ailments. In the land of memorable, iconic moustaches - Dennis Lillee, Rodney Marsh, David Boon - they are carrying on a long, and great, Australian tradition. So all power to their whiskered upper lips...

Certainly, these have been fallow years for Australian republicans, and remain so now, even though the prime minister is an avowed republican and the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, used to head up the Australian Republican Movement.

I've just finished reading a book on the subject by the Melbourne academic Glenn Patmore, who, among other things, examines one of the great paradoxes of the 1999 debate: that 88% of Australians told pollsters that they supported an Australian head of state while only 45.1% voted for one at the referendum. In Choosing the Republic, Patmore points the finger at a number of suspects: a wily Prime Minister, John Howard, who knew that the constitutional convention which preceded the referendum would pit republican against republican; a referendum question framed exquisitely to exploit divisions within the republican movement between those who wanted en elected president and those who wanted an appointed president; a No campaign that gained traction by arguing the Australia would get a "Politician's Republic"; the lack of bipartisanship and the difficulty of winning a referendum without the active support of the prime minister of the day.

Add to that the "status quo" argument, voiced most forcefully by John Howard, who believed that the referendum failed "because of the inherent unwillingness on the part of Australians to change something that they haven't been persuaded was no longer working".

But perhaps the overarching argument of Choosing a Republic is that the movement has failed to produce an irresistible and animating vision of a monarch-free Australia. "It was as if the proposal for an Australian head of state was put to the people without any resonance with a philosophy of republicanism," Patmore writes of 1999.

We've spoken before in this blog about the Elizabeth factor: how the popularity of the present monarch presents problems for the republicans. When bold rhetoric is required, her continued presence is perhaps one of the reasons why politicians like Rudd and Turnbull are so timid on the question. Republicans would argue that the popularity of the Queen needs to be decoupled from the uselessness of the institution, but that is the kind of abstraction which goes against the grain. It's a tough one: to divorce the principle from the personality. So for all his talk about accelerating the republican debate when he took over as prime minister, Kevin Rudd has mothballed the issue until at least his second term.

The survival of the monarchy in Australia is endlessly intriguing. From Gallipoli to the great betrayal in World War II, the Brits have not always treated Australia with much respect or consideration. And yet that has never fuelled any significant anti-British backlash, save for the odd sledge on the cricket field or a bit of flippant Pom-bashing in the bar. Equally, you would have logically thought that the character traits which many Australians hold dear, such as their laconic informality, lack of snobbery, anti-authoritarianism (though this is surely exaggerated) and egalitarianism, would have militated against the idea of hereditary privilege.

My sense is that so much cultural space in Australia is occupied by the British made or British influenced that the idea of a British head of state is not as incongruous as it might be. And then there's the demographic factor: the huge, if declining, proportion of Australians whose roots are in Britain.

I've written a longer piece on the whole question which has sparked a debate here. You can read the full piece in full here.

So over to you. Why did the referendum fail in 1999, and why this week was it the constitutional monarchists rather than the republicans who seemed in much more chipper mood as they look to the future?

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...

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 Sydney's Sunday Telegraph, 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 The Australian 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 coastal lifestyle is under threat , 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 killed off Australian Chardonnay. '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 Aussie foodie culture, 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 perils of using remote cameras 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 A Streetcar Named Desire - 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'.

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 Homebush, 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."

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?

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 Reeling and Writhing. 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 here.

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.

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 ABC's Media Watch 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...

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 this piece in The Monthly, which offers a very balanced and carefully modulated assessment. And though he misrepresents BBC 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.

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 Australia has now overtaken America as a financial centre, 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 Channel Nine Hey Hey It's Saturday skit. 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...