Review: The Big Fella, Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin (2009)

I suppose that a book about a company as famous as mining giant BHP Billiton should focus on the machinations of senior executives as they negotiate such pitfalls as poor investments, corporate takeovers and mergers and acquisitions. There is a certain thrill to be experienced in reading about their decisions about whether to go ahead with one thing or another as their company grows from nothing with German prospector Charles Rasp clomping around the far-west of New South Wales with his eyes fixed firmly on the ground, to a $30 billion behemoth with stock exchange listings in Sydney and London and employing tens of thousands of people. Hence the subtitle: 'The Rise and Rise of BHP Billiton'.

And it certainly is interesting to learn that Billiton, which is the partner firm most Australians would be less familiar with, was a South African company that had its roots in tin mining on the island of Belitung in what is now Indonesia. There's enough material in the book to satisfy the curiosity of anyone interested in such arcana. It was certainly enough for me.

But the book suffers from two faults: an excess of facts and the lack of a driving narrative. Journalist-reviewers might applaud the fact that we often get an inside line on information about goings-on behind usually closed doors, but I felt that the carefully-modulated utterances of recent executives who are talking about colleagues still-living suffer from the same credibility problem as soundbites made by politicians on the campaign trail. It's all a bit too surreal and clubby. You frequently yearn for more substance.

There are some interesting leads that the authors unfortunately refused to follow up, such as the nepotistic proximity of BHP to the Liberal government of Robert Menzies. A few facts are revealed with some fanfare - "you heard it here first" - but the leads go cold quickly. And while the authors declare at the outset that there was no editorial control by either company during the writing of the book, the fact that such potentially-embarrassing leads are left alone leaves you wondering about the strength of the authors' backbones.

Compared with the volume of material that is disclosed when dealing with business events, the amount of material dedicated to unfavourable leads like this is deeply disappointing. Other areas which the authors leave largely alone are the Ok Tedi mine disaster (where millions of tonnes of toxic tailings were discharged directly into the Fly River in Papua New Guinea, severaly damaging the ecosystem), the AWB scandal (where BHP facilitated the supply of a shipment of wheat from Australia to Iraq during the period when a UN trade embargo applied to dealings with the pariah nation) and, most damaging perhaps, BHP's role in managing the Howard government's response to the challenges of climate change.

Both authors are former journalists. They are not used to managing long narratives, but rather are familiar with short ones. For this reason a lot of the book feels like an extended feature article. One major problem with this method is that the reader is constantly surprised by names that had been introduced earlier in the piece but whose relevance the reader has subsequently forgotten. In a 1000-word feature this is easy to counter: you just scroll back up the story until you find the first reference to the peron. In a book running to 500 pages you just shrug and concede defeat and plow on, remaining ignorant of which Bob or David is being talked about at that particular point. This is a failing of method and it is routine in this book.

But beyond this weakness there is an overriding lack of narrative theme. The journalists have decided to pack the book with every available fact and just forge ahead using time as the main ordering principle. It doesn't work. The book is fragmented and often seems repetitive because the strong editorial hand is missing from it. It could have been a really gripping read if the authors had possessed more long-form experience. Unfortunately, they don't and so the reader is faced with trawling through pages and pages of unimportant detail in search of the theme that will make everything make sense. It's just not there.

Regardless, it's a book that any Australian with curiosity about the social, environmental and economic performance of a major mining company can profitably read. It's a page-turner at times. It's just that sometimes it seems that the authors are more interested in being seen to be experienced insiders than they are in showing the truth about an industry that will cintinue to be controversial well into the industrial future that awaits us all.

Oh dear.

The holidays have not even ended and already I've got a gripe, and not a trivial one. The attack, by journalist Brigid Delaney, on inner-city types who go to art galleries and wear tight jeans and sand shoes is another example of the kind of reaction against progressives that we have already seen from Christian Lander, author of Stuff White People Like. Back in my days of youthful experimentation, the run-of-the-mill progressives who favoured Newtown over wherever they originated from (Brisbane or Dubbo), were dubbed by us "droogs". The term derived from the 1971 Kubrick film A Clockwork Orange but unlike the Droogs in the film our droogs were just the routine latte-sipping trendoids who got shit-faced at friends' parties at squats in Pyrmont then went to work in the public service on Monday like everyone else. Like the bogans.

The thing that Delaney and Lander forget about the inner-city type is that he or she often came from somewhere else, gravitating to those parts of the big cities of Australia because of an often-inchoate yearning for a better way of living. There may now be critical mass in some areas. The election of Adam Bandt, of the federal seat of Melbourne, to the Lower House of Parliament, is merely the result of decades of demographic shifting in that part of town. When I was young and living in a share house in Newtown there was little choice for droogs: it was Sydney or Melbourne and nothing else. Now, the same shift is no doubt occurring in other major urban centres in Australia. The thing to remember is that the change was a long time coming. And it was never, for the individual, a sure thing.

The barriers that used to exist that worked against a shift to the inner city were significant. We called these people droogs in a humorous vein, considering them to be just nice, middle-class kids with grungy pretensions (and this was a long time before Pearl Jam appeared). But the progressive impulse, which both Lander and Delaney choose to lambast, is often the result of a long period of gestation. During this period the individual can go through a process of soul-searching as they decide what to do to mitigate the sense of ennui that regular suburban life engenders in them. As I said, it's not usually a sure thing, although it suits glib pastiche to redeploy those motivations in such a way as to make them small enough to criticise. As such, the criticism is essentially facile.

The cute duality that Delaney sets up - between the bogan and the intellectual - ignores the rather depressing fact that bogans overwhelmingly outnumber intellectuals. Many intellectuals came from bogan families and then rebelled at the end of their teens. A far smaller number were privileged to grow up with parents who respected their ideas and gave license to alternative life choices. Most broke out of the bogan straight jacket in order to "find themselves" in a more congenial environment - this they knew to exist at the very centre of the major conurbations. It takes a large city to support a droog, whereas a bogan can live anywhere, even in such inhospitable places as Karratha or Rockhampton.

The thing is that the intellectual, the droog, is still a minority and intellectual types like Lander and Delaney should know better than to slip the knife in where it can do real damage. They should know that, on the streets, people who look different still get hurt.

If ever there were proof of how necessary WikiLeaks is in the modern world, it's action flic The Losers (dir Sylvain White, 2010), a fantasy based on a comic series of the same name published by DC Comics from 2004 in which "a team of special forces soldiers ... declare war on the Central Intelligence Agency after their Agency handler tries to assassinate them". The film opens during an operation the group are carrying out in Bolivia against a drug baron, which carries loud echoes of Oliver North's Iran-Contra scam, in which proceeds of illegal sales of arms to Iran were diverted to rebels in Nicaragua fighting against the Sandinista junta ruling there. Manuel Noriega, the ex-president of Panama, was indicted for drug smuggling as part of the affair and served time in a Miami prison before being extradicted to France to face further charges there. It was a nasty chapter in America's foreign affairs and one that we would do well to remember now, as the WikiLeaks debacle unfolds in the media.

The original DC Comics series, also called The Losers, dealt with a group of WWII soldiers and began in 1970. The shift to the CIA signals popular awareness that while war continues in peacetime, it's carried out by clandestine operatives in secret.

The film is not at all realistic. Notable in this regard is the way the men in the team seem so readily to recover from serious injury sustained during their adventures. It's also formulaic. When Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) meets Aisha (Zoe Saldana) they fight ruthlessly in a seedy Bolivian motel until it burns to the ground. Outside, Aisha then blithely tries to conscript Clay's support for a revenge attack Aisha plans to carry out against Max (Jason Patric), the CIA boss who betrayed the team. A romance also develops (yawn), which will figure largely in the (otherwise thin) plot due to Roque's (Idris Elba) suspicions about this shadowy female who effectively infiltrates their tight-knit group.

Yes, the plot is thin and yes it's pretty incredible based, as it is, on the existence of a lethal weapon of mass destruction that uses sonics to destroy a target without generating harmful waste. It's Max's goal to secure enough of the WMDs to allow him to create a terrorist threat in the community because it's in his interest as a member of the secret agency he works for to have people scared and willing to tolerate further impositions by the administration on their freedoms. As such, the movie also contains echoes of the spin-doctoring that took place ahead of the American invasion of Iraq, when governments throughout the West used devious public relations methods to convince their electorates to support a military action that had no other rationale than finishing off George Bush's incomplete 1990-1991 Gulf War.

It's part of the beauty of basing a movie on a comic that you don't need to worry too much about verisimilitude. But the other comic legacy is the underlying humanity of Clay's team and the way they function as a group. They all agree that justice must be served and they believe that they are the best-qualified to ensure that it is. They act from consensus, while Max is temperamentally brittle and capricious, and rude to those who serve him. They value their freedom but target only those who they believe are acting contrary to the best interests of society. It's a simple equation, but interesting nonetheless. The film is all action, most of which is completely outlandish (as when sniper Cougar (Oscar Jaenada) punctures the petrol tank of the motor bike Max's lieutenant Wade (Holt McCallany) is riding on so that he catapaults directly into the jet engine of the plane that is about to take off, carrying Roque to safety with his ill-gotten billion dollars). But it's not meant to be believeable stuff. It's meant purely to entertain. Apart from that, it contains multiple messages about the way that governments go about business that, if they were widely known, would without doubt be labelled illegal.

And why are they called 'The Losers'? Because they believe in things that the majority of people can understand. It's a question of morals.

It's hard to believe that it actually rained again this morning. Last night, as the fireworks went off at Mooloolaba in front of the tourist holiday lets, there was more light rain a-falling. It got heavier towards midnight and the streets were wet this morning. Then more sprinkles of precipitation around breakfast-time. It's a sign the drought has broken.

Up north, they say that an area the size of New South Wales is under water. Other pundits in the media say it's an area the size of France and Germany combined. All that water, which fell over the past week, sometimes in veritable torrents that crashed from the sky accompanied by thunder and lightning, is now draining seawards down creeks and rivers that have swollen to record volumes. Houses and businesses are expecting the flood to subside in Emerald in the next few days. Down the Fitzroy River - which they say constitutes Australia's second-largest catchment after the Murray-Darling system - seaside Rockhampton (pop 75,000) waits for the water to arrive.

Those in the food industry will tell you that prices for vegetables in Australia's major south-eastern cities will rise as a result of the wash-out. We can also expect that some of the water will have started to drain toward the wouth-west, toward Lake Eyre in South Australia, where already last year heavy rain brought water not seen thereabouts in a decade. While some will applaud because the drought has finally broken, others will short-term rue the deluge and raise their fists in anger at the gods. Eheu! At least the grass is thriving.

I've never understood the story of Lot's Wife who, fleeing Sodom, turned back to reflect on the destruction meted out by God on the mortal inhabitants of that fabled place, or that of Eurydice who, saved from Hades by Orpheus, her husband, is returned to that place when he looks back at her face before they reach the upper world again. These travel stories seem to tell us to merely obey, or to avoid counting chickens until they're hatched, or to be humble in success. Or something. But all of these surmisings are highly proscriptive and unsuited to the era of enquiry in which we now live. Inquisitiveness is a virtue, right? So, then, reflection must also be favoured by the gods. Some evidently think it is, especially at this time of year when the media is filled with lists of the "ten best" and nods in the direction of fulfilled destinies - the past - whence we have ventured like the lost souls we possibly are.

It's funny, too, that in all these old stories from antiquity and from Christian writings it's the woman who is chastised by the gods for transgressing. We all know that women have better memories than men, just as we know that men have a better spatial sense (a better sense of direction in the physical world). Is a woman who remembers a past slight a Harpie to be judged with a stern lens, turned into stone, returned to the infernal realm? And what about Pandora's box? Always, it seems, men have written the script for all of us to act out. Women have been demonised for centuries. Is it now time for them to take the their place in the front rank? Perhaps.

One woman who came out of left field to take a place of prominence - in the field of sport - this year was Jessica Watson who, at 17, became the youngest person to circumnavigate the globe unassisted and without making landfall in a sailing boat. Another woman who made headlines this year in Australia was Julia Gillard, whose superior negotiating skills came to the fore when she successfully convinced unaligned members of parliament who had been given a secondary franchise after the August election, which returned a hung parliament, to side with Labor in preference to the other side of politics. There are no doubt other stories available in which women came out ahead in the mainstream lists, reorganising, at least partially, our concept of the world we live in. But regardless, we know that men still earn more than women for identical work and that women are underrepresented on corporate boards. The die are still loaded.

They're falling in propitious arrangements for me, albeit with an unassuming shift. This is a conclusion I could come to if I were to look back on the past year, during which I published about 30 stories commercially having taken the plunge and gone freelance. Many of the editors I have dealt with over the year have been women, and they're certainly not retiring when it comes to giving an opinion. But the two editors who take most of my work currently are both men.

So, it's been a year of goals reached and expectations rewarded by some tokens of general regard (including the baseline reward of money) despite the fact that I have limited myself to stories of a certain nature (it's necessary to do this as a freelancer in order to conserve one's focus; a too-broad net, if cast, can leave you exhausted and confused) that place me to one side of the mainstream. It's impossible to avoid locating yourself somewhere along the ideological spectrum; the mere fact of your topic choices does this for you.

I don't know what awaits me in the new year arriving but to prepare I took some time off at the end of this one: a couple of weeks during which I put other parts of my life in a better state of order than they had been in before. Banzai!

Review: The Sixties, Jenny Diski (2009)

This articulate and thoughtful little primer on the historical period reaching from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s contains more dress label names and album covers than dates and the names of important people. But it's easy to read. It's not comprehensive (it doesn't pretend to be). It's more of a sketch than a compendium, but it's no less satisfying for that.

Diski, a writer born in 1947, muses on the reason for the rise of alternative lifestylers in the 60s. The war had ended but the world was in more trouble than ever with a frightening Cold War in train, unrelenting economic hardship in many countries, and then the debacle of Vietnam. The state, in the UK, had decided to provide the means of support in the form of generous social security payments so that young people didn't have to work if they didn't want to. There was money and there was the occasion; it was practically inevitable after the optimistic 1950s and amid the post-war economic boom.

Relying on the method of memoir more than history, Diski attempts to describe what it was like being part of the new generation who dropped out, tuned in and turned on. Her personal journey included involvement in protest rallies, stints in mental institutions to treat depression, and then a reaching out into the field of teaching in an attempt to find a way to really change the way people thought about their lives and so change the very structure of society. By addressing the problems of youth, Diski thought, a real change was possible for the future. So in a sense this is a fairly personal account of the period, but I see no reason why that makes it any less cogent for a contemporary reader.

Diski also spends quite a lot of time reflecting on "what went wrong". Specifically, why did the Thatcher era of rampant materialism and individualism result from the 60s. Here, she asks many questions but does not come up with a solid answer. The reason might be that the impetus to reform became entrenched and made its way into the modus operandi of those on the conservative side of politics, thus leading to neoliberalism. But Diski leaves the question unanswered, for now.

This book is refreshing, modest, anecdotal and thought-provoking, and so comes highly recommended.

Review: Collapse, Jared Diamond (2005)

This book has been available for a number of years. I first heard about it while travelling in the Sydney CBD: it must have been on the car radio in 2006, an interview with the author perhaps. A few years later I decided to change careers and become a journalist and I have concentrated on a small number of subjects including the environment. So it was natural for me to buy and read this book. Many people have done the same thing. But I was surprised at how impressed I was once I started.

Briefly, Diamond sets out to expose the reasons behind a series of societal collapses that have occurred at various times in history beginning with the Easter Island society. They cut down all the trees and their culture imploded. He then moves on to the Norse settlement of Greenland which collapsed for similar reasons. No trees equals loss of topsoil which leads to crop failure and starvation. There are other cases including the Maya and the Anasazi, a culture that prospered in the south-eastern United States a thousand years ago. They all collapsed for the same reason: no trees equals starvation.

So far so good. The best parts of the book enable you to look in detail at how these untoward events occurred. Surprising, too, is the number of insights Diamond gives into how our own society is faring on planet Earth. We, too, are chopping down trees at a great rate. Are we doomed to societal collapse, too? That remains to be seen. There is no doubt, however, that generalised changes in society's thinking since the 1980s especially in the area of environmentalism have begun to throw out promising tendencies. It remains our challenge to promote them so that we may cope with the significant challenges that lie ahead in the current century.

What seems likely is that Diamond's book will continue to attract attention from commentators of the left who will use it as a warning against complacency and greed. Short-sightedness in the face of looming catastrophe was a characteristic of former civilisations that ultimately failed and so we should be wary of falling into a similar trap. Rather than merely taking into account the economic advantages of a proposal - be it a government policy or a new enterprise - it seems that we need to also take into account its impact on biodiversity. That's why Diamond's book seems to endorse such initiatives as The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, a UN initiative, which is currently attempting to bring into public focus biodiversity as a valuable resource. Without it we might just follow the societies Diamond chronicles and stop functioning. Chaos is the only likely result.

Northern Mexico is the locus of a modern media echo chamber where global press outlets constantly practice their synchronised routines in condemning drug-connected violence as, almost daily it seems, another slaughter occurs under the noses of local civil authorities. Remarkable this October was news that a 20-year-old student named Marisol Valles was the only candidate willing to take up the position of police chief in the town of Praxedis. But the war on drugs is simply not working.

Back in 2009, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think-tank based in Washington DC, released a report it had comissioned on Portugal's decriminalisation of drug use. Several press outlets covered the paper but there was little traction in the broadsheets, let alone the ghastly tabloids.

In 2011 I think it's time to take another look at the options available, keeping in mind that, in Portugal, the nightmare scenarios predicted by the chorus of conservative doom-sayers just did not eventuate. Switzerland and Holland also have liberal laws regarding drug use. In the US, the standard-bearer for the War on Drugs, live 25 percent of the world's criminals, despite the fact that the country only has five percent of the world's population. Trillions of dollars have been spent in the battle for supremacy against the drug barons, but there has been precious little to show for all the expense. And a lot of dead bodies. It's time to take the trade away from dealers and put it into the hands of corporations.

This is a sight further than even Portugal has ventured but it is, I believe, the only way to stop the carnage, the jailings and the pain. Drugs are certainly not to be recommended: rational speech is. (There are other, better ways to minimise the pain of living.) By continuing to allow dealers to run the trade, the authorities are merely pushing the money underground. People will always want to find a way to reduce existential pain. So let's remove the stigma attached to drugs and talk rationally about the problem. Our children will thank us.

Whatever else the end of the year has in store for residents of south-east Queensland there's one thing for sure: it's going to keep on raining for the forseeable future.This picture shows the Bureau of Meteorology's map of the country for today, and they predict it will continue to rain until Thursday. Friday is New Year's Eve so it might get fine before the end of the year, but going by the current charts that outcome seems doubtful right at the moment. More likely, we'll see continued rain into the beginning of January.

I was driving in the rain today because I decided to get in the car and shoot out into the hinterland to visit Maleny, a small alpine town set in the Blackall Ranges about 45 minutes' drive south west of my home. There was a big traffic jam on the Bruce Highway due to a fatal crash on the road south of Beerwah. I negotiated the heavy traffic off the highway and headed west where I was surprised by the steady stream of traffic advancing in the opposite direction. These were northward-bound cars that had been diverted off the highway by the police to bypass the crash site.

Once you pass Lansborough, you start going up a steep hill into the ranges and the fog sets in. I was a little dismayed by the limited visibility as the fog closed in, especially when the terrain close to the car told me I was driving around the side of a steep incline with precipices on either side of the road. I slowed down well below the speed limit and took it carefully all the way through the upland pastures and up and down a series of small hills that lead you into the township, which is modern, cosy and compact. I had a sandwich and a cup of coffee in a cafe near where I parked then got back in the wet car and headed home.

The streets around my place are largely deserted due to the continued rain that has lashed the landscape for over a week. Picnickers are staying away from the parks and beaches. So I took out a video and plan to spend a quiet evening at home, having eaten some leftovers from Christmas lunch washed down with a glass of inexpensive white wine. It may be wet, but it's still warm and dry inside the house. My thoughts are often occupied by images of homeless people left to cope with Christmas at shelters and in doss-houses. For them, I give a small prayer as I change my bedsheets or place a new towel on the rack in my bathroom. May I always have such small, domestic things to do on rainy summer evenings.

It's the time of the year called Christmas time and we're all spending a lot of it with family and with friends. No? Actually, that's right. Many people have noone to spend time with over the end-of-year season - supposed by the majority and by those in charge of advertising and the media to be the "festive" season - and, of those who do, not a few find that those days spent together are less than complete. In fact, I've heard that the divorce rate goes up in January. It's a bit unfortunate, don't you think?

Possibly not as sad as the Christmas tree I bought for this year's celebrations: a tiny Norfolk Island pine, an araucaria. It's so slender the decorations make the branches dip. I was contemplating my tree today and the thought sprung up in my brain that its branches look like little arms and hands. It looked, to me as I sat on the couch, that the tree was doing a special Christmas dance, known only to infant araucarias worldwide.

Our meal finally cooked, we sat down at about 4pm to eat.

So this post is to wish those of you who read this blog a very happy festive season, hoping that you have the opportunity to spend it with people who care about you enough to make your end-of-year special. "Special" can mean "interesting" and "interesting" can mean many things, but my wish is that you can get through this time of transition with your self-esteem unscathed and your future prospects undamaged. Here's to a season of engaging connections to those around you, and to a useful and prosperous 2011. I will post again before the end of this year. Until then, Ciao.

Normally a new online service announces itself via a news story when the service achieves a remarkable uptake level. Another service might advertise on frequented sites. But you don't often see a new service from Google being advertised via spam. That's what happened in my case, and I must admit to being puzzled. Here's what I received in an email from a stange-looking domain. When I tried to respond to the address I got a failure notice. There's no doubt about it: this is spam. But why?

Hello my name is Julia
I send you this email to tell you important news about Google.

Google will soon launch a great reading platform called YouMagzi a site like YouTube.
Magazines, books, newspapers, comics,brochures ... free or paid ,all in one site.
This site was Created by a French teenager 20 years ,unknown for now. He copied the YouTube site entirely, and also logo. may be the next Mark Zuckerberg of the silicon valley,I don't know...
Google's contacted the young french , 1 month ago, because the idea of French, is enormous !
This site would aim to dethrone Facebook and twitter.

There was also a mysterious-sounding close:

A friend working at Google told me, Please don't said who you say this. I don't want problems !
I await more news and I tell you more soon

So I naturally googled YouMagzi only to find that the service had launched earlier this year. But it was one I had not heard about. Of course, it doesn't look as though it would "dethrone Facebook and Twitter" as my mystery correspondent augured in her cryptic email. What was the point? To tell me that a French national had invented the new service? How could I imagine that the spam had any point - it was sent to my website email address, and I'm a journalist. Were they looking to give me a scoop? It's been online for almost a year. Were they trying to drum up interest? Surely Google couldn't be behind the spam scam.

I remain puzzled. Any suggestions?

Now that we all know that Julian Assange, founder of whistleblower website WikiLeaks, is a "high-tech terrorist", he should be condemned by all right-thinking individuals in whichever country they live in. Joe Biden will thank you. He's the one who placed that hard label on Assange, as The Australian reported today. But, then again, you may be a person who does not agree with this uncompromising suggestion.

In fact, you might think that Biden is attempting to generate negative pre-trial sentiment in the community - even before a charge has been laid. It's true! They have no idea yet which way they'll turn in order to stifle Assange and his wicked henchmen, but they're working hard to create the groundswell of animosity that seems to be requisite for a successful legal campaign. Don't worry, Joe Biden isn't trying to influence the court process (even before a charge has been laid, mind you). He's just giving his honest opinion, in the same way that any other individual franchise-holder is entitled to. Slander? C'mon, don't be rash.

If you think that the American vice president is right to pre-judge Julian Assange, who is currently on bail pending an appeal by Swedish authorities keen to extradite him to their country to face marginally-credible allegations of a sexual nature, then say nothing. Do nothing. Believe that it will all just go away. But remember the precedents, like David Hicks and Mohammed Hanif. Remember that governments will do anything to get what they want, even distort legal process if necessary. Just as long as they get the desired outcome.

In the case of WikiLeaks, governments globally have a lot to worry about. The whistleblower website has deeply embarrassed the US government by placing in clear sight the divergence of public announcements from the realities of back-stage machinations perpetrated by diplomats charged with protecting "national interests". Lost in all of these deals and quiet conversations are the interests of private individuals, however. The people have no voice. Of course! The people need to be protected from truths they cannot handle. Right?

Or do the people need to tell governments they pay for that they are not to be taken for granted.

US President Barack Obama must be quietly pleased today. He said in a statement reported by the Guardian:

"By ending 'don't ask, don't tell' no longer will our nation be denied the service of thousands of patriotic Americans forced to leave the military, despite years of exemplary performance, because they happen to be gay. And no longer will many thousands more be asked to live a lie in order to serve the country they love."

Another election promise down, on top of the mammoth, marathon contest the health care reforms turned out to be. Despite losing control of the House of Representatives in the mid-term election. Despite a fiercely partisan right wing in the US that is incredibly quick to attack Obama's government because they fear its intrusion into their lives.

But what is government? "When you change the government, you change the country," said former Australian prime minister Paul Keating. If that's true then the patriots seeking smaller government, less taxes, and more focus on individual rights as opposed to progressivism are merely annoyed by the path that's being taken. It's not smaller government they're challenged by, it's the liberal cast it's taking on as the months slide by and the 2012 election approaches.

Those who support equality of opportunity for all people despite race, religion, sexual orientation and any other point of distinction that we conventionally raise in describing people should be pleased with the way the US Senate has voted today. It's an admission that sexual orientation is not chosen but genetically conditioned. It's a major setback for the conservative elements in the US. And it will be hotly debated in that country in succeeding weeks.

All the way up to the next election, two years away.

In the public sphere trust is a commodity and we pay for it, either with actual money or with our attention. The media is deeply involved in this market of trust, and newspapers try to project an image of themselves as trusted sources of information. But there are other important actors, too. Politicians attempt to project a trustworthy persona in the public sphere. The media, for its part, bolsters its claim on our credulity by using experts such as university researchers and teachers in the articles it publishes. There are other experts, as well, including people who work at non-profit organisations and think tanks.

Then there's WikiLeaks, a new actor in the public sphere and one whose trustworthyness is currently being tested. Since the release of classified US military information earlier this year, the authorities there have been trying to erode the quantum of credibility WikiLeaks possesses in the public sphere. The Swedish "rape" claim - it's not a charge yet - may be beside the point, technically, but by throwing at least a modicum of opprobrium at WikiLeaks, Swedish authorities have achieved what the US government has so far been unable to achieve: create a compelling spectacle in which WikiLeaks is forced to defend itself against a threat to its credibility.

From the outset, US authorities have tried to call into question the very premise and platform WikiLeaks uses to justify its existence. So far, there are those who support WikiLeaks on principle - which includes a large proportion of people working in the media (WikiLeaks has gifted them a slew of interesting stories) - and then there are those who are on-principle against WikiLeaks. This latter camp includes politicians everywhere. Australian prime minister Julia Gillard was forced to explain her comments on WikiLeaks (she had said that Julian Assange's actions were "illegal") yesterday in a media conference slated to deal with a separate issue. Her solution to the dilemma raised by being paired off against the whistleblower clearinghouse was to say that the initial event (the taking of diplomatic cables from the source) was illegal. She said she was "not a fan" (as though those who support WikiLeaks are mere 'fans' of the site). And she resuscitated the old chestnut about the possibility that third parties mentioned in the cables could be endangered by the WikiLeaks release. This has been the US government's line from the beginning. So far, there is no evidence that anyone has faced a threat due to the release.

Public players such as the Australian prime minister and the US government are fighting not only against WikiLeaks but also against the entrenched distrust they face all the time in the public sphere. Trust is not easily earned. Trust is a commodity that these players cannot simply buy by repeating their condemnations against WikiLeaks because each time they condemn it they are drawing down on their "capital reserves", as it were. In Julia Gillard's case - she came to power in August - there is a fair bit in reserve yet, one would imagine. The US government is in a more tenuous position because it's precisely this unelected complex of departments, managers, policies, and tenured positions that is being questioned by WikiLeaks. In short, it's a bloodbath.

Which explains why these guys are hammering away at WikiLeaks' credibility tooth-and-nail. So far, there has been no attempt on the part of the authorities to discuss the leaked cables. The only way that has been used so far has been to attack WikiLeaks itself. The authorities know that they lost a certain segment of the population a long time ago. Those people are not their audience in the current fracas. The real audience is the uncommitted majority who continue to place trust in, for example, the media. For the most part, the people who are best placed to question the media are already on the side of WikiLeaks. The ones who didn't do a master's degree in international studies or whatever - they're the ones still in play.

The notion of trust in the public sphere is an old one. Jurgen Habermas' seminal book, where the term "public sphere" was coined (as Ben Eltham reminds us - thanks Ben) came out in English in 1962. But in 1961 there was another publishing event relevant to the current post. It was the publication of Robert Heinlein's Stranger in A Strange Land, a science fiction novel about the return to Earth of a young man raised on Mars in an atlernative civilisation. Heinlein invented a class of player in the public sphere of his novel called a "Fair Witness". From Wikipedia: "Fair Witnesses are prohibited from drawing conclusions about what they observe." They are favoured people in the society, and they are trusted for their objectivity. The fact that they're in a science fiction novel should tell us a lot about the way Heinlein viewed the media. It's still a problem today, and WikiLeaks will continue to enjoy privileged status for many observers of this international drama. The longer they continue, the more trust they will generate in the public sphere.

Review: Imperium, Ryszard Kapuscinski (1994)

Most of the writing by Kapuscinski that I've read to this point has been about Africa, a continent full of countries so foreign to the author that his mind might be thought of, as it were, as a kind of blank slate. The difference with the current case is marked. As a Pole, Kapuscinski comes to the table with preconceptions and biases - the first piece in this collection involves scenes from the point of view of the young Ryszard coping with the Soviet take-over of his city - and so the temperature of the book is markedly different from the outset. In fact, it's nearly a failure early on: the contrast between stories about the authoritarian Russian and the imperfect, nascent Azerbaijiani, for example, is not really instructive or all that interesting. In a sense, then, Kapuscinski's clarity of vision is almost his downfall. It would be nice to say that "anything by Kapuscinski is worth reading" but in fact it's not the case. He can be boring. At the start of this book, in the section headed 'First Encounters (1939 - 1967)', he is.

It's in the book's second section ('From A Bird's-Eye View (1989 - 1991)') that things start to look up for the reader. We welcome back the Kapuscinski who is able to set aside - if only temporarily - his long-held views and who is, consequently, able to be at least somewhat objective. By the end of the book, we are in a mood to welcome the summation, the analysis that has been able to emerge from Kapuscinski's extraordinary brain - one so deeply educated and experienced - over the years he's been a Russia-watcher. Most of his conclusions have, in fact, played out in reality in the intervening years.

After finishing this book, I went to the bookstore and placed an order for his The Soccer Wars, and I also plan now to read his other books. I have a real appetite for Kapuscinski's honest, hard-graft, feet-on-the-ground journalism with its subtelties and side-glances into eternity. I was initially disappointed with Imperium, but found that it grew on me as I began to engage with his more mature writing. It seems that at some point the idea for the book gelled in his mind and he decided to spend a significant portion of his time examining the newly-emerged Russian nation. Perhaps not with innocent eyes, but certainly with a bit more compassion and understanding than we initially find in this book.

I've been trying to think of a way to write a review of Salt (dir Phillip Noyce, 2010) without giving away the ending but it's just not possible so it's probably best not to click to read this post until you've seen the movie yourself. On the other hand, it's such a fun film to watch that you might be interested in knowing how the magic works. There are a number of peculiarities that make this spy thriller different from what's come before. The main thing is that the principal character is a woman. The second thing is that she's not trying to save the world (although she does that, too). She's trying to save her husband. I'll let others come to their own conclusions about this twist and write about how Angelina Jolie as Evelyn Salt has helped to redraw the rules of the action flic. There is probably something deep to say at this point, but that's not what I want to do.

In the beginning, Salt is about to leave work in a CIA building that has a petroleum company as a front when she's called back to duty: a defector has appeared and he has a message to deliver. His message is that Salt is a Russian spy tasked with killing the Russian president who is to visit New York to attend the funeral of the US vice president. Although alarms go off inside the heads of Salt's colleagues around the interrogation chamber, there's not much they can do when she escapes from the secure room and decamps to the second floor, an unoccupied area. A squad of armed men is sent up but Salt manages to flee barefoot. She runs to a cab which takes her home. Her husband, Mike (August Diehl), is not there. She fears the worst, grabs her panic bag, leaves her dog with a neighbour and rushes off. The flight sequence on the expressways of Washington that unfolds at this point is exceptional. Salt jumps from a bridge onto a cargo truck, from the cargo truck onto a chemical tanker, and from the chemical tanker onto a moving van. Then she grabs a motorcycle and shoots off into the night, heading for New York.

The kill at the church is just as easy for the thorough Salt, but she uses spider venom instead of a lethal bullet to immobilise the Russian president - a fact that will take a day or so to emerge into the public sphere. After the kill, she disappears onto the waterways, finishing up at a scrap yard where she makes contact with her boss, Orlov (Daniel Olbrychski). Here, she finds her husband but they shoot him dead: it's part of the total dedication demanded of her cohort of Russian spies. (As a girl, she had been indoctrinated by the spy-master and switched for the daughter of an American couple that had a car accident in Moscow. This is how she gets back to the US.) So she kills all of them on the barge and leaves to meet up with the fixer of her next job, which is to kill the American president.

The pair manage to infiltrate the White House but the Secret Service bundle the Big Guy into the elevator leading to the vault under the building. Undaunted, Salt descends via the empty elevator shaft. Once inside the chamber, she discovers that her CIA colleague, Ted (Liev Schreiber), is also a Russian plant. In the ensuing gunfight, Salt is able to survive and cancel the strike order Ted has orchestrated (targets: Mecca and Tehran) but everyone thinks she's the killer and she's bundled off into a helicopter to be removed for interrogation elsewhere. Over the Potomac, she jumps from the chopper and swims ashore. Cue credits.

There's a mesmerising volume of fast action in this film and it's instructive that Salt's motivation is purely selfless. She's a true heroin in many senses, and it would be nice to think that, if the world were given over to be run by more women, you would find more altruistic activity playing out in the media. Sadly, that's not what seems to happen, but you've gotta hand it to Noyce for putting together a compelling and interesting piece of high-tech theatre that is surely slated for long remembrance in the annals of action thrillers and cinematic geopolitical plotting.

Do you want to see Jennifer Lopez invent a bunch of new ways of getting into a cab while wearing a too-tight dress? The Back-up Plan (dir Alan Poul, 2010) is where you can do this. But the movie is more than a romantic comedy as it looks at ways that distrust and fear can undermine even the most promising vision of the future. In a sense, it's quite a serious film and Lopez, who plays Zoe, is up to the challenge of doing both comedy and drama supported by sensitive hunk Alex O'Loughlin as Stan the student goat farmer.

From the outset the focus is on making babies. The movie opens in a fertility clinic where Zoe is about to undergo insemination. After the procedure is finished, she leaves the building but it's raining so she flags a cab. Once inside, she's suprised to find another occupant: it's Stan. They bicker in the back seat and then Zoe gives up the field and exits but Stan follows her down the street as she makes her way home. In this way their romance is concieved. It flourishes after they meet again at a farmer's market where Stan is manning a stall where the cheeses he makes are on display. Then Stan visits Zoe's pet store, Zoe drives out to visit Stan on his farm, and they're well on the way to marital bliss until Stan finds out that Zoe is pregnant with someone else's child.

Zoe has problems with Stan, too. One day, he mentions to an old lover of his that the child evident in Zoe's silhouette is not his. Zoe flares up and promptly quits the relationship. Zoe has this complexity in her character that her mother died when she was a small child and her father left the family, unable to cope with the desperate situation. Ever since then, Zoe has found it hard to trust other people. So when Stan mentions the truth to his old flame, Zoe goes ballistic and walks out.

Through all these trials, Zoe's warmth and seriousness shine through. She's not only self-motivated but she's sensitive too. Lopez is up to the task of navigating both the difficult and the comic passages that fall out between Zoe and Stan, and O'Loughlin plays second fiddle with sensitivity and flair. In the end, though, it's really a girl's movie. It is in fact about what it takes for two people to set up a family: out of nothing more than dreams and wishes, it seems. But these turn out to be enough for these two and in the end it was with tears that I watched the closer approach. It's a comic scene and I won't spoil it but suffice to say that Lopez nails it, just as she does everything else in this excellent, fun film.

WikiLeaks has adapted its modus operandi in recent weeks in order to maximise the impact of the information it holds in its database, and to shift the focus of the story away from WikiLeaks itself back onto the information it holds.

Back in July, when the "Afghan war logs" - around 70,000 pages of data from a US military source - appeared, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was clearly not pleased with the way the media had chosen to cover the case. Impelled by US civil and military denunciations, which had as their point of focus the safety of US collaborators and soldiers operating in the field, the media began to shift the story from the contents of the logs back onto WikiLeaks, the organisation, itself.

In the case of the "US embassy cables" which have recently begun to come to light, the release has been far more measured. We're told that there are about 250,000 pages of data. Only about 1000 pages of that was released to the regular, select group of media outlets favoured by WikiLeaks, including The Guardian and the New York Times. In addition, some pages have been given to the Fairfax mastheads, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. This slow-release method is designed to ensure that the daily headline is pertinent to the information held by WikiLeaks.

But it's a close contest. The main story at the moment appears to be Julian Assange's incarceration on untested allegations in Sweden. A few days ago Assange presented himself at court in London in order to answer for himself. He is still being confined as his bail application was rejected.

So the new MO appears to have been advisedly adopted. So far, we've had stories about dozens of different things, from mining giant Rio Tinto's handling of the Stern Hu case in China to the behaviour of Shell in Nigeria. The drip feed is inexorable and the drama is compelling. Noone knows what story will appear tomorrow. Politicians are so scared that they've completely stopped commenting about WikiLeaks.

And supporters of WikiLeaks have come out in force. Several thousand people added a comment to an ABC story a couple of days ago in order to express their support for Assange. There have been protest rallies in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. Respected members of the community have voiced their disagreement with the prime minister, Julia Gillard, who said WikiLeaks' activities were "illegal". And the Australian activist group Get Up! has collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in order to buy advertising space in the New York Times in order to protest against American conservatives' calls for Assange's assassination.

In brief, WikiLeaks is the only story in town at the moment, with new headlines appearing every day. One notable story that hit the web yesterday focused on the promise of a new organisation, to be called OpenLeaks. This splinter group is being headed by disaffected members of WikiLeaks led by Daniel Domschelt-Berg (aka Daniel Schmidt). Even if WikiLeaks crashes and burns, there will be a phoenix to rise from the ashes and continue spreading information about things powerful people want to keep secret.

The heat goes on.

Review: Tokyo Vice, Jake Adelstein (2010)

Subtitled 'A Western Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan', this book begins with a threat from the yakuza boss Tadamasa Goto delivered to the veteran reporter in 2005. The story then backtracks some 12 years to when Adelstein won employment with Japan's biggest daily general newspaper, the Yomiuri Shimbun, after sitting several competitive tests and passing a number of interviews. After this victory, it's down to business on the beat covering crime in the company's Saitama bureau.

Adelstein gets moved around a lot during the next 12 years. As a regular sei-shain, or full company employee, Adelstein pays the price - long hours, obligatory after-hours socialising with sources, minimal home life, fatigue, routine subjection of his individual judgement to the company line - but reaps the rewards: the status attached to being a sei-shain supports the spirit when times get tough, there's lifetime employment, the pay is decent, and the cameraderie is substantial.

This is a good book to read for those who are interested in contemporary Japanese culture and politics. Its hard-boiled style palls on occasion and it's been written at a rapid pace, but these things may in fact be endemic to reporters once they decide to go down the path to publishing a book. I've come across these failings before with this type of author. In Tokyo Vice, the rapid pace might have been a problem due to the large number of Japanese names involved in some of the cases Adelstein writes about, but it's not a fatal flaw. You generally get the idea of each twist in the plot. You are not left behind. But beware that you need to pay attention. Lazy reading will simply leave you floundering.

As a journalist covering crime, Adelstein is eventually a wake-up to the way Japan views different sectors of society, such as foreigners, yakuza, and politicians. A follow-up volume might focus on the way politicians are involved in the crime world. Now that would be interesting, and I'm certain that Adelstein merely touches on the surface of the pond of data that is available to him.

Once he becomes competent as a senior journalist Adelstein begins to make his own decisions about what stories to cover. He finally chooses two main themes for scrutiny. One is the issue of human trafficking: how young women from Eastern Europe are brought to Japan on promises of work as club hostesses and are then forced into prostitution by their yakuza facilitators. As in other cases Adelstein covers, the story comes to him through a tip-off from a long-time source. Adelstein follows up on the story and tries to get it published but he hits a number of barriers that display an unpleasant side to the Japanese psyche: Japanese people don't really care about foreigners and whether they are mistreated during their stays in Japan.

But the story runs. As a sideline to this thread, he discovers that a major yakuza boss, Tadamasa Goto, traded secrets with the FBI in order to secure a visa to enable him to visit California for a liver transplant. There were several other yakuza who did the same thing, but Goto is Adelstein's main target and in the end his story, once published, leads to Goto being expelled from the Yamaguchi-gumi, Japan's largest yakuza group.

There is a price to be paid for all these editorial successes, however. Adelstein ends up burnt out and suffering personally due to the nature of the crimes he is investigating. A postscript might alert readers to how Adelstein's life changed once he finished covering crime in Japan. We know that he returns to the US - his home country - in order to start a new life. We don't know what job he's got now. By the time we finish his book, we want to know. This fact is a testament to the way Adelstein has been able to establish points of contact with his readers: simply, we care. Because he did. So many journalists seem not to.

Neighbours bugging you? At least I'm guessing they aren't trying to kill you. That's a better deal than the one dealt in the movie Killers (dir Robert Luketich, 2010) to Jen Kornfeldt (Katherine Heigl) who, having unwittingly married a spy, Spencer Aimes (Ashton Kutcher), must cope with finding out she's pregnant at the same time as she discovers that the entire neighbourhood wants to top her husband.

It's a fairly unusual situation to end up in. Naturally, it's his fault: lying to you, hiding his shady past, generally failing on the "I can protect you" front as your longtime family friend turns out to be a contract killer and your husband appears all at sea. The whole domestic-bliss thing comes tumbling down the morning after Spencer's surprise party when Henry (Rob Riggle), waking up from a drunken slumber on the family couch in the living room, tries to off Spencer with a kitchen knife. Having exhausted the pantry, Henry chases an unhappy Spencer and a terrified Jen through the streets in his car until they end up on a building site and Spencer solves the immediate problem by ramming Henry into a construction pit where the victimiser becomes the victim, impaled on a set of reinforcing rods.

It's a comedy-thriller so there's plenty of frustrated banter in the wrecked truck as the pair negotiate their way to a supermarket to buy a pregnancy test. Jen tears strips off Spencer - Spencer's real, long-term problem - while Spencer tries to simultaneously placate his furious wife and guard himself against unexpected attack from every conceivable direction. There's a lot of humour in these scenes. At this point there's also a quantity of suspence mixed with the banter. Where to go from here? First Spencer must find out what happened to his old boss, who has contacted him after three years of silence during which Spencer thought that he had outrun his old life and forged a new one with Jen. The guy's in his hotel room, shot dead. At this point the familiar faces multiply as does the number of guns being used against the two. Jen knuckles down and quickly learns how to shoot.

Kutcher plays a solid comic line, adopting the persona of the henpecked husband trying to get his wife to ease off on the tongue-lashing but it's Heigl who owns this film. From the outset, during scenes where Jen falls in love with the hunky Spencer, she is refreshingly candid, normal even. She's you. She's that girl over there. She's everywoman. It's a movie for the girls from the start: a mysterious, attractive man appears out of nowhere in a hotel lift on the French Riviera, you find a dress that's too tight for you but which you chose from the rack to impress him, you drink an excessive quantity of champagne and it sends you to sleep. There's a ton of the routine paranoid paraphernalia of dating to squeeze into the early scenes of the film. Will she get the guy? Does he care that she fell asleep when he was talking to her? Will he be fazed by the fact that her mother is a lush? Does he care that she can't speak French?

Cut to the domestic idyll. It's a new subdivision and the house is handsome: neat and respectable, it nestles among a row of similar structures. Your husband's job is going fine. Your parents like him. You are doing well at your job. There are some annoyances during the party, such as the neighbour who touches your husband flirtatiously and of course there's the other one who always runs after you as you're driving your car down the street, talking at you non-stop through the driver's-side window. But all-in-all it's a happy life of domestic pleasures that easily aligns with your ultimate goal of starting a family. Then Henry starts trying to kill your husband. Then you get mad. Spencer lied to you and all of a sudden your solid, predictable life is in ruins and you're looking for someone to blame, and he's right next to you.

For all her conventional failings, Jen is firmly in charge of this movie and her rules will finally triumph over the forces of chaos that were unleashed when Henry came into the kitchen and grabbed a weapon from the bench. Jen's down-to-earth, funny, irrepressible femininity will conquer every adverse situation that comes before it. This film is, without doubt, one for the girls. And the guys will enjoy the car chases, martial arts, machine guns, and sudden explosions: everything, in other words, that is designed to thwart Jen's desires.