Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

Ever been on the receiving end of a call centre Droid? Someone who instead of answering your query, badgers you with question after question? You bet. It’s part of daily life and we are told that this benefits us by improving call centre efficiency.

"How would Australia be different if he were prime minister? What are his most closely held policy convictions? I asked dozens of Malcolm Turnbull's political colleagues this question, asking them to name three. Many of them had to pause before responding. (Annabel Crabb)

A very important message from the Middle Kingdom ... and keep watching this space.

The couple rang QANTAS to advise them of the predicament, and the airline gave them permission to make the flight. Loretta tells me that health authorities, when advised of QANTAS and the couple's decision, "were about to go into a meeting and would discuss it there" and would ring them back later in the day. The call was never returned.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak has promised to dismantle the 22 illegal outposts "already in the coming weeks." But anyone listening to him will laugh. He didn't even evacuate one outpost when he was Ehud Olmert's defense minister, when he had the prime minister's full support to do so. Now he's going to evacuate settlements, under Netanyahu, who actually favors expanding them? (Nehemia Shtrasler)

The implications of climate change for ecosystems are illustrated in the new book Heatstroke: Nature in an Age of Global Warming by Anthony Barnosky, of Yale University. Despite intensified warnings from the Copenhagen climate conference, as a self-fulfilling prophecy the government’s “great moral issue of our time” is being relegated to secondary priority. Given that warnings by scientists have proven mostly correct, as contrasted with watered-down reports percolating upward through bureaucracies, there is little evidence the Rudd government is listening to the recent dire warnings by climate scientists.

The Federal government has stepped back from its budget crackdown on the tax breaks that come with employee share schemes. That happened when the Assistant Treasurer, Chris Bowen, admitted that the government’s initial response had been clumsy. He said it could - and would - be “better calibrated.”

The task of the intellectual is not to advance an ideal arrangement that will lead us to some kind of heaven-on-earth; the task of the intellectual is to call things by their names and this is what Keane has failed to do. Those who truly love democracy seek to account for its absence rather than to find it where it does not exist.

This editorial was in response to Media Watch, the Press Council, myself and several others whom the Australian's editor chose to attack because his paper refused to stop using the word “illegal” in response to refugees arriving to seek asylum. The court citations are of course the genuine interpretations of our own parliament’s laws and are not “reems [sic] of drivel”, as they would have known if they bothered to accede to my request to read the truth.

Thirteen-year-old Tim Spehr solemnly watched as wreaths were laid at the cenotaph at High Cross Park in Randwick; the medals of his great-great-uncle, World War I veteran Private Harold Walter Cavill, adorned his jacket. Spehr and dozens of local residents of all ages had gathered to commemorate Anzac Day, 25 April 2009.

A few weeks ago the Australian media reported, with some approval, a message from Netanyahu saying that he supported peace negotiations. I am sure that many of my Palestinian colleagues would have shared my own wry smile at the Israeli PM support for the negotiations rather than peace. The point is that negotiations have been used to obstruct the prospects of peace. Few people express it as clearly and succinctly as Akiva Eldar does.

It is a great testimony to the host people, by now not wholly Anglo-Australian, that the vast variety of new cultures entering the country adapted to one another, and to the host culture, peacefully. And that is because most, if not all, immigrants do want to “adapt” to the institutions and social mores of their chosen new home. Governments are not needed to “manage” ethno-cultural diversity.

The UK's Sustainable Development Commission has released a major new report: 'Prosperity without Growth?: the transition to a sustainable economy' which proposes twelve steps towards a sustainable economy and argues for a redefinition of "prosperity" in line with evidence about what contributes to people’s wellbeing.

The true cause of our present difficulties is that democracy slept through the making of a deep crisis. It is not that the road to our present hell was paved by good or bad intentions. We find ourselves heading for hell because nothing was ever done politically to prevent it. Democracy failure bred market failure. Unelected regulatory bodies and elected politicians, parties and whole governments let their citizens down. (Professor John Keane)

It is precisely this idea [describing education as a product] which bedevils the current debate on education, I would argue, for this kind of conception is an essential part of the current pursuit of economic uniformity. Education is seen in this context not just as a product but as a product produced for exchange. In other words, education is reduced to a commodity.

The state of Australian democracy, the probe into Brimbank City Council, whistleblower protection, climate change and corporate colonisation, and criticisms of the electoral roll are among the topics covered in this month’s update.

This budget reflects the government's definitive move away from its ambit of 2007. It does this under cover of the real issue of  the global recession, induced by international financiers in the wake of neolib deregulation, comfortable in the knowledge that this once it can't be blamed personally.

There is an art to finding affordable housing, especially if one is in the world’s most expensive cities. I discovered this when I arrived in Sydney early this year. As one of my main concerns, I went looking for housing industry experts to give me a couple of tips on how to get a fairly priced rental accommodation.

The question remains, should law-biding aerosol street artists be classified in the same group as vandals? I would say the answer is definitely not. These groups like the one Jasy runs not only promote better communities through quality mural street art but also provide positive guidance and direction to young people in becoming responsible citizens.