Getting What They Deserved

I’d say I’m not surprised that we ended up with a hung parliament given the disgraceful campaign we just had, but I’d be lying; the truth was I was expecting more would be swayed by Abbott’s message and we would end up with a coalition of dithering in power, but instead we’ve been given a result that could be the start of a shift in Australian politics.

That of course is the emergence of the Greens as a solid force. With 11% of the primary vote, most of it stolen from Labor no doubt, the Greens have shown themselves to be adept at getting a clear message out: this is our policy, and this is why you should vote for us. Sticking to principles is something that the electorate has clearly endorsed here.

Third parties in the Senate have come and gone before – the Democrats after all had 9 senators just a decade ago, and three elections later disappeared off the map. What gives some hope here however is that the Greens have managed to take a seat in the House of Reps, something the Dems never managed to do.

You could argue that the Greens are but a fifth column for Labor, but clearly what happened in this election was that Labor thought they could get away with shifting rightwards to the centre and could rely on Greens preferences from the left they’ve abandoned to get them over the line. In a few key electorates, this hasn’t happened.

Melbourne, obviously, was the big one, and without a conclusive primary vote Labor was screwed. Two of the seats still potentially up in the air, Denison in Tasmania and Lindsay in Western Sydney, don’t have Greens preferences flowing to Labor and the net result may be a loss of these seats, or a severe cutback of the margin. Labor have been dumped by part of their ideological core because of their lack of principles in attempting to retain power.

The point to be made here is that the previous status quo in Australian politics was unusual by global standards – two major parties (never mind the Nats, who haven’t had an independent voice in years) alone dominating the executive branch of government is rare, with fluid coalitions far more the order of the day and perhaps even could be considered more democratic.

However, that is not to say government determined by a small number of independents is automatically a good thing. The temptation for pork barrelling is great, both for the parties to buy them off and for the independents to demonstrate a return for the electorate, but I think in this case we’re lucky in that the key people are men of principle and intelligence.

Windsor, Katter and Oakeshott appeared simultaneously on the 7.30 Report last night, and performed admirably. Windsor showed gravitas and experience, Katter passion for the people he represents and an independent mind, and Oakeshott an idealism for improved parliamentary process combined with a pragmatism for getting the job done. All three emphasised stable government and the need to avoid a quick re-run of the election (some suggest because there’s only so much campaign funds available to these independents).

Labor’s situation is such that it can afford to breathe a little easier in all this. The Greens MP has indicated that he would prefer to work with them, which gives them one more seat by proxy. If the result in Hasluck falls Labour’s way, that leaves Labor as the only credible side able to form government. Denison may yet fall to Wilkie, and his politics are unknowable – a former Liberal party member, a whistleblower on the Iraq war against Howard, a former Greens member and now standing as an independent. You’d suggest he’s shifted left-wards, but it’s by no means guaranteed.

The independents in the country have made a point about the NBN being favoured, which has me hopeful, as much of Abbott’s economic case is dependent on dropping that to pay for other policies. I personally hope Labor gets over the line on the back of this alone, but the compromises that occur on the way will be fascinating to watch for.

Election 2010

It says a lot for this election that I’ve waited until Election Day to say anything about it that goes beyond 140 characters. It has really been that kind of election campaign – a dearth of substance from all sides in an effort to come to power by attacking the other side. It’s not a contest I want to engage in.

Gillard (how could I not have written about this before?!) came to power under circumstances best described as controversial – though far from unprecedented. You don’t have to explain to NSW voters that the leader can be replaced at the drop of a hat. The Liberals have gotten good running out of this.

That said, I understand the reasoning and the political machinery behind this. Rudd was unpopular and with the mining tax was fast making new enemies.  The Labor political machine, spooked once before by Howard’s pincer with Latham over the Tasmanian forestry unions, certainly didn’t want a fight with the mining unions on their hands, especially after they saw what could work with the unions in the 2007 campaign. In a way, the replacing of an underperforming leader is a policy that would be well supported in the market, had the government been a corporation. As it is, the electorate is mostly stunned at the notion, and the “Faceless men” bogey is back.

With an election called so soon, there was no real chance for Gillard to have established herself as incumbent PM, and so we have a farce of a campaign where both parties are pretending to be oppositions. Each side is playing a low-risk, high-attack campaign which puts the leaders front and centre in a presidential-style election that bears no relation to the actual voting method. Most telling for me was a colleague filling out a postal vote asking where Gillard was on either the House of Reps or the Senate ballot – that’s not how the voting system works, but for many they can’t see this until they get a how-to-vote card in hand.

The Coalition has led with a simple slogan that Abbott trots out over and over, but fades from my memory almost as soon as it’s out of mind. Stop the boats, end the waste, pay back the debt, something something. Their policies are defined by what they will do to oppose Labor’s current actions, be it on the boats, broadband, or hospitals. The only policy that goes beyond is for paid parental leave, where Abbott comes in with a policy that is simultaneously left and right wing: maternity leave at full salary-matched pay. A tax on big business to pay for a social entitlement is left; paying people at their full salary, instead of an equal payment across the board (Labor’s policy), fundamentally right-wing. Breathtaking.

Labor on the other hand offers…. not much, really. Gone is the ETS in any reasonable time, gone is any pretence to a fair and balanced refugee policy. The policies being sold are the ones which already are in motion – the NBN, the Health Network, and further pushes on the education front. The attack has been focused on the straw-man of Work Choices returning, which I find unbelievable given the Liberals knew the extent of the rejection at the 2007 poll. Labor have been no more inspiring than the Liberals, offering the status quo as an argument while trying to campaign without their legacy due to their fresh dumping of Rudd.

Gillard stumbled hard after the election campaign started over the manner of Rudd’s replacement, and then faced derision over the Real Julia punt. Abbott has managed to skate through without any headline bumbles as he simply avoids anything where he could screw up. That the man campaigning to be future PM did not show at the release of two significant policies, broadband and, well, the entire financial plan shows the sheer opportunism. Here is a man and a party that cannot say that it has a full grasp of the policy it is relying on the attack their opponent’s key policies.

The media is no less to blame. The headline presidential show of Gillard and Abbott running around the country (in Abbott’s case, quite literally) attracted the media, while real policy debates at the National Press Club went ignored by all but the most serious. Perhaps the apex of this shallow focus was the attention given to Mark Latham acting as Channel 9 journalist – the focus was on the media process, not on the election process. I remember being told as a kid that if you respond to the bully, he will act up more – so why did Latham get any attention at all? I didn’t see a single contribution, positive or negative, from him.

There has been no meaningful economic debate at the highest level, the focus entirely being on the meaningless size of the budget. There’s been no debate on foreign policy beyond the meaningless focus on the boats. There’s been nothing on arts, science, defence, infrastructure, agriculture, or industry, all serious policy areas and key ministries. The debate on gay marriage has been shut out entirely.

The blame for shallowness of the debate and the election can in some part be put at the feet of our election system. The rule of the marginals, you could say – it would be in Australia’s best interest for every seat to be a marginal, the government at all times at risk of being shoved out. Right now though, the marginals are focused on the fringes of cities, suburbia filled with families. The nature of swinging voters in these seats is to simply ask, “what’s in it for me?” and wait to be rewarded. I now live in a marginal seat, and all the advertising locally has been focused on that exact question.

I don’t want to see Australia’s destiny ruled by the marginal seats. Self-interest has been the order of the day for far too long: what is good for the family in outer Sydney or Brisbane or Melbourne isn’t necessarily good for the nation. Population growth is not so onerous yet that we need to make a significant cutback and label the population ministry “sustainable”. Governments can borrow money in the order of billions and not struggle to pay it back over a reasonable time frame – the analogy I prefer is that we need to make a renovation, so we’ll borrow some money from the proverbial bank to build it now, and repay it later with a bit of interest. If you simply save and save and save, you’re going to be stuck in your shabby little house from the 80s for years.

The other analogy should come from business: capital investment. We’re investing this money now because it will pay off in the future. I’ve heard Gillard mention that term exactly once. Abbott would have you believe that Australia needs no public capital investment, and that the private sector will provide. It certainly hasn’t provided so far, so why should it now?

I’m pretty sure I’m going to vote the Greens as my first preference. They’re not perfect – many of their policies take a good idea and extend it to the left. Were they to play a significant role in government, these would need to be moderated by a sense of reality. Nonetheless, their policy platform sits far closer to my ideal than Labor or Liberal. A national broadband network without the stupid filter; investment in education through an increase in the mining tax; compassionate treatment of refugees; and of course, most of all, an ETS that makes some real difference – punish the polluters in order to make them change their ways.

Everyone pretty much knows a vote for the Greens is ultimately a vote for Labor, and that’s disappointing. Labor does deserve to be punished for its presumption of its support base. The Liberals however don’t deserve to be rewarded for blind opposition. I suspect if Turnbull had still been the opposition leader and we were still having the same election we have today, I would have wavered, but Abbott? Are you kidding me?

Here’s hoping for PM Gillard to be returned tomorrow, or we shall learn how truly self-centred Australians really are.

Updates for Everybody!

WordPress 3, iOS (nee iPhone OS) 4, iPad, and a new website, oh my!

Yessir, I’ve been just a tad bit busy with things, so here’s a consolidated update:

  1. WordPress 3: pushing the sky is now running on the latest and greatest WordPress has to offer. Usually warnings apply, if you see anything funny let me know etc etc etc. Apparently this now unites WordPress with WordPress MU (multi-user), so let’s see if I can’t get something going with that…
  2. I have an iPad! It is gorgeous and it’s replaced a subset of tasks my laptop once stood in for. The battery life is amazing and everything that’s been promised, and it’s great for general web stuff, though I’d kill for a basic adblock or something. More on this at another point.
  3. iOS 4 was released this morning, and I reluctantly let go of the jailbreak in order to play with it. The decision was difficult in some ways, as I’d gotten quite comfortable with my modifications, but the temptation to play with shiny-new-thing was too much. (Maybe I’ll get the best of both worlds shortly.)The main things I’d had jailbreak for were:
    • SBSettings – swipe the status bar, flick services on and off, adjust brightness.
    • Categories – put apps into folders, when you’ve got way too much junk and nowhere to put it.
    • Customisable appearance – background wallpapers, themes, just generally being able to make my phone look somewhat unique next to the other thousand iPhones out there.
    • Five Icon Dock – it’s just logical to me: Phone, mail, messages, web, and iPod. Don’t make me choose.
    • Weather Icon – update the icon for my weather app (PocketWeather AU) with an icon based on the conditions, and update it regularly.
    • SMS Character count – glaring omission from Apple, as some of us cared about going to 161 characters and weren’t interested in counting characters by hand.

    So naturally, there wasn’t too much that was going to sway me over… except shiny-new =) So anyway, here’s how the update went for those services:

    • Settings-in-the-app-tray – almost as good as SBSettings in the sense that McDonalds is almost as good as a gourmet steak from a Michelin-recognised restaurant, i.e. it does the job but it certainly doesn’t do it well. I want it back.
    • iOS Folders – excellent, apart from the 12-apps-per-folder restriction. I can see the reasoning, but dammit, we all know how to scroll. The “rejected” mechanics when trying to add the 13th app is also awful. Overall though, solid win over Categories.
    • Appearance options – background wallpaper: tick (it even carried over my jailbreak wallpaper!). Everything else: fail. Back to shiny app bubbles, back to bog-standard-translucent-blue notifications. To be expected, but I will say this much: Apple’s default icons are definitely amongst the most appealing. Don’t mess with the formula.
    • Five Icon Dock – unfortunately, folders-in-the-dock aren’t quite as elegant as a five icon dock. There’s room there, though I can see the advantage of spacing. Want it back.
    • Weather Icon – of course, no update here; Pocket Weather luckily has implemented (some time since I jailbroke at least) the badge, so I get that much, but still no glanceable information. Mitigated Weather Icon somewhat, but still not as good.
    • SMS character count – finally here! No need to go back for this.

    Of course, there’s plenty of other reasons to have jailbroken, not least of which was background apps, and the ever-so-tempting Lockscreen Info, but I never found much use for those. Other iOS 4 features like better spell-check, mailbox unification and message threading are great though, and perfect for that easier day-to-day use. In terms of the headline features, “multitasking” does make transitions snappy, and there’s other improvements that make it feel a bit quicker. We’ll see how it goes over the next few days.

Whew! and more soon hopefully!

Back to the Future

We’ve been here before. I wonder if anyone else recognises it?

(Well, I haven’t, though I’ve read about it. Let me explain…)

There’s an eerie sense of deja vu about the computer industry right now, if you look at it the right way.  The PC wars were pretty much over by the time I was born, definitely so by the time I was old enough to be conscious of a computer, but from what I’ve gleaned from my history books and a little recent reading, things weren’t always so straightforward in the computer industry as they’ve been over the last few years.

Once upon a time thirty years ago, there were many computer manufacturers, almost all with significant differences in key technology components of their machines. The chips inside were different, the operating systems weren’t compatible, and if you made a bet on technology occasionally it didn’t pay out – the computer you bought today might be gone tomorrow.

Apple was there, as was Microsoft. That was the genesis of these two giants of the industry, and their approach to the computing world at the time led to their wildly differing fortunes in the 90s. Apple worked as it does now – to control the whole process end-to-end, with the hardware and the software all under the Apple umbrella.

Microsoft on the other hand tied up with a key partner in IBM and picked just the software side of the equation. Someone else would build the hardware, but anywhere Microsoft’s operating system ran its programs could run, too.

Hardware manufacturers were quickly sidelined as Microsoft defined their interaction with the machine. In the end, even IBM was sidelined as “IBM PC-compatible” quickly became the “Wintel” world.

It all looked like a war that was over until the smartphone redefined what a personal computer was.

Today, we’ve got something very much like the 80s playing out again in the tablet and smartphone market – competing, incompatible OSes, different hardware architectures, and a market that is quickly proliferating with options.

Apple’s got a head start like they did last time, and are controlling the end-to-end chain even more strongly than before. They’ve got a major competitor that is selling only the software, not the hardware. Only this time, Google is Microsoft, with Android the biggest challenger amongst the pack.

There are differences, of course. IBM is no longer in the consumer hardware business, and there’s no Big Blue equivalent for either the consumers to go with or Google to work with as a premier hardware partner. Microsoft is still around of course, though not competitive in the segment where the battle is being fought.

And it almost goes without saying, the Internet has changed everything – no longer does your computing platform determine what applications you can use, as increasingly the complex logic is available in a device-agnostic form. No longer is it necessary to be tied to a single platform if what you do is simply accessed through a browser, more than ever a proxy OS environment for the web.

All this is also within the lifespan of the people involved the first time around, and they’re not likely to make the same mistakes twice, especially not Steve Jobs.

Mercantile

Interesting article over on Satyajit Das’s blog on China and its place in the global economy today – especially the opening insight:

China’s economic model is reminiscent of 17th century mercantilist policies. Thomas Mun, a Director of the East India Company, in England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade (1664), wrote that the purpose of trade was to export more than you imported. At the same time, a country should amass foreign ‘Treasure’ that would be the basis of acquiring foreign colonies to allow control of essential natural resources. The strategy required reducing domestic consumption and imports and export of goods manufactured with imported foreign raw materials.

While these days it’s no longer fashionable or politically acceptable to have total control over a sovereign nation, I have to wonder how much Australia is caught in the foreign colony honey trap of China.

With China now our dominant trading partner and Chinese money gradually buying up Australian companies left and right, and the rumoured extent of Chinese investment in Australian real estate driving house prices here, how much have we tied ourselves to the Chinese bandwagon voluntarily and how much of it is through a state-sponsored mercantile policy reminiscent of the European powers in the 17th and 18th centuries?

Will history repeat so soon? I guess it’s an invitation to the question, is the 20th century and its drive for equality and democracy globally ultimately a blip in the history of hierarchical power which ultimately amounts to feudalism?

Discuss.

Google’s Take-Down Stats

Google recently created a page where they revealed government take-down requests for their services, with some interesting figures revealing Brazil topping the list of take-down requests, followed by Germany, India and the United States.

Australia ranks 10th with 17 take-down requests, of which Google has complied with 52%. China however considers the take-down requests themselves state secrets and so Google cannot reveal that data without legal trouble.

While this is all well and good in Google’s campaign for internet openness and freedoms, what this ultimately makes me even more curious about is the corporate take-down requests they get – where are the stats for those requests, Google?

While it’s easier to target countries and represent their statistics on a map nicely, I suspect corporate entities are responsible for the majority of the take-down requests, particularly for YouTube.

What would be most interesting is if the implications of law means that the corporates effectively act the same way as China, with the take-downs being treated as commercial-in-confidence.

It would also dovetail very nicely with the idea that China is effectively acting as a giant corporation, and as a result just getting stuff done instead of the bickering we see in open democracies.

More on Phones

It’s amazing how Apple has set the agenda in the mobile phone space, and it’s only been too evident in the last few days. Apple’s iPhone OS 4 event last week not only drew the tech media but managed to splash out headlines across what might be termed, for want of a better word, the “mainstream media”. The BBC, ABC, SMH and other generalist/unspecialised all reported on the event in a way they would never have done for Nokia.

Nowhere was it more evident this week with the announcement of Microsoft’s Kin One and Two, the bastard children of Windows Phone 7 and Danger Sidekick, acquired by Microsoft some time ago. Sure, the BBC had a story on it, but it’s accorded about the same prominence even on their Technology news page as a report on the implications of Apple changing some legal terms in their iPhone Developer agreement, something which affects no-one outside the developer community.

Whatever else happens, it’s certain to be an established fact that Apple set the zeitgeist of the day just as much as Google does.

iPhone OS 4.0

As many suspected, Apple finally announced multitasking in version 4 of their iPhone OS. It’s clear that they’re playing catch up here to the bleeding edge of the market in the form of Android, as the multitasking implementation has many similar features (I sincerely hope it doesn’t add to more fuel to the patent suing fire which helps nobody.

Most importantly for me, 4.0 ticks many of the boxes for which I’m attached to my jailbreak, with a couple of exceptions. The multitasking isn’t much to me, apart from the value to be gained from having a VoIP or IM app running in the background. On the other hand, comparatively straightforward advances that could easily have been there from day 1, such as folders, SMS character counts, custom wallpapers (avoiding every iPhone looking like each other), and multiple & save-able on-the-go playlists in iPod are things that put 4.0 on par.

Multitasking, a unified inbox, message threading, full text search, improved spell-check, and finally (finally!) improved support for localisation in the form of English (Australian) in voice control together all make it a can’t-miss. An excellent breakdown is available at iLounge.

That said, I don’t think even with the convenience of multitasking there’s anything quite like SBSettings, and it’ll be hard to let that go – the Settings app will certainly be running in the background for me. There’s also themeing – with the point again being to make my phone more personalised to me, as well as giving me the ability to have my own SMS tone (why a restriction Apple? can’t make money off the SMS tone market?). And finally of course, there’s just the general I-can-screw-with-it nature of the beast that makes me want to keep a jailbreak. Chances are I’ll forgo that though, as missing out on all that goodness for a few small things isn’t worth it.

Finally, in spite of all the advances, Apple still hasn’t fixed the fundamental notifications interaction, nor have they added any method to give more information on the default lock screen. That contrasts sharply with Microsoft, which is a nice segue to the Microsoft Kin.

Kin One and Two

Danger’s Sidekick never actually made it to Australia in any substantial way, probably because it was a Telstra exclusive, but by all reports it made a big splash in the US, and its form factor certainly appeared to influence a number of subsequent designs. They’re certainly fun looking devices, and the ease of messaging on a physical pad made it a hit in a key market segment, the teens and their 20something siblings.

Little surprise then that Microsoft, Danger’s owner since 2008, is hell bent on keeping this valuable advertising market interested in their devices by announcing two new models, the Kin One and Two. They’ve chosen to orient the whole device around “the social” – essentially a way to say it gets twitter, facebook and all the rest of the social networks and puts them in one place. The operating system looks like a slimmed down version of Windows Phone 7. and it doesn’t have any possibility for user-installable apps.

Until the iPhone’s app store was unleashed upon the world, the majority of people got the software from the manufacturer on day one and that was pretty much it. Sure, some devices you could install more apps or run mini Java applets on newer handsets, but none had that customisability. Now though, the apps are your customisation, so to find Microsoft selling the Kins just as Google and iPhone ramp up their devices seems a bit backwards.

It’s the Henry Ford metaphor: Any colour so long as it’s black. Microsoft expects the target audience will see that they’ve got their favourite social networks already available and hope on board – thankfully Microsoft steered clear of the temptation to try to push their own network.

There’s something to be said for the simplicity that this offers for people who want a phone that does the basics well and offers some extra features that you don’t have to go out and find or think too much about. There’s definitely a niche for these.

On the other hand, who exactly does this target? The idea of the installable apps has become embedded in the market, and it would have to be a price point difference that shifts people towards this. When you’ve got a Kin and your friend brings out their iPhone/Nexus/Droid and starts playing with a game, you’re going to want to ask about the games you’ve got. When a new social network comes into play in the next 6 months or year, where are the Kin people going to be? Simplicity is a trade-off.

Either way, the Kin looks like an early preview of where Microsoft intends to go with Windows Phone 7, and for that alone it’ll be intriguing.

Where’s that Nexus One?

Dammit Google, dammit HTC, where do I get my Nexus One/Desire/HD2 Android 2.1 in Australia? Get it here already, I need a new toy!

Google’s Leverage

Up until now, it looked like Google was chucking services out there in the hope that it would stick; Google Apps for Your Domain was mostly about getting businesses into the Google hivemind space by appealing to users who wanted to have their home experience of GMail at work too. Almost by accident they managed to pick up a bunch of micro-businesses whose only presence on the web had been a website built for them years ago but who didn’t want to bother setting up and maintaining a mail server to respond to the three emails a week they were likely to get.

Apropos of this, Apple came along with the App Store on the iPhone, and showed the world there was a whole new way to distribute programs on a platform, instead of relying on people to go to individual developer sites. And now we’re some 3-billion-apps-sold later, with a whole host of pretenders to the throne in the form of the Android Marketplace, Ovi store (Nokia), and others for Blackberries, WinMos and Samsungs. There’s suddenly a profusion of app stores, even to the point where someone saw a market opportunity for a Mac OSX App Store (Bodega) – though not Apple, at least not yet =)

Someone at Google though clearly added two plus two and got five, because Google’s now launched its Google Apps Marketplace – you can now add non-Google web apps to your Google Apps For Your Domain.

Wow.

If you haven’t grasped the wow yet, think of this way: you could previous start up a small business, have the e-mail, calendaring, online doc sharing, and all those lovely Google services hosted for you; now you can also have CRM, or bug tracking, or project management, or invoicing, all available for your business, with a single login, in the “cloud” for access anywhere, hosted by Google. All those IT costs of running and managing servers for businesses whose primary business is not technology-based is now effectively optional. Wow.

As long as you trust Google.

Why I don’t go to the cinema any more

At the Cinema

Cost of two movie tickets to a standard session of latest hit: $36
Cost of a medium popcorn and two drinks: $16
(Optional) Internet booking fee to guarantee seats: $1 per ticket

At Home

Cost of a DVD on your giant flat-screen TV on your very comfy couch: 3 months from cinematic release date + $15
Cost of medium popcorn and multiple drinks: $3
(Optional) Seat guarantee: $0

Now, I don’t know about you, but is going to the cinema to see the latest hit really worth the extra $36 dollars? It’s starting to feel less and less like it is…

Links for the Day

  • Ok, I know the whole iPad thing is getting tired, but here’s one final one (for now) that’s making me reconsider it a bit – just look at this quote:

    I went back for a second helping of Avatar this Sunday. There’s a scene early on in the movie where one of the scientists walks across the lab carrying the “mobile computer slab of the future.” We’ve seen one of these in almost every sci-fi movie of the last 50 years. It comes free with a jetpack, I suppose. Except this time, one month later, my 12 year old son turns to me and whispers “Look Dad, it’s an iPad.”

    I’m still not sure those used to more power, for want of a better word, to do what they want on their computers will give it up for the iPad, but it does push the fulfilment of the average user’s expectations that one step further.

  • Gary Kasparov, he of World-Chess-Champion-Playing-Computer fame, writes on the evolution of chess being influenced by computers, particularly since the historic victory of Big Blue, and how the computer’s lack of context, of appreciating the myth of culture around Chess, means its playing style is different and unfettered.Kasparov is left wondering if Chess is losing its heart to the march of technology, and whether this could he tackled by a better AI that actually tries to imitate human thinking – more efficient and elegant than brute-force, but certainly a harder technology to create.

    Either way, a fascinating read.

  • The New York Times has an excellent info-graphic of the US Federal Budget as requested by Obama this year – The proportions spent on defence, health (both the boxes labelled Health and Medicare) and social security (which I would consider includes both the Social Security and Income Security boxes) are staggering, and if anyone wants to use it as propoganda for the relative socialism of the American state, it’s ripe for the picking. Wish we had a similar one for the Australian budget yearly… *investigates how to get this data ready*
  • A beautiful image of an owl in flight. Just realised we don’t have many (any?) owls in Australia, do we?
  • 50 second Avatar Lego spoof. Need. I. Say. More.