I Want In

You might already be tired of hearing about 'working families', but that's fine because there are a lot of other catchphrases and buzzwords to work your way through. One of them is 'social inclusion'.

This idea really caught on about 10 years ago with the Blair government in the UK, although it looked at it from the other angle - 'social exclusion'.

In this country, South Australia (in many ways the most progressive State) has led the way. It established a Social Inclusion Unit (within the Premier's Department) and a Social Inclusion Board in 2002. The Rudd Government has now essentially nicked the idea and is doing the same thing.

So who is socially excluded and therefore needs to be socially included? Last week, I chaired a panel on this at the Australian Institute of Family Studies conference in Melbourne. I can't say the panel was comprehensive, but it did highlight some groups that do need help.

The homeless - Tony Nicholson from the Brotherhood of St Laurence spoke about them.

Senior Australians - Rhonda Parker, a former WA Cabinet Minister is these days a very effective advocate as Aged Care Commissioner.

The mentally ill - the Chief Federal Magistrate John Pascoe spoke movingly about the difficulties some people face when interacting with the legal system.

And indigenous children - their interests were highlighted by the deeply impressive Muriel Bamblett, who's the Chair of the Secretariat of National Aboriginal and Islander Child Care.

The Rudd Government is still getting going but it has made social inclusion a priority. It's one of the portfolios of Julia Gillard, and has its own Parly Sec. The polititicans have had a fair bit to say on this topic but (as always) it's what they do that matters. Unfortunately, it's not rocket science - it's much more difficult than that.

Reap what you sow

For some time now I have occasionally teased my 4 year old about her tummy. "It blocks out the light", I might say, or "Are we having an eclipse?"

She laughs, I laugh, it's been fun. Until the other day, when she said to her mother, "Am I too fat?"

We live in an age when about 1 in 5 of kids beginning school is overweight and childhood obesity is increasing. Fat kids have a tendency to become fat adults, with consequent effects for their quality of life, health and life expectancy. I'm not sure whether this next bit is chicken or egg, but most of the parents of overweight kids don't think their children weigh too much.

That's the context. But the specific bottom line is fine. She's not fat. She has an age-appropriate tummy - her weight has always been pretty much bang in the middle of where she ought to be for her age. She's tall, but fat she ain't.

So that question brought both her mum and I up short.

She doesn't get to watch a lot of commercial telly, though she does see some. And everywhere she sees images that extol the virtues of beauty and slimness for girls and women. Actually, it's more than that, it's popular culture: Girls in advertising, magazines, appearing on television are mostly not normal-looking - they're slim to very skinny and have big hair. Toys are not normal looking either. Forget the anatomically impossible Barbie, there's now something worse, the Bratz doll.

Bratz dolls are tarty. My mum would call them 'common-looking', but that's English understatement. Put it this way, if you were a straight teenage boy and you met a young woman who looked a bit like that, you'd be very excited indeed*. Our daughter understands that a Bratz doll will never be permitted in this house.

We are trying to give her good messages. This house is full of books and she has her head in them all the time. She's physically active and next year begins school and playing a team sport. Her mother went to one of the finest universities in the world and there's no reason why she can't as well.

But there are companies that plan to make money from our girl. The marketing has started already and it clearly gets more intense over the next 5-10 years. The other day on the show, I spoke to Maggie Hamilton about her new book. She traverses a range of issues about girls from birth to adulthood. Clearly, our girl is still at an easy age and things will get tougher later. There is so much I want her to learn but four things seem very relevant right now.

1. Skinny isn't everything.
2. Treat other people the way you'd like them to treat you.
3. Buying things doesn't make you happy.
4. You have to be true to yourself. (Hard when you're still working it out)

And ps. Your Dad was wrong to say "it's blocking out the light."

*Though if their heads really were that big, it would freak the boys out completely.

Don't know much biology*

In my job I interview a lot of academics. They can be great people to talk to, they're often genuine experts and their job is thinking. Years ago, I read a quote from the Dean of Engineering at Auckland University. It went along the lines of "Few Cabinet Ministers, in my experience, are used to sustained thought". Well, yes. That's because the skills that make for an effective politician don't usually involve sustained thought, not in terms of grappling with an intellectual challenge anyway. But I digress.

The trouble with many academics is that they often don't appear to say anything. There is a disconnect between what we in the media want, something simple and definite, and the way that so much of the world actually works - complex and ambiguous. Academics are grappling with that complexity and ambiguity, and they don't want the simplification to be wrong. (They also don't want to be sniped at by their peers, who may be a bit - how shall I put this - jealous of any media profile)

All of this explains much of what can be an unhappy relationship between academia and the media, but as far as today is concerned, it's just background. Because today I interviewed an academic who had things to say and said them well.

We were talking about sex education in schools - something the Public Health Association (along with 28 other groups) is calling for a much more comprehensive approach on. I put it to Angela Taft that some critics of sex education oppose giving teenagers information, essentially on the grounds that they will use it to have sex.

She shot that point of view down so quickly it was the intellectual equivalent of watching a ninja take out an unknowing guard in the movies. Sweden, she told the Life Matters audience, has had a comprehensive sex education approach since 1945. Other Scandinavian countries have also been taking this path for decades. Their teenagers begin having sex later than ours and their rates of teenage pregnancy are half what ours are. The evidence is overwhelming.

Not that one or two newspaper columnists will let a few inconvenient facts get in the way of a good rant though. Watch this space.

*With apologies to Sam Cooke

Matron!

My grandmother, who was born in 1901 and died almost 20 years ago after a long and noisy life, trained as a nurse. When she started there were no such things as antibiotics - so the focus was on hygiene, everything had to gleam. She could make a bed with creases so sharp they could cut you. She didn't do bedside manner, even for the grandchildren she loved. Instead she had a real facility for pointing out your faults. It was refreshing - in much the same way that swimming in the North Sea on Christmas Day* is refreshing.

She liked a drink and at Christmas parties she often drank too much. She was a member of enough clubs to attend perhaps 50 Christmas lunches every year, beginning in early November. She never tired of them. When libated she was known to have the ocassional cigarette - a habit she'd really tossed decades beforehand. She believed in saturated fats of all kinds - and had a weakness for strange foods from another age: brawn, dripping on bread, black pudding, tapioca.

When my mum, her daughter, produced a meal with rice as the carbohydrate, my Gran would say helpful things like, "What is this muck?" She consumed industrial quantities of salt, enjoyed the pokies, had an eye for much younger men and loved to embarrass her adolescent grandson.

She was exhausting, she was unforgettable. She was a Character.

I've been thinking about her a lot this week, partly because it was her anniversary earlier in the month but mostly because the government announced it had appointed a Chief Nurse - a capable and impressive woman. Australia hasn't had one for ages. In a small, almost ineffable, way it makes me feel better to know she's there. My Gran would have approved.

*Sea Palling, Norfolk, 1993. Never again.

I blame the parents

Ten days or so ago, I was MC and facilitator of Parents' Night Out in Brisbane. It was a good night. There was music, from a vocal group I'd never heard of before (they were wonderful), comedy from mother of five Fiona O'Loughlin (she was brilliant) and a discussion with the cheery heading "Are today's cities destroying childhood?"

Not long into it, one of the panellists, I think it was Geoff Woolcock, wondered aloud whether the culprit wasn't so much cities as parents. After all, it's parents that hover like helicopters over their precious children; it's parents who drive their children everywhere rather than encourage them to cycle or walk; it's parents with the best of intentions who have lobbied to remove risk from their children's lives.

Another panellist, the geographer Paul Tranter, thinks about child-friendly cities a lot - it's his job. A while ago he went to a transport conference. Paul spent the day listening to economists and engineers talking about cost-benefit analyses and the efficiency of transport networks. Jeanie Mac!
Eventually someone (it wasn't Paul) asked "have you factored into your models the loss of children's joy and wonder?" I think you can imagine the response.

We have lost a bit of joy and wonder. Over the last year or so on Life Matters, several guests have highlighted the importance of children being allowed latitude and freedom. It's not good for kids if they're only unsupervised inside the house or garden - they need to be given the skills to learn to navigate their neighbourhoods safely and allowed to get on with it. In the long run, it's safer. Adolescence is too late to be learning road sense

Think of your own childhood and the best bits that come to mind are probably when you were away from the parental gaze. That's what too many of today's kids are missing out on - a bit of benign neglect.

Prue Walsh has spent decades consulting on play. She's the person that schools and local governments around the country and all over the world ring to make their playgrounds better. If they're too safe, she reckons they're boring. "I blame the safety-nazis," she says.

I don't. I blame the parents. With the best will in the world, and the most positive intentions, we've got this wrong. And our kids are missing out.

Cranky at Crikey

I like Crikey. As a journalist, it's hard not to. I've used Crikey commentators on various shows I've presented - they've been great talkers with something to say. Crikey at its best is irreverent, cheeky and sometimes fearless. It doesn't mind sticking it to those in power.

And sometimes it gets it completely wrong.

Yesterday in its Tips and Rumours section, Crikey ran this:

On October 23, 2006, the ABC's Life Matters program devoted itself to a warm analysis of The Dore Program which was offering help to parents with children suffering attention deficit syndrome ... at a price! It featured a lengthy interview with the program's founder, owner and chief evangelist, Wynford Dore. The Life Matters website still carries this gushing blurb:
The Dore Program offers drug-free treatment for a range of learning problems. It's based around exercises that stimulate the cerebellum - the part of the brain that controls eye-coordination, inner ear balance and motor skills.
The therapy is named after it's (sic) backer and founder Wynford Dore, who struggled for many years to help his daughter cope with severe dyslexia.
He's now calling for change in the way we manage and treat learning difficulties, such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).
The program was presented by Richard Aedy, the producer was Amanda Armstrong and the story researcher and producer was Jackie May. Last year the ABC's Four Corners took a more sceptical view of The Dore Program and last night The 7.30 Report comprehensively buried it with the news that the business is now in receivership leaving debts of more than $13 million. Parents have been left high and dry, some owing money while others are in debt. We eagerly await Life Matters follow-up story as well as its apology. Or doesn't it matter?

The short answer is it matters a great deal. The longer version is that Life Matters did follow up stories. Two of them. If the anonymous Crikey writer had followed a few journalism basics, like making a phone call or spending 10 seconds using Google, he or she would have discovered that this was completely wrong.

Yes, I spoke to Wynford Dore - though the interview was anything but gush. In March last year, when his organisation put forward its lead researcher, David Reynolds, I interviewed him too. By then it was very clear that the science was disputed and controversial. The interview was rigorous, detailed and robust. By some distance it was the toughest interview Dr Reynolds had in Australia. I'm proud of it.

When Four Corners reporter Matthew Carney was doing his own story on Dore, he requested that interview. He told me recently it was a key piece of research for his film.

Last month, when the Dore organisation collapsed, Life Matters was one of the first to report the story. I spoke to a long-time critic of Dore, Max Coltheart, who's at Macquarie University. I also interviewed Michael Greenwood from Parkes Shire Council. Parkes had really embraced the Dore concept, it had a Dore centre and established a trust to pay for kids who it was thought would benefit to attend. When I did that interview, Parkes was still wondering where its $15,000 was.

I'm not perfect, far from it, and Life Matters isn't perfect either. But we really have tried to cover this story at key stages and from different angles. A few seconds with a search engine would have established this.

I'm sorry to go on - I'm about to stop. Life Matters executive producer Amanda Armstrong says it all far better, and much more concisely, in the response Crikey published today.

There still hasn't been an apology though!

What do you do?

It's the classic question, isn't it, the one you get at parties.

"What do you do?"

I am not good at parties and the last one I went to was my sister's 40th. In a way this doesn't count as a party (not that it wasn't fun, L, if you're reading this) because I knew nearly everyone there and so didn't get asked the question.

The thing is, answering that question is pretty much where I peak at parties because my job is easy to explain: I talk to people on the radio. Most of the time is spent preparing to talk on the radio, which means a lot of reading, quite a lot of conversations with the EPs and producers, a fair bit of thinking and some writing. The actual talking is the smallest part of the whole process, in terms of time.

There - that's it. There's obviously more to it but that's really the guts of the thing. It's dead easy to explain.

A couple of weeks ago, sitting at Adelaide airport, it occurred to me how unusual this is. I was in conversation with a geologist, who agreed, but then didn't try to explain to me what his job involves. Mainly I suspect because it's not that easy to do*.

A few days later I was having dinner with friends - it was a special occasion so there were 15 people around the table. The group was made up of:
broadcaster, IT manager, nutritionist, anaesthetist, TV journalist, environmental NGO campaigner, TV journalist, lawyer, director of a childcare centre, financial journalist, IT specialist, channel manager for a technology firm, housewife/actress, investment banker and dental specialist.

I know exactly what I do (restrain yourself) and have a good idea of what the three journalists do and also the childcare director and the housewife/actress. But that's it. Of the 14 people there who weren't me, I can tell you what five of them really do. I have no understanding at all of what the investment banker does, but consider him one of my better friends. The channel manager has explained her job to me on three occasions but I still don't understand it. She has been immensely patient.

We live in a time of arcane specialties. Many of us become fluent in highly specialised and sometimes technical skills that are difficult to explain to someone who doesn't have them. There are plenty of jobs which require skills that are easy to explain - plumber, electrician, carpenter, butcher, baker, teacher, journalist. We all feel we have a handle on these occupations without any real understanding of what they do. These days though many of us have jobs that are difficult to even describe.

This ought to mean that we make real connections when we have conversations, instead of just talking about work. But I fear that what's really happening is we're not having the conversations with those outside of our circle - because they're too hard.

Talking to people is what I do and it's usually worth the effort. I just wish I could make myself do it at parties.

*To be fair, he thought that people weren't really interested in what he did, that they were just being polite.

That's gratitude for you

Once, when I was whingeing to my mother about my son, she said something that stopped me in my tracks.

"Don't go expecting gratitude from your children."

Now there are two ways of taking this and I took both. She's right - absolutely right - it's the way of the world. And I think she was making a small point too. Incidentally, I think it's difficult to get your head around how much your parents loved you until you have your own kids. Then it blows you away.

Anyway, I say this because tomorrow on the show we're doing a talkback on feeling appreciated. We all need to feel appreciated, both at work and at home. Stephanie Dowrick will be my guest and I think quite a few people will ring in. Hope so.

None of my business

Privacy is a mutable concept. Most of the time most of us never think about it. Roger Clarke, who's Chair of the Privacy Foundation and was on Friday's talkback, puts it very succintly: "It doesn't matter until it does." This is a pithy, IT-expert's way of saying that none of us care about privacy until we feel ours has been invaded.

I think that's right but also not the full story. It's likely I would feel my privacy is being invaded at a different point to when you would. Certainly, there's a difference between generations. Older Australians have a more attenuated sense of privacy, younger ones much less so. So a person in her 70s, is less likely to tell you how she votes or what her house cost, than one in her 40s.

Young people, for whom social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook and Bebo are de riguer, are extremely relaxed about privacy. Or at least, that's how it looks. I use Youtube to find old music clips when I'm supposed to be working but there's plenty of other, more embarrassing, footage out there. And spend five minutes flipping through bebo.com or myspace and you can see images of worse-for-wear party-goers that would not have been in the public domain a decade ago.

A couple of things are going on here. Firstly, these images are not being posted so the likes of me can pontificate about 'young people today'. They're not aimed at me at all, they're for their friends and acquaintances. Interestingly, Jonathan Nicholas - Director of Inspire Interactive, says the fact that anyone can see these pictures doesn't really occur to many people who post them(!)

But it's not just naïveté. This is the Big Brother generation (in the Endemollian sense rather than the Orwellian). It's used to the idea of a life lived in public - that's what the nobodies selected for the tv show do and it's what the high status celebs do too. Using myspace enables you to control your image as professionally as the craftiest PR firm, so why would you want to hide your light under a bushel?

However, you can't do this if you have a privacy threshold set at the same level as say, a 75-year-old's. Naturally there are 75-year-old exceptions to that rule - Joan Collins springs (unbidden) to mind, and I don't think any of us are looking forward to this guy getting older in his usual understated, discreet manner.

Butter Butters Better

When I moved to New Zealand in the mid-80s, one of the many things I didn't know about the place* was that I was emigrating to a Dairy Super Power. NZ is a small economy and so export earnings are important. Back then, dairy was the biggest export earner, and every Kiwi I met seemed to consume a lot of milk products.

Cheese was marketed as "The Great New Zealand 1-Kg" - none of this mucking around with 500g blocks. And butter, though I may be wrong about this, advertised as "Butter butters better". Great, catchy slogan. Everyone I met used butter, and in seemingly vast quantities. I honestly do not know how companies making margarine survived - their product seemed to be regarded with universal hostility.

Coming from Australia, (with a pretty big dairy industry itself) I could barely remember eating butter. I'd grown up on ads for Meadow Lea and had a horror of fats that weren't polyunsaturated - not that I'd really known what it meant. I got used to eating butter, who wouldn't? Then I moved to the UK.

Britain was not all about butter, instead it had a rather schizoid relationship with food. You have to remember the government there had been (at the very least) economical with the truth about links between Mad Cow Disease and CJD, so there was a deal of justifiable suspicion about the food industry. But at the same time, organic food was getting going and British people have terrific exposure to some of the great food cultures of the world: France, Italy, Spain etc. The Brits were just inventing the gastro-pub, a brilliant concept that combines two of my favourite things. Indeed, after they brought the licencing laws into the (then) 20th Century, it became all too possible, in those happy days when I didn't have children but did have a high disposable income, to go into a gastropub for Sunday lunch and not be able to get away until say, 8ish. Not that any of this got me back to butter.

In fact, I've only just made the return trip, this very week. Marge will be leaving our household, along with a lot of the biscuits we've been buying. We're going to make more of our own, because that way we'll really know what's in them. White bread, along with it's delicious variant, the fresh white roll, is being banished to the weekend. And there will be no more yoghurt-like products with long lists of ingredients being handed over to the kids.

This might seem a little schizoid too - going back to butter but embracing the dense, multi-grain bread. But there is a logic to it. After talking to Michael Pollan and reading his book, we're embracing proper foods that have been less mucked about with. We already eat a lot of fruit and fair few vegies but we could do with eating a bit less meat. I can't imagine giving it up, compelling as the environmental argument is, but eating less - yes, that I can do. In fact eating less of everything is a good idea and the first baby steps down that track are now being taken.

Food is one of life's great pleasures and I don't plan to don the gastronomical equivalent of a hairshirt. Proper foods - the kind your great grandmother would recognise as foods - in proper portions, properly savoured - that's the way the French and Italians do it. I think they're onto something.

*Australians are woefully ignorant about New Zealand, whereas Kiwis know a fair bit about Australia. Their media has quite a few stories about Australia and Australians; our media covers the All Blacks and the odd earthquake or volcanic eruption. It's a classic, big brother/little brother thing and explains a bit of why they love to beat us at anything.

Pause for breath (and play)

A few years ago, when my son was still at childcare, he had a friend I'm going to call Wendy. (I'm calling her Wendy, not to protect her identity but because I cannot remember her name). She was a bit older than him, maybe six or seven months, and at that age, that can still be quite a big deal. Certainly, she was vastly more accomplished. Before she was five, she could read and write in both English and Mandarin. If memory serves, she was learning the piano.

My son got on well with her and he was matter of fact about her achievements - which is more than could be said for his mother and me. We looked at him, we looked at her, we noted the feedback from his childcare teacher about what a bright little boy we had.

But though he recognised all the letters of the alphabet and could count to 50, he certainly couldn't read, let alone write. He could also sing better than his mother and dance so much better than me that I would wonder if we were genuinely related - but he wasn't learning an instrument.

I began to think we might be letting him down a bit. Luckily my wife did not. He needs time to just be a little boy, she said. She was right. These days he reads, writes and is doing well for a child in his third year of school. But he is often tired because he doesn't get as much time to just be a little boy as he used to.

He has a swimming lesson a week. Training for rugby, training for soccer, at least one game every Saturday. If he had his druthers, he'd be playing a third code of football as well, but that was a bridge too far. There are other things he wants to get involved in. He's keen on drama and wants to learn how to play the guitar. The P&C is going to organise a before school language program (French - don't ask), and he wants to do that too.

Right now, he's preparing for his first Holy Communion, which means an hour long meeting after dinner once a week a good 20 minute drive from our house. All of this is taking a toll - he's knackered. He hasn't been this tired since perhaps the end of his first year in school. His face is a bit smudged and he looks disconcertingly like one of these.

When the football seasons (I will never agree again to him playing two at once) end, cricket will be around the corner. But in the window between the two, he can start guitar if he's still keen.

Like all parents, we want the best for him - we want him to learn, to have experiences, to play sport with his friends. The trick is to make sure he has the chance just to be a boy. It's a big year for him and he'll never get it back. Neither will we.

Recently I read Carl Honoré's splendid "Under Pressure", then I got to speak to him on the show. Honoré became famous for an earlier book, "In Praise of Slow", and this new one is really about slow parenting. Taking your time, and making sure the kids take theirs. I read a lot for work and for pleasure too - but it's not often a book strikes such a chord. I think every parent I know should see this one.

Parlez-vous?

My wife, who grew up in Europe, can speak French. She has German too but her French is better, in no small part because she spent a happy year there between school and university. My own French is a sort of gesture. I can kind of follow it in print, I know some words but not enough to have anything more than the most rudimentary and stumbling conversation.

My version of French is a relic of 'learning' it three decades ago for two years. And damn near passing, I'll have you know. All this time later, French is still the fourth most taught language in Australian schools. German is fifth. Italian - probably the sexiest language in the world - is second. The top six actually looks like this:

1/ Japanese 302,780 students

2/ Italian 296,641

3/ Indonesian 214,760

4/ French 204,869

5/ German 128,133

6/ Chinese* 78,419

(*Chinese includes Mandarin and other, unspecified languages)

These figures are from 2005 but they're the latest available. They were included in a report for the Australian government from the Research Centre for Languages and Cultures Education at the University of South Australia. They cover the government and non-government sectors across all the years languages are taught in schools. What's wrong with that list?

Firstly, the numbers are small. Less than half of students learn a language. By the time they get to year 12, it's down to 13%. The overwhelming majority of the language teaching happens at primary school, with most program times taking less than an hour a week. No other OECD country puts in as little effort as this - in Finland all children study three languages throughout their school years.

Secondly, check out that list again. How relevant does it look, really? French is beautiful, Italian is sexy, German is not sexy but my word it is precise. There are community reasons for teaching Italian and historical reasons for teaching the other two. But that's where it ends.

This is the Asian century. By the time the five year olds beginning school now are mid-career, China and India will be (once again) two of the world's most dominant economies. Australian schooling, as it stands now, does almost nothing to prepare the kids for this.

So let's stop teaching a ridiculous 133 languages in our schools. 90% of students are doing one of the six listed above. Let's not dilute the resources in this way - let's teach six. Get all the States and Territories to agree on which six and do it. And let's make sure the six we teach reflect the geopolitical and economic realities we face. Let's make it:

1/ Mandarin

2/ Japanese

3/ Indonesian

4/ Hindi

5/ Russian

6/ One from Korean/Thai/Vietnamese

Let's work to encourage more language teachers - for starters give them HECS-free degrees in return for say four years of teaching. Let's also raise the status of languages in the rest of society - they're the key to the deep understanding of other cultures. Robin Jeffrey at the ANU has ideas on how to do both.

But here's the thing, we can have a lot more understanding for everyone (not all of our children will learn languages) by embedding Asian cultures into the rest of the curriculum - English, maths, sciences, history, geography. It can be done, it's vital that it is done and we need to start now.

There's good news and bad news about that. The bad news is that the Federal government - that would be the one headed by a Mandarin-speaking Prime Minister - is proposing to inject about $20 million a year into teaching Asian languages in high schools. That's bad news because, the old Howard government program, which was ended in 2002, tipped in about five times as much money every year.

The good news is there are some very smart people at the Asian Education Foundation and I think, gradually, they are going to win the argument.

Not Straight from the Budget Lock Up...

...More modern life really.

I got into the car this afternoon and my daughter, who is four and perhaps the most acutely verbal person on the planet, started telling me about her day. She'd been to the dentist for a check up, and been sufficiently calm that he'd done a proper clean of her teeth.

Personally I loathe this happening. I go along twice a year and get it done but find it uncomfortable to the point of not-being-able-to-wait-until-it's-over. There's pressure, there's abrasion, there's noise. A trained professional has his fingers in your mouth. What's not to not like?

Afterwards I feel stoical and - yes, my teeth feel amazing. So I was pretty impressed that my daughter had got through this. So was my wife. As a treat for being such a brave girl, she bought her a donut. And a milkshake. And when she got home, she was allowed a biscuit. That is the kind of top-quality parenting we provide.

So I got the full narrative about the dentist and the donut and the milkshake and the biscuit. She was particularly impressed with the biscuit, which features layers of things that our dentist would be horrified to hear about. She called it a disco biscuit and I laughed.

A few hours later I saw the packet. It really is called a disco biscuit. I was sure that meant something else. It took about one second on Google to confirm that suspicion. I can't help but think that someone at the large European retailer we bought the biscuits from has a sense of humour.

Sad at the Happy conference

I went to the Happiness and its Causes conference on Friday afternoon. By the time I had registered and found my way in I just caught the end of Stephen Post's presentation on why giving makes us not only happy, but healthy too. He'd been on the show the day before and he'd been absolutely terrific as a guest. He heads the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love, which for completely explicable reasons makes me think of this guy.

After Stephen Post had finished we had 20 minutes of Steve Biddulph. Actually it was supposed to be 20 minutes, it was more like 30 minutes. The first 12 of it was comedy. I didn't know he was funny - but he was very funny - he worked the enormous room like Robin Williams at the Met. He was brilliant. Then we had a bit on how we stuff up the under 5's and tiny bit on how we stuff up the 12-15's. Biddulph has some great lines: A 14 year-old-boy has so much testosterone that he will argue with a road sign! But we didn't hear much on adolescents because he had a fair bit to say about the SIEV-X tragedy and the memorial to it that Biddulph has been a prime mover for. There was even a short video at the end.

It's fair to say that at this point quite a few in the audience were sad at the happy conference. My own sad moment came later because I was struck at the time by how different this gathering was to say, an academic conference. For starters, there was a lot of love in the room - a huge amount of it for Steve Biddulph, but as I discovered later, a lot of love generally. A high baseline of love, you might say.

In that environment, Biddulph said one or two things that are contested. He denigrated 'controlled crying'. The audience was approving, even appreciative, of his position. Not a dissenting word was heard in that great chamber. More on this later.

Now, whatever your views on this issue, there's at least two points of view - hence the controversy. The reason it's quite a big controversy is that it's used a lot by desperate parents who can't get their babies to go to sleep any other way. Opponents of it won't like me acknowledging this technique in any way. But there you go, I've covered it enough as a journalist to know those two things: 1/ It's very controversial. 2/ Lots of people use it anyway.

After lunch, I moderated a panel entitled "Can Children be Educated to be Happy?" On it was Martin Seligman, the father of Positive Psychology; Stephen Meek, the Principal of Geelong Grammar, which is using Seligman's techniques in the school; Michael Carr-Gregg, the adolescent psychologist; and Anna Patty, who is Education Editor at the Sydney Morning Herald. My job was to be a bit like Parkinson toward the end of his show - keep the conversation moving and make sure that everyone gets to speak.

Well the audience loved a lot of what Martin Seligman had to say. It loved what Stephen Meek had to say. And it loved the vast majority of what Michael Carr-Gregg had to say. But it did not like what Anna Patty had to say at all. She's a journalist and was there to give her broader based perspective and perhaps inject a bit of scepticism into the discussion. After all, what we're talking about - trying to inculcate resilience, an engaged life and well-being into young minds at school - is still an experiment. What Seligman and Meek are doing at Geelong Grammar is hugely ambitious and could result in all schooling being reconsidered, with well-being becoming a key educational outcome. That would be amazing. But nobody's done this yet and so we don't know if it will work, how well or whether there will be unintended consequences.

Anna Patty pointed some of this out and the audience did not like it. They did not like it a bit. Some of them made clear their position in a way completely unlike the rapturous applause we heard earlier for Steve Biddulph. In her closing remarks, there were boos and some yelling. I was just wondering if I should intervene when it stopped.

That was the moment when I was sad at the happy conference.

Ouch!

Like most people I have made use of the tactical headache when I wanted to get out of something. "I'm sorry," I've said, "I can't" do/attend XYZ because of a headache. I don't do it now. I'd like to think this is because maturity has made me a better person but what it has really made me is better at saying "no."

I get perhaps three or four headaches a year. They are always related to tiredness, or stress, or being dehydrated. They can be treated with over the counter pain relief and cured with sleep, relaxation or water. After doing Friday's show, I can't tell you how lucky I feel.

Our main guest was Paula Kamen, on the line from Chicago. One day in 1991, while putting in a contact lens, she got a sharp pain that seemed to begin behind her left eye and go back into her brain. She still has it. Every single day, for the last 17 years, she's had a pig of a headache. Sometimes it's been so bad she couldn't do anything at all - so it's had a massive effect on her. Paula's tried - well, everything you can imagine short of beating her head against a wall. Despite this she is funny and insightful about not just her Headache (it's capitalized) but other people's too. A couple of years ago, she wrote a terrific book which is a mixture of memoir, black humour and science journalism.

Unsurprisingly, when I told Life Matters listeners what we were talking about, the switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree. Those who couldn't get through went to the guestbook. There's clearly a lot more to be said about pain, which as a subject of scientific inquiry is still in its infancy.

Sea Monsters & Hypertension

As a young man I loved to swim in the sea alone. You're not supposed to do this, the life savers tell us not to, but there's something about it that makes you feel amazing. At least, that's how I used to feel. Because one day, a dozen years ago, I went for a swim at Bawley Point on the south coast of NSW and something happened. I was snorkelling across the bay about a metre from the bottom when I saw something. It was a stingray, not fully grown, and it saw me at the exact same moment that I saw it - we arched upward and away from each other at the same time.

The ray was beautiful, it looked hydrodynamically perfect and moved effortlessly. But that's not what struck me as soon as I got to the surface. Instead I became horribly aware that not only was I the only person in the water, there was nobody on the beach or rocks either. I don't think I've ever swum quicker.

I don't swim alone in the ocean any more. It's not that I fear another encounter with a stingray - it's sharks that I worry about now. I don't remember worrying about them before, but these days I do - just for a moment - every time I go into the sea. I'm careful not to get too far from everyone else because I figure why narrow the odds?

The fear of sharks is one of a larger group - the fear of being eaten alive. This fear is an ancient one. It's up there in the amygdala, that part of the brain we got from reptiles, and for most of human history it's been a real asset. It's helped to ensure that my ancestors and yours survived long enough to reproduce - which has worked out well for both of us.

But these days my chances of being killed, let alone eaten, by a shark are close to zero. They're higher than being killed by a lion - Australia doesn't have lions except in zoos and I still go to the beach in summer - but they're still very, very small. I'm much more likely to drown than be attacked by a shark. And many times more likely to killed in a car crash than drown. Actually the drive to and from the beach is the riskiest part of the whole day.

However, it doesn't feel like that. Lizard brain has nothing to say about driving - but quite a bit on the subject of being attacked by a shark. Both risks are small, but one is orders of magnitude smaller than the other. Perversely, this is the one I worry about.

If I really want to worry about something that will kill me, I should lose some weight. If I lost 13.6% of what I weigh now I'd be healthier. (I'd also look amazing in the shower). My family history contains hypertension, diabetes and obesity - not a trifecta I'm keen to encounter. Diseases of affluence - caused by eating too much and moving too little - are the big killers in Australia. (They're not doing the country any good either) They're what I should be worrying about and that worry should change my behaviour.

But lizard brain is not frightened of eating too much and completely unperturbed by the idea of moving too little. It's doing me no favours.

In short, I worry unnecessarily about very unlikely events and ignore genuine dangers because it's the unlikely events that push my emotional buttons and the genuine dangers that don't.

Dan Gardner, the Canadian journalist, manages to make perfect sense of all this in his book, "Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear". I've spent the last week devouring it and interviewed him this morning. You can find it here.

This Mortal Coil

I watched a terrific movie at the weekend: Scoop, made by Woody Allen*. Confusingly, it's not the story of Evelyn Waugh's novel of the same name, (which remains a masterpiece), it's about a young journalism student who's given a tip off about a very wealthy and prominent man. I'm not going to spoil it for you by telling you what happens - except this: the tip-off comes from a dead journalist who manages to reconnect with the living world enough times to point our main character in the right direction. Sort of.

The first time the journo (Ian McShane) does this, he drops off the back of the boat being piloted by the Grim Reaper across a waterway. It's not clear what the waterway is, but it ain't the Murray and if it's the Styx, then Ian McShane is headed for a bit of unpleasantness.

There seems to be more dead in popular culture. Not death in popular culture - there's always been a lot of that - but dead in popular culture. Without thinking about it, Six Feet Under, Shaun of the Dead, even American Beauty, all leap to mind. It isn't just on screens either, a few years ago there was the remarkable The Lovely Bones, the narrator of which is dead from the first pages. More recently there's been Helen Garner's new novel and Mark Wakely's splendid non-fiction effort, Sweet Sorrow, among others.

I have to declare an interest before we go any further - Mark is a colleague and I'm fond of him, but that doesn't stop him producing something rather extraordinary: a beautifully written exploration of death. Friday's Life Matters was given over to a talkback on thinking about death and some of the calls were remarkable. You can listen here.

Today we talked about a more controversial aspect of dying - euthanasia. My guest, Dr Rodney Syme, does not like the word. He prefers 'physician assisted dying' and is upfront about his role in helping some people suffering pain, despair and fear end their lives. The book he's written (this has been a very bookish post) will upset a lot of people, in part because he is not always positive about some who work in palliative care. Hopefully it will be read rather than just ranted about.

*Woody Allen's character comes up with a great line - one that all pessimists (like me) will enjoy. He's just been accused of always seeing the glass as half-empty.
"No, you're wrong. I see the glass half full, but of poison."

Chill, Bill

Bill Clinton did not inhale. Or more accurately, he said he didn't inhale. Remember, he was trying to secure the Democrat nomination for President at the time. This was in 1992 - years before the idea of a President who had to quit cocaine and stop drinking before he could achieve anything was really imaginable.

Bill said he didn't like it and he didn't inhale, which leads to the conclusion that it was the mouth feel of the smoke that he had a problem with. Anyway he got the nomination, won the election and proceeded to squander the biggest political talent most observers had ever seen. He was, famously, distracted by one thing and another. But I digress.

Times have changed. Barack Obama has admitted he did inhale. Frequently. "That was kind of the point." Well, yes. But he hasn't won his party's nomination yet, let alone anything else.

One of these men has clearly been more honest than the other - and one is the greatest political talent...etc. But the point is both were talking about the past, their youth. Because that's when most people use cannabis. They try it when they're at high school or university and it peaks in their 20's - the decade marked by independent income and freedom from parental shackles - then it drops away markedly.

But the latest National Drug Household Survey shows that the beginners, the school-age users, are disappearing. Ten years ago, 35% of boys had recently used cannabis when surveyed. Last year it was a shade over 13%. It's the same story with girls - in 1998 about 34% had recently gotten stoned; last year it was 12.7%. Something is going on, but what?

I won't know until the morning, when I ask Jan Copeland, head of the new National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre, but there is a long journalistic tradition of guessing and I'm nothing if not a traditionalist. Firstly ecstacy use is increasing, rapidly becoming the drug of choice for younger people. Secondly, cannabis use is associated with tobacco use and smoking is trending down.

Actually I think these reasons are connected. Tobacco is not healthy, as discussed here before, and it's not seen as such a cool choice anymore. Whereas e is seen as 'healthier' - it doesn't make you cough or wheeze, it doesn't make you smell, it doesn't send you outside or offend anyone. It makes most people feel amazing and wanting to engage with the world. Cannabis doesn't do that - it's renowned for making people feel hungry, happy and sleepy. But it can also make people withdrawn, uncommunicative and paranoid. Stack all that up and it's an easy call. Sorted.

I will ask, though really most of the interview will be about cannabis and addiction. Because, yes, it turns out that if you're my age, your Dad was right after all - there is now evidence that cannabis can be a drug of addiction and also lead to real health problems.

Luckily for Bill Clinton, he'll never know.

Pack of Bankers

A few years ago there was an ad on the telly. The scene: it's summer, there are kids in the pool, a barbie is going nicely. A woman says to a man she's just met, "So, what do you do?".

"I'm a banker."

Everything freezes - all other conversation, the kids in the pool, even the dog turns to look.

Pause.

"I'm with St George."

"Oh!" the woman says - almost sighs really - and everything is back to normal.
Cue voiceover and pictures of the banker engaging in conversation just like a normal good bloke.

It was a great ad (sadly I can't find a link to it) which cast the St George Bank as different, more human, nicer than all the other banks. This approach is still very much part of the bank's brand today. But the real reason this was such a great ad was that banks were really on the nose.

Nobody, apart from a couple of radio broadcasters, had anything good to say about them. They were seen as ruthless profiteers, growing fat on the banking fees and charges paid by almost everyone.

Nine years on, I wonder how much public affection there is for banks at the moment.

Interest rates are up. Technically, this is not the banks' fault. The cost of their money has been increasing, partly because the Reserve Bank wants to get to grips with inflation and partly because since the collapse of the US sub prime market all risk is more expensive.

The banks' first responsibility is to their shareholders. Indeed, the market would punish them if it was not, so the banks have to pass on the costs of borrowing money to their customers. But most people don't care about all that, what they care about is that interest rates are going up - at a time when petrol, fruit and veg and rents are shooting up too.

That's the context. On top of that have come one or two stories that don't help the banks at all when it comes to winning hearts and minds. And now, another one, from the other side of the world about our old friend: fees and charges.

Essentially British banks have been coining it in, especially through fees for unauthorised overdrafts (where more has come out of your account than you have in it). The Office of Fair Trading estimates these fees alone are worth £3.5 billion every year. It's taking the banks to court. Now the High Court has ruled that this comes under unfair contract rules supposed to protect the public. It is going to be years before this legal process is finished but it could end up with the British banks having to pay back rather a lot of money: £9 billion (+ the half billion they've already handed over). You can hear the Brits cheering from here.

The thing is though, Australian banks are doing pretty well out of fees and charges. Choice estimates that in 2006, they raked in $4 billion from credit card and account holders who paid late, inadvertantly went over their limit, or had a cheque (that somebody else had written) bounce.

Choice, along with the Consumer Action Law Centre, is having a red hot go at the banks on this. There's a Senate Inquiry due to report in September. And Steve Fielding, the Family First Senator for Victoria, has a private member's bill that would stop banks charging more than their costs for dishonoured periodic payments, direct debits or cheques. With one thing and another, it doesn't look like being an annus mirabilis for Australian banks.

All in all then, you wouldn't be completely astonished if somewhere, somehow, the bankers were having a few words in some influential ears.

Capital Idea

I am in the middle of a few days off work and have been away, hence the lack of blogging from me.

The first thing to say is how restorative that particular combination is. Not working and going away - in my experience you have to do both - is a wonderful tonic. The perceptive Peter Martin has written about the value of not working, that is, the value of not working to a person who usually works. He could not be more spot on.

I get to not work for seven weeks a year. In Australian terms, that's rather a lot of not working. (In American terms it's an astronomical amount of not working). It tends to break down into a four-week break over summer and three one-week breaks through the year. I get up later and spend more time with the kids. There's always a child-friendly movie and an associated visit to a certain global fast food chain which the kids love and I enjoy more than I should. There's usually plenty of time out doors, though this week in Sydney it hasn't been good.

But we haven't been in Sydney. We've been in Canberra, my home town. I have lived exactly 6 and a half years in Canberra. But six of those years were 14 to 20, a pretty crucial period in most lives. Because of that, and because my mum is there, (and two of my sisters with attendant nephews and nieces) it is my home town. Years ago, I felt like a Londoner, an Australian Londoner, but it did feel like home. I like living in Sydney and it is home but it will never be my home town. Canberra, with it's distinct, proper seasons, hills, bush and family very much is. It's a city that mostly has blue skies, and true to form, it was glorious.

We stayed at my mum's house. My son and I walked up the bike track from O'Connor to the facility that most people still think of as Bruce Stadium, and we watched the Brumbies come home the stronger against the much fancied Sharks from South Africa. The next day we went to some friends' house for lunch, then on to my niece's 8th birthday party as the afternoon became evening. On Monday we went to the wonderful Questacon - there was just us and about 20-thousand kids there - then I caught up with a Canberra bloke who lives in Sydney for lunch. Another friend, down from Sydney to visit her sister-in-law, popped in for an hour, and then my sister came around for a cup of tea. It was wonderful.

Canberra is a much maligned town. It's news shorthand for the government. Everybody knows jokes about public servants. It is one of the few places in our hot country with really cold winters. But it's actually a great place to live and a fantastic place to bring up kids. It's clean and green, though not as green as everyone would like (it really needs some rain). Compared to all of the state capitals (bar Hobart) it's easy to get around, and because it's the national capital it has wonderful facilities for such a small place.

At lunch yesterday with my friend, I met a senior public servant who came from Sunshine Coast in the mid 80s. His oldest is in year 12 and other child is in year 8. He'd be about 50, so in a few years when the kids have finished school he could do the 54/11 and live anywhere he wanted. Or, he could keep working and get a transfer. Go home to the sunshine on the Sunshine Coast. He's not going anywhere.

Physicists driving cabs

Quick, what's the most ethnically diverse city in the world?

It's not New York. It's not London. It's not Melbourne (though like Melbourne it's rather flat).

It's Toronto. Allegedly. I say allegedly because I find it hard to believe that NY and London aren't ahead on that score, they're both much bigger after all. But there it is, Toronto is the world's most ethnically diverse city. Really.

Half the population wasn't born in Canada and more than 150 languages are spoken every day. But to me that's not the mind-boggling statistic. This is: 100-thousand immigrants arrive there every year. Australia's total immigration is 150-thousand a year.

Traditionally immigrant groups arrive, cop a bit of prejudice from those already there, put their heads down, work like Trojans, and send their kids to university. It's not easy, it's bloody hard, but they benefit and the countries they arrive in - Australia, Canada, USA - benefit even more. But that system is breaking down, these days everything needs to happen faster.

In Toronto, they've done the research. The region is heading for a labour market growth of zero without immigration. They have big impending and current skills shortages. Everybody needs professionals (not lawyers obviously but teachers, engineers, doctors and accountants) and Toronto is no different, but it also needs sheet metal workers, an occupation with an average age in the 50s.

So the city has 100-thousand new arrivals from outside Canada every year and genuine problems in its labour market. This means too many proverbial physicists driving cabs, and indeed there is a bit of that. Except the Torontonians have started squaring the circle - they set up an organisation aimed at getting immigrants into work. It's called TRIEC, short for Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council, and much easier to say quickly. It doesn't deliver services, it works like a broker, or convenor - essentially it gets people together. This modest approach turns out to be very effective.

TRIEC is still fairly new. It has a smallish intern program, which has an 85% success rate in getting people into work. It has a larger mentor program that generates similarly impressive results. It has a website that encourages the employment of immigrants. It has begun addressing the culture by engaging with the region's business schools and HR professionals. It has done all this in a bit over four years and it isn't really a branch of government. Instead TRIEC was created after the stakeholders of Toronto had a good, hard look at their city and the future it was likely to face.

The burghers of Toronto have been proactive, thoughtful and practical. They haven't solved their problems yet - TRIEC's ultimate aim is to go out of business - but they have made an impressive start. Good on them.

The Big Three Oh

Louise Brown will be 30 in July. Doubtless she feels as ambiguous about that as the rest of us do when confronted with a significant birthday. But her big day is being noted by the likes of me because Louise Brown is a bit special - she was the world's first 'test-tube' baby.

How quaint that phrase seems now. How long since you heard anyone say it, "test-tube baby"? Technically Louise Brown was the result of a successful in vitro fertilisation (IVF). In the 30 years since she was born, IVF has been joined by a suite of other procedures. These days they are all grouped into something called Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART).

Over the last decade or so, the use of ART has become almost commonplace. So commonplace it's easy to think it's unremarkable. That would be a mistake - these technologies are remarkable, they have brought more than a million children into the lives of people who otherwise could not have had them. But the technologies aren't perfect. They are expensive, intrusive, physically uncomfortable and emotionally confronting. They often fail and that failure rate climbs quickly when the would-be parents, especially the would-be mothers, are older.

Older is a relative term. Most of us, these days, do not think of women in their late 30s as 'older'. But in fertility terms, they are. Fertility begins to drop at around 35 in most women as egg quality declines. It's inexorable and irreversible. And, with the best will in the world and enough money to go through many 'cycles' of treatment, the result can still be no baby and heartbreak*.

Who then ought to be allowed access to ART? This is the question asked and answered in Tom Frame's Children on Demand. The head of the School of Theology at Charles Sturt University is one of Australia's most prolific public intellectuals. He's cranking out books faster than many professional footballers can read them. Dr Frame is also an adoptee and the impact this has had on him affects every word. He is completely upfront about this.

Essentially Tom Frame believes that ART should not be available to a couple in which either the man or the woman isn't contributing their DNA. He argues that women should not be able to use donor sperm from a man they do not know, or even that widows be permitted to use the sperm of a man they used to know exceedingly well - their dead husband. He also believes that gay and lesbian couples should not be granted access to ART. And he's not keen on surrogacy either.

Apart from the issue of surrogacy, his motivation is a concern for the welfare and well-being of the child that may result. But if you want to know exactly why he holds these concerns, and why the ethicist Leslie Cannold disagrees with him, you'll need to listen to the show.

*This should not imply that all fertility problems are women's problems. A bit under half are men's problems and sometimes the problem seems to belong to the couple. Worst of all, about 15% of the time the infertility cannot be explained with the investigations we have now.

Let them eat cake or something

We have two truly outstanding science communicators in Australia. One is my colleague Robyn Williams. The other is Julian Cribb. Robyn is a broadcaster, the broadcaster really. Julian works for himself these days, rather than a paper, but he remains the doyen of science writers. He is clear, fluent and explains the otherwise inexplicable. His latest effort is as scary as something that rhymes with duck.

In a nutshell, the world is running out of food. One indicator is that our reserves of grains would not last two months. It's easy, in these days of no-wheat diets, to forget what that means. Grains are the great staple foods of the world - especially rice, maize and wheat. If we run out of grains, the planet goes to hell in a handbasket.

You may have noticed that filling your handbasket (alright, trolley) at the supermarket is costing more. Australia's drought has pushed up the prices of fruit, vegetables and meat. Lately, there's been increases in the cost of bread, flour, rice and the already exhorbitant breakfast cereals. That's because wheat, rice and barley have all become more expensive.

If you live in Australia, you're not going to starve. Food will get more expensive but not impossible to come by. Actually food really is going to get rather pricier. We've been living in an era of cheap food which has lasted for decades. (Though, as one of five children in a family growing up in the 70s, I remember when chicken was "too dear"). There are lots of reasons all this cheap food was possible, and this isn't the place to go through them all, but two are fundamental: land and water.

Much of the world's best arable land is now being paved over. Cities are built on it. And golf courses. (I am conflicted about golf courses - I find them beguilingly attractive but know that in most environments they are about the most wasteful use of land and resources). Even in Sydney, where I live, the arable land is vanishing because it's becoming too valuable to be farmed. That's one reason.

Another is that the world's topsoil, that magic, fertile layer 5-20 centimetres thick, is disappearing. Wind, farming practices and rain are taking it to the sea. And speaking of water, cheap food is predicated on cheap water. Mostly the water hasn't been so much cheap as ludicrously undervalued. This is gradually changing, and it may be that that supply and demand produce a tipping point where prices increase very rapidly indeed.

But if the end of cheap food in Australia is an inconvenience, or even another source of pressure on working families, that's as nothing to the impact we're already seeing in some parts of the world. There have been riots over food in the last couple of weeks - people have died.

Food and water security have been the great drivers of conflict throughout history. We have tended to focus on the who in these disputes - which people, which ethnic groups, which nations? But the why has usually been about resources - most of the time about food and water. Cribb points out that if people can't get food where they live, they move. The UNHCR currently helps almost 33 million people, who are either refugees or have been "internally displaced". That figure is likely to rise as global warming continues to impact on crop growth in Africa and Asia.

Julian Cribb is clear-eyed about what needs to happen - he suggests 12 changes that would make a difference. Among them, a massive investment in agricultural research; speeding up the transfer of new technologies to farmers the world over; the development of "green cities", which recycle their own water and waste and grow some of their own food.

The 2020 Summit is next weekend in Canberra. I do hope someone going will mention all this.