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What is the biggest number you can visualise? You can probably picture a crowd of 100,000, either because you were once part of such a crowd or have seen shots of a full MCG on Grand Final day. But what about ten times as many, or 1000 times ten times? Now we are talking billions, and your mind has likely gone into what computer programmers call overflow. So when we read that the cost of replacing our six subs with 12 new ones will be $20 billion, it means little to us: it's just a number.
Now is an exciting moment for Australia, after all the low points of the past two years. We can look forward to a real return to greater civil discourse and intellectual integrity in politics. It will be good if the parties can set aside the negative energy that was brought to the Parliament and return to an informed contest of ideas, for there is much to debate.
Since Richard Casey was External Affairs Minister in the 1950s, the three pillars of Australian foreign policy have been: a genuine reaching out to our Asian neighbours, adherence to UN-based multilateral values and institutions, and a firm but self-respecting defence partnership with the United States. All those pillars look pretty shaken now.
The Coalition's impending destruction of the Australian car industry by calculated public stalling of decisions on government assistance is shaping up as its most disastrous high-visibility policy blunder. This industry — but none other — is to be wilfully abandoned as a victim of rigid free-market economic ideologies. It does not make sense, in economic, social or national security terms. This is Australia's version of US Tea Party budget brinkmanship.
An earlier generation of politicians feared impoverished Asian hordes would pour down and eat our lunch. Current PM Kevin Rudd worries their offspring can now afford to come armed with the latest weapons and steal it. His fretting comes at great cost to the nation.
Opponents of nuclear power in Australia most often use environmental and economic arguments. The real problem with establishing a nuclear power industry is that it is a hugely complex and dangerous technology, and Australia has a poor record in safely managing even relatively simple technologies.
There are submarines in the New South Wales country town of Holbrook. They lie snugly berthed in the grass of the classic Australian park that runs alongside the main street.
Jane Mayo Carolan goes Down to the sea: The true saga of an Australian fishing dynasty with John Little.
Gavan Daws’s Prisoners of the Japanese: POWs of World War II in the Pacific prompts some reflection from Denis Tracey.