Full of wonderful hyperbole. Rather misleading on that one important point.

Sure, much of the local beer that gets promoted to us is awful, adjunct lager crap. The same goes for imported beers though - personally I’m sick of having average euro lagers marketed in Australia as premium beers at premium prices. Some of them are almost enough to make me want to drink Crown Lager. Almost.

Still, saying that Australia doesn’t have good beers because of the poor quality of some popular local beers is akin to saying that we don’t have good wine because people drink Passion Pop.

As for the tendency to serve the beer extremely cold. I think that’s sometimes forgivable. When it’s 35 degrees celcius you don’t have much choice but to serve the beer a little bit cooler. Granted, it’s a bit of a double edged sword in that it can mask good and bad beers. However, if the beer is really, really skunking ordinary then the usual trick around these parts is to turn the beer into something else by adding lime. Not beer, just a nice cool drink on a hot day.

For anyway looking for a starting place to find some good Australian beer, Murray’s have just released their limited edition Best Extra Porter so if you’re a porter lover, get in quick.

Interesting to see Gnoos on there. I’m surprised the site was up long enough for Ross to rate it. Also, I’m not going to name names but some of the other sites on the list have already closed down. Go click through and have a look at some… be mindful of the ones that probably wouldn’t call themselves Australian unless you were buying a round.

Anyway… I think that’s a sufficient dose of abrasiveness for the moment. After all, the many people who put hours of hard work into ausculture.com every day are undoubtedly just insanely jealous.

Still, I was looking at the list and noticed a few other sites that had simpy whacked a crappy theme on top of Pligg. I say “other sites” because that’s exactly what ausculture.com did. As I was looking at these sites though, I noticed that 95% of the links were straight into the websites for major Australian newspapers. Honestly, I think that is kinda missing the point. Part of the reason people liked Digg in the first place was in the charm of sending truckloads of users to small and obscure sites to look at really interesting content. That the Digg effect usually brought those sames sites to their knees was part of the fun.

It’s not so much fun when your social news aggregator is just giving you an alternative top ten articles on the major online newspapers. Those sites already have most popular lists.

Of course, this causes me to ask the question “Is there any room for an Australia social news aggregator?” - particularly one that is aggregating more that four sources and concentrating on Australian content?

I’d have to say that so far, it’s looking like a no from where I’m sitting. Anyone have a different opinion?

Maybe there is, but that such a site would have to do more than reskin pligg (or reddit.) I notice, however, that perthnorg isn’t just a reskin and their traffic looks less-than-stellar.

Possibly related stuff elsewhere

• Nielsen: Digg Traffic Sucks. Mashable: That’s What She Said
• The 30 Top Social Bookmarking Web Sites on ebizma.com.

Cane sugar? I thought they had done away with that in the 80’s?

Welcome to the first extra:terrestrial, a look at environmental change as it relates to Australia, it’s values, culture and way of life. Or I might just find some beach volleyball jpegs and shove in a line about the increasing need for good sunscreen...

Today is World Environment Day 2008. (I’m sure it would be quite unkind to point out that the UN has allocated just one day of the year to this but an entire year to the potato.) The double-whammy of penning the words “...environmental change as it relates to Australia, it’s values, culture and way of life”, and doing so on World Environment Day is frankly freaking me out – not the way we roll round here. I mean I’m the kind of guy who’s much more likely to post a film review the day it closes than the premiere. If at all.

But I digress.

Australians live on a knife-edge ecologically. While there are vast expanses of land, most is unsuitable for agriculture or large-scale habitation. We have ‘cheated’ nature by using irrigation to make arid land fertile, but as the rains fail longer than any drought our food bowls are starting to become dust bowls.

The Woolworth/Safeway group has started placing ‘Fresh Market Update’ ads on TV to reassure customers that their storm-damaged Queensland fruit and dust-covered South Australian vegetables are still top eating. (The cheery spruiker also extols the virtues of the potato – the UN would doubtless be delighted.)

In A journey down the not-so Mighty Murray, the ABC’s AustraliaWide paints a graphic picture of a river system in crisis. Though not helped by mismanagement – “Y’now, all fairness to Karlene Maywald, the only thing she’d know about water is when she’s sitting on the toilet seat.” says fisherman Eric Hayward of the Minister for the River Murray – ultimately it’s lack of rain that’s causing the dropping river levels.

Just about the whole of mainland Australia below the tropics is affected, with even south-east Queensland on Level 6 restrictions. Victoria might like to think of itself as ‘The place to be’, but with Melbourne reservoirs down to 30%, it’s Tasmanians – who are using only 1% of their major river’s water – for whom things are going swimmingly.

The good news is that there’s been an amazing seachange in Aussie attitudes to the environment, and next time I might take a look at that. That’s if I can’t find the jpegs...

18th of May, 2008. The erudite (yeah, right) Corey Worthington is interviewed by Kyle Sandilands and Jackie O’Neill:

Jackie: “You preferred Bec. What about Bianca?”

Corey: “Oh, she was alright, I guess.”

Kyle: “Bit dopey though, Jackie, don't you think?”

Jackie: “Bianca? You think she's – You're talking about Brigitte?”

Kyle: “Oh, Brigitte – sorry, I get them confused.”

You get them confused? You get Brigitte and Bianca confused? Perhaps try looking up at their faces. It’s just a suggestion.

25th of May, 2008. Sandilands has had a week to remember to take his pills and try to grasp the most basic information relating to the Eviction shows he’s supposed to be co-hosting. For instance, the public votes for their favourite Housemates and the least popular three are put up for the HMs themselves to nominate for eviction. This week, they have a choice between Nathan, David and Rory. That’s three people, you see? The kind of maths even Corey would be capable of.

It’s a double Eviction, so Bianca (that’s the one who does know what ‘illiterate’ means, Kyle) has to vote out two of the three who are up. She nominates David for two points and Nathan for one, the latter being because she was close with Renee before Nathan came along and whisked her away to a quiet corner of the garden. And when she has finished:

Kyle: “That's a bit of an odd choice.”

Jackie: “No, I got that. I mean, you know, he [Nathan] is spending all this time with Renee. And I reckon she's a bit different around him.”

Kyle: “Well why wouldn't she vote out Renee, if she thinks Nathan's the nicest person on the planet?”

Jackie: “No –”

Kyle: “Is she not that smart either?”

Jackie: “Rory, you mean? Why wouldn't she vote out Rory?”

Kyle: “Oh, I don't know.”

Jackie: “You don't know what's going on.”

Kyle: “She was just – she just looked like a giant bugs bunny up there, that's all I could see.”

No, Kyle, it’s true, you don’t know what’s going on. I think this is about the point that the psychiatrist would be asking you what day of the week it is and who’s the Prime Minister. (The answers, Kyle, me old pal, are Ketchup and Wa-boo, Wa-boo. Don’t mention it.)

Images: Network Ten

This page from the National Gallery of Victoria What’s On – May-Jun 08 booklet shows visitors naively viewing the Sidney Nolan exhibition, unaware of the imminent dangers. Look closely and you see that the visitor on the left has her stiletto caught in the floor grill. Alas, we’re not shown the frame of her crashing back onto her coccyx.

In this age of interactive performance art this was a natural progression: the gallery becomes one large installation, and the toppling tourists an integral part of the piece. This is art that affects the viewer; art in which the viewer is recognised and acknowledged. The artist is saying “Yeah, this person knows her arse from her elbow – her arse is the one that’s sore.” Good on ya, NGV!

So, this post from Hippo has indirectly alerted me to De Bortoli making beer. I’m somewhat disturbed that the article there on the ABC is from February last year. Where have I been and where is the beer?

Apparently that is the bottle there on the left of the Red Angus Pilsner.

Anyone who reads this blog (ie. nobody) knows that I’m a big fan of Australian craft brewers such as Murray’s so I’m very interested to see what De Bortoli can do.

If anyone who reads this blog stumbles across this blog via Google has tried the Red Angus Pilsner, or any other beer produced by the De Bortoli owned William Bull Brewery please drop a line to let me know how it was and where you found it.

Given that there are no ads on the new site I’ve been finding other ways to reduce bandwidth costs by killing some image indexing, removing mp3’s and using Amazon’s excellent S3. I’ve started hosting some images and other static assets on S3 and it seems to have been working out pretty.

There is a difficulty though in the format and delivery of the log files from S3. Instead of spending time I don’t have available to faff around with getting those log files into some analysis software I decided to have a look at S3Stat which is a service that does the fiddly stuff, runs your data through Webalizer, and uploads the reports back to your S3 account. Pretty handy!

S3Stat has been working pretty well for me so - in true “cash for comment” style - with the aim of getting the S3Stat service for free I’m suggesting to anyone that uses S3 and wants to see traffic data on things like image files that they should check out S3Stat.

So Crust are getting a heart foundation tick of approval on six of their pizzas. It seems that we find this important enough for it to be a “top 5” article on The Age, to also be posted on NEWS.com.au as “Heart Foundation gives Pizza the tick”, and on abc.net.au as “Nutritionists ticked off over approval for pizza chain.” If you check out the Crust website you’ll notice the tick of approval is already proudly displayed.

TV ratings evidence would suggest that us Australians are as fat obsessed as the next nation with high levels of obesity (we were ranked 21 in the world on percentage of population overweight at last count.

But… why the interest? Why the coverage? Sure, almost anything can get in the news these days (and if it’s not good enough for the news it still has a chance to get on Today Tonight or A Current Affair) but a pizza chain getting a heart foundation tick is usually the sort of thing that would slip by relatively unnoticed.

Which leads me off on a wild tangent to the questions at hand.

• Is pizza in any way an identifiable part of our national identity?
• If it is an identifiable part of our national identity… do we bring anything to the pizza oven or are we just riding along?

I think I can address the first question fairly quickly… like so:

• Pizza goes with beer
• Beer is part of our national identity
• Therefore, pizza is part of our national identity… by proxy. QED

It’s the second question that troubles me. Do we bring anything to the world of pizza or are we just riding along?

I’ll start this with some beer talk and meander around semi-aimlessly until I arrive limp at the end, sans-conclusion.

In beer terms, Australia is starting to produce some great beer. Those who doubt me should put down their imported beers for a second and try something from Red Oak, Murray’s, Barons, Little Creatures or any of a number of small boutique breweries. I enjoy an Orval as much as anybody but some of these boutique breweries in Australia are producing great beer. Particularly Red Oak and Murray’s.

Yet, whilst we are starting to create some great beers we’re still generally recognised for Fosters internationally and many Australians would sooner pick up an adjunct lager like Corona or a mass produced import like Heineken than adventure into the world of Australian boutique beers.

The same goes for pizza. Dominos and Pizza Hut are both heavily entrenched in the Australian market complete with crusts stuffed with five different kinds of bad cheese and five different kinds of meat derivative products.

So how about the so-called gourmet chains? The ones I know, and have tried are Crust (NSW, Victoria and Brisbane) and GPK (NSW) in addition to a few smaller chains that have the same feel to them. Usually I find the term gourmet dubious, and I was with these places labelling themselves as such, but generally they’re of varying good standards - if you’re not in a pizza purist mood. I’m not going to review them but my experience with Crust was ok and with GPK was actually good. Their bases are good - again in a non-traditional way.

Still, there are too many pizza places in Australia with the word gourmet attached. In some cases gourmet seems to mean “our pizzas consist primarily of ingredients you don’t normally find on pizza” and in some instances it just seems to mean “our pizzas are more than 20 dollars each and we have one with some sort of Teriyaki chicken on it.

I really hope that running with the word gourmet isn’t the only thing of note about Australian Pizza.

So, where else to look. Perhaps to those members of the Australian community with Italian heritage. According to the 2006 Census that is somewhere around 800 000 of us, which sounds promising. After all, if there is someone I can trust not to put pineapple on my pizza, it’s usually an Italian.

I can only really speak for Sydney here as I haven’t lived in any other states, but for traditional, neapolitan style pizza it’s usually the inner west to Haberfield and La Disfida, Napoli in Bocca or Il Goloso. I know these places get bad reviews at times and I have actually taken people there that were entirely unimpressed but you get real mozzarella (you know, the type that’s more white than yellow) and, as you can tell by watching the pizzas being prepared and cooked in the wood-fired ovens, it’s treated like a craft.

Still, looking at these places, Toto’s at nearby five dock, Rosso Pomodoro at Balmain or a number of other pizza joints around there’s nothing that grabs me as uniquely Australian about them. Sure the pizza is good, sure we have many Australians with great Italian heritage but… where is the Australian edge on all of this?

I know, at this point I may be renounced as a heretic but I do think there should be room for something Australian about our pizza. In the same way that our national football team needs to find an Australian playing style, and just like how we need to produced Australian beers, I think we should be doing something more than overusing the term gourmet and putting heart foundation ticks on things.

If Barons can put Wattle Seed in a beer and actually get a good result, then why can’t somebody do something with Pizza that still does the rest properly but adds a small touch of Australia to it.

Again, I know i’d be called a pizza heretic for suggesting something like this but why not Macadamia oil? Why not bush tomatoes? Mountain Pepper?

Why not indeed? Next pizza I make is getting the native ingredients treatment. I’ll let you know how it goes.

As for the fat obsession, I don’t think we should worry. Just tell the kids that Pizza is a sometimes food. Anyway, on that leaderboard of the fattest nations Italy comes in at 111 to our 21. I’m hazarding a guess that they consume more pizza than Australia per-capita.

Oh, and by the way, if anyone in Melbourne has been to Pizza Faro, what did you think? I’m a big fan of spelt flour and I hear Pizza Faro makes a particularly good spelt pizza base. Plus, it seems you can order their pizzas with Buffalo cheese from the Shaw River. With the Shaw River being in Australia I think that’s a great idea.

Years later, the driver, now a wealthy, middle-aged man, motivated by a nagging guilt that won’t go away, tracks down the man he disabled and says “Sorry about what I did to you all those years ago, but I’m not giving you a cent of compensation.”

This morning, Kevin Rudd, on behalf of the Federal Government of Australia, finally delivers the long-awaited apology to the Stolen Generations. But he’s already stated that there are no plans for compensation. And it gets worse...

This quote, from the Cathy Freeman episode of ancestry program Who Do You Think You Are? on SBS, paints a picture of life for indigenous Australians in 1918:

“Under The Act [of 1897], all Aboriginal wages, including military pay, was controlled by the Protector of Aborigines, who, at his discretion, would then pass it on to those who had worked for it. The reasoning was that Aborigines couldn't be trusted to spend their own money wisely.”

Fast-forward 90 years and the current Intervention sees compulsory ‘quarantining’ of welfare payments, a Government officer with powers to seize Aboriginal community assets at his sole discretion and plans to seize land. The reasoning is much the same, and the application as indiscriminate and heavy-handed as ever.

Emotive arguments were used to justify the Intervention, Howard suddenly announcing that it was a national emergency shortly before the Federal election in 2007 – this despite the NT’s Little Children Are Sacred report following four similar major State Government reports dating back to 2002. An in-depth report by the ABC’s Four Corners in November 2007 stated that not a single arrest had been made during the Intervention’s first four months for child sexual abuse. Which is not to say the problem doesn’t exist, but nor is it confined to Indigenous Australians. And I haven’t heard of any plans to strip assets, remove employment opportunities and ban alcohol and porn in any of our Capital Cities.

Today’s apology states “...the injustices of the past must never, never happen again.” But the injustices continue.

This evening, I caught his low key stand-up show, Wil Anderson – A Work In Progress at Ruby’s Lounge, Belgrave. To coin an overused adjective, it was hilarious. But also desperately and inescapably poignant. The publicity for the gig warned that it wouldn’t all be funny. (Wil’s putting together material for his forthcoming show BeWILdered, and the gigs at Wollongong, Belgrave and Canberra are new material tryouts.) No warnings, though, about Wil’s anguish, nor his lashing out. At one point he laid into a bar wench (sorry, bar staff assistant) who was clattering the bottles she was collecting. And at the end he kinda attacked the whole crowd, by saying that the evening had been no help in putting the new show together.

So, am I warning you away from BeWILdered? Absolutely not! The best creativity comes from deep within the emotional core; the best humour from pain, humiliation and anger. Wil’s new material has a dark edge, an acid bite and a ruthless honesty. The result is a performance with substance and meaning, as you get a tangible sense of his struggle to do what most of us can relate to – try to pick up the pieces of a shattered life.

Oh, and after seeing the show, you’ll never be able to watch Lleyton Hewitt doing his ‘c'mon’ gesture without rafflwaffling your ass off!!!

BeWILdered is on at the Sydney Opera House in March and Melbourne International Comedy Festival in April – tour dates here.

“It's great to see new names coming up that are doing well, that are bringing excitement and whatever it is, glamour, to the sport. Even to bring fans that are not just tennis fans, but other fans into the sport, is wonderful.”

And both players have exhibited glamour with a capital ‘G’ off-court. Sharapova was a model for the 2007 Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, amongst many other assignments, and Ivanovic’s body of modelling work shows no shortage of body either.

Seven’s coverage, though, will doubtless be scrutinised for impropriety by one S. Collins of Box Hill North, Melbourne. In a letter to The Age’s Green Guide s/he wrote “...slow-motion technology was abused for grossly inappropriate purposes in the night match between Venus Williams and Zi Yan. Straight after one ad break, there blazing on the screen appeared Venus' backside in action with extreme close-up and extreme slow-motion cast upon it. Seconds later, Roger Rasheed stated ‘I don't know about all the other ladies out there, but to me that's a prrretty good sight’.” Thank god Seven was broadcasting in widescreen!

I saw that coverage, and actually yes, it was a bit of a visit to Wrongtown – Venus would have been appalled. But using that yardstick for this afternoon’s match, things are not the same. Perving rights have been given...

Images: youngteenidols.com and si.com

We start with this Sunday Telegraph story, linked by god. In it, we’re told that career women in Sydney are creating a nationwide sperm shortage as they race to get themselves preggers before hitting the Big Four-O.

We’re told the number of single women seeking sperm donors has risen by 40% – but not how many women we’re talking about. However, with less than 5 registered donors in NSW and a current limit of 10 donees (soon to drop to 5) for each, it’s not hard to see how there would be a shortage.

“Dr Joel Bernstein, medical director at Fertility East, believes social change was driving the rise in single women seeking sperm donors.”

Yes, well that’s a pretty vague kind of thing to say, isn’t it. What precisely, besides social change, would be driving it? Some enticing new FlyBuys offer on semen phials?

Ellen Connolly’s article plays it safe, neatly avoiding saying anything that would be likely to offend NSW career women – an important section of the paper’s readership.

(Not) Finding Mr Right

I think women tend to take the business of finding their Mr Right pretty seriously. They’re genetically programmed to do so, just as men are programmed to try and win the right woman. The woman’s mission, it seems to me, goes something like this: Try to find the best mate out of the pool of available males. And don’t fall pregnant until you’ve found a man who will help you raise the child.

In a small village, 20,000 years ago, this would have been a simple enough task. The pool of males would have been a two-digit number, and the comparisons made without playing Hide The Salami.

But then things started getting more complicated. First, people started living in towns and cities. Then, in the 1950s, the introduction of The Pill meant sex without pregnancy. (Incidentally, new research indicates that the hormones in The Pill tend to make women less interested in men.) Economic changes and jet flight made it easier to travel. From the 1990s, the communications revolution meant someone could easily get to know people regardless of distance.

Enter the world of bulk email. Many women make careful use of cyberspace, either on dating sites or in less obviously overt ways. Some female journalists include an email address in their articles, even when their column doesn’t have an obvious interactive aspect.

2008 sees the mission in crisis. For a single woman living in, say, Sydney, the pool has become an ocean – a figure of at least six digits. Sex is now in the mix, because the risk of pregnancy is so low. And this affects the emotional bond – love – diluting it a little with each encounter. So however many boxes a potential Mr Right might tick, for many women it’s never possible to make a definitive decision and commit to just one.

The Career Woman

I’d suggest that most career women are still actively involved in the above mission. But for some, especially those who’ve given up on cracking it, the control of doing away with the man in the equation evidently has appeal. Some claim not to have time to find the right man, but I think they’re forgetting how much time it takes to bring up a child, and how much harder it is to do right without a partner. As for the biological clock, the safe deadline for having a first child is closer to 25 than 40. Regardless of the method of insemination, there is, sadly, a greatly increased risk of complications if the first pregnancy takes place after the late 20s.

The Sex Addict

This is a serious addiction – and an epidemic. It affects the search for Mr (or Ms) Right because the addiction is all about variety, and however wonderful the partner, the addict will subconsciously sabotage the relationship (or consciously cheat on it) to satisfy the craving.

Religious Abstinence

Personally, I abstain from all religions. But they do have a point when it comes to human relationships. They promote a lifestyle in many ways similar to that traditional, village one. And they foster relationships that actually last. Don’t worry, you don’t have to become a Scientologist(!) in order to fix your personal life. But here are a few suggestions:

Get yourself a good vibrator (and some rechargeable batteries!); don’t have any relationships for 3 months; don’t have sex with anyone until you’ve been out with them 14 times; have a break of at least a month before you start going out with anyone else; substitute any sex you’re missing out on by socialising (with people you’re not attracted to). Good luck!

Image: Oxford Scientific Film

No surprise, then, that the Melbourne skyline is dotted with the logos that make us see red.

Commonwealth Bank

The yellow diamond with the cancerous black wedge in the corner represents the Commonwealth Bank (or the Collectingwealth Bank, according to one eye-catching satirical bumper sticker, with the tag line “A guaranteed fee with every transaction”!) If you open one of their Streamline current accounts, you’re likely to be stung with a $4 fee every month – or $6 if you want the luxury of speaking to a real person on the phone without incurring a separate charge. But those generous folks at ConBank, er, I mean CommBank will waive that fee if you have $50,000 or more in their accounts. If you have less than that with them, do not fear, you’ll at least earn a massive 0.01% interest on the account balance! (At that rate, it would take a balance of $480,000 to recoup the year’s bank fees!)

The Commonwealth raked in a bumper $4.4 billion profit last year, up 14% on the previous year. They own Colonial First State, making them Melbourne CBD’s biggest landlord[1].

ANZ, NAB & Westpac

NAB does make a $4 a month charge for its eBanking account, but at least includes phone assistance, debit card transactions, etc. ANZ and Westpac both offer internet banking accounts with no monthly fee, the Westpac eSaver offering a generous 5.25% (or above) on balances from $5,000. It therefore wins the prestigious Ausculture Award for Rortless eBanking, 2008! (The award is a rare green and yellow striped paperclip – I’m sure they’ll be stoked!)

Profits for ANZ last year of $4 bn (up by 6%) were considered disappointing. NAB, however recorded a record $4.2 bn, up over 17%. And the last of the four big banks, the award-winning Westpac (which escaped the above ‘identity parade’) made $3.4 bn (up 12%), perhaps demonstrating that doing the right thing needn’t impact on profitability.

Telstra

It’s hard to know where to start on the litany of Telstra travesties. The Chaser found it was cheaper to call a random person in the US for the number of a business here than to use Telstra’s Directory Assistance! Their voice ‘recognition’ systems continue to drive customers up the wall. Mobile GPRS data charges, and now those for Next G data, defy belief.

‘Telstra.com’, it says in giant, illuminated letters atop their head office, emblazoned as if to advertise what a wonderful ambassador they are for the internet revolution. Far from it. Sign up for a standard home broadband plan and you’re in for some nasty surprises. On their $29.95 a month plan, you get a 200 MB data allowance per month. Their own literature notes that Windows security updates from Microsoft can be over 150 MB, but they have a simple solution – just “...turn this feature off”! (Good job this isn’t America, or hacked and hacked off users might be lining up to sue Telstra over that one!) ADSL plans range from $29.95 to $159.95 per month, but with each you get just one inclusive mailbox, limited to 20 MB.

Telstra’s profit last year was a ‘low’ $3.3 billion (up by around 5%), although this didn’t stop CEO Sol Trujillo getting a 30% pay rise to nearly $12m per year. Life on the bottom rung isn’t so rosy, as can be gleaned from a comment by Telstra Chief Operations Officer Greg Winn last year:

“We run an absolute dictatorship and that’s what’s going to drive this transformation and deliver results… If you can’t get the people to go there and you try once and you try twice… then you just shoot ’em and get them out of the way…”

The Big Rort

Greg Winn’s telling comment reveals a ‘psychotic’ culture shared by many corporate giants – there is only one thing that matters, and that’s the bottom line. The customer doesn’t matter; the employee is just a drain on earnings who should be either replaced by an automated system or controlled as if he or she was one; the wider social picture and the environment are entirely irrelevant.

This approach is morally reprehensible and ultimately counter-productive for the company.

The more enlightened big business will talk about the triple bottom line: financial success, social responsibility and environmental sustainability. The customer should want to trade with it because s/he’s impressed by what it stands for. The employee should want to work for it because s/he feels valued (is valued). Society at large should embrace its philosophy because it’s helping society move forward. And the environment should be a little less impacted by it every passing year.

So why should this utopian vision actually become a reality? Because of you. We vote with our wallets all the time; all we need do is shun the morally dysfunctional companies until they change.

There’s a reason why, for instance, so many of our neighbouring countries enjoy 100 Mbps urban broadband for $30-40 a month while we barely manage 1% of that, and it’s not just political. Something in our collective psyche makes us resigned to the corporate rort.

Grounding the Bad Teen

Corporations – even multi-nationals – are like society’s kids. They will try it on; find out what the boundaries are. That’s what Network Ten did with the subliminal advertising. It’s what Microsoft did with their OS’s built-in web browser. And it’s what many of the companies making up our city skylines do all the time.

So it’s time to say ‘enough is enough’. And if you feel trying to ‘ground’ Telstra would be like a scene from Honey, I Blew Up the Kid, just remember: there are over twenty million of us...

[1] according to The Age, 18/12/04
Figures are approximate and information not authoritative