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

Universal literacy was a 20th-century goal. Before then, reading and writing were skills largely confined to a small, highly educated class of professional people.

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.

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.

It's Australian to do such things because, however uncivilised they may seem, it's human to do them.

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.

The copycat effects of media violence, similar to those previously attributed to westerns, radio serials and comic books, are easy to exaggerate.