With increasing frequency and growing vehemence, you hear people saying they are ashamed to be Australians.

On average, Australians watch more than three hours of television a day, compared with 12 minutes a day spent by the average couple talking to each other.

It is the misfortune of contemporary leaders, across the whole spectrum of Australian life, that the community's demand for strong leadership is growing in direct proportion to our lack of confidence in ourselves. The end of this century is an unusually difficult time to be a leader in Australia.

Actually, I can't imagine anything more tedious than a perfect person, especially if it was someone who also demanded perfection from me.

One reason we resist making deliberate choices is that choice equals change and most of us, feeling the world is unpredictable enough, try to minimise the trauma of change in our personal lives.

A strangely reflective, even melancholy day. Is that because, unlike our cousins in the northern hemisphere, Easter is not associated with the energy and vitality of spring but with the more subdued spirit of autumn.

Polls are no substitute for leadership because, at its very essence, leadership is about giving people what they don't already have - a sense of vision, inspiration, or even an adequate grasp of a particular subject.