Australia: once a free country

Hacking through my 1,600 emails from a week away - yes I do belong to too many email lists - I came across a couple of pieces about Australia that can only be cause for further depression about its prospects.

The unlovely Halliburton is apparently taking over most of South Australia, and getting army contracts without tendering. Well of course John Howard wants to keep George Bush sweet, even though I doubt the President could find Australia on a map.

But American activists are another question. Not content with locking up children of asylum-seekers, the government is now calling activists of the Greenpeace ilk "security threats". Norties McCarthyism anyone?

I saw, or rather heard, an astonishing number of Australians in Biarritz last week - well it is a surf town - but they say one million Australians (one in 20 or so) live abroard, and I can't but feel this is only going to increase.