Tuesday, 16 August 2011
Most Australians duped by science fiction
More than three-quarters of Australians believe microscopic life has been found on other planets and almost half believe humans can be frozen and thawed back to life, despite neither being true.
These are some of the findings from a survey of 1,250 people commissioned by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO).Called Fact or Fiction, the survey was conducted as part of National Science Week 2011 to assess whether Australians can separate what is happening in the "real world" from what we see and read in science fiction.
The survey asked people whether eight scientific technologies seen in feature films, such as light sabres, invisibility cloaks or hover boards, were science fact or fiction.
ANSTO's Discovery Centre Visitors Centre team leader Rod Dowler says the results were a surprise.
"This survey has confirmed that willingly or not, we believe in science fiction movies more than we realise," he said.
Only one-quarter of respondents were aware that it is possible to grow an eye in a dish, although 44 per cent correctly believe flying cars exist.
But it is not all bad news.
While many of us might dream of being able to travel through time, more than 90 per cent of survey respondents correctly identified it as still being in the realm of science fiction. A similar survey in Birmingham, United Kingdom, found 30 per cent of respondents thought time travel was possible.
Who wants to live forever?
The survey also revealed the older we are, the longer we want to live, with 46.3 per cent of respondents aged 65 years or more listing "reversing the ageing cycle" in the top three areas of science they would like investigated, compared to only 13.2 per cent of 18 to 24-year-olds.
Despite this, only 10 per cent of those surveyed wanted science to discover the secret for immortality.
According to Mr Dowler, three-quarters of respondents said they were interested in science, with most receiving their information from television news stories. Only 6 per cent sourced their information from science magazines and 3 per cent from science centres.
Last year, a survey commissioned by the Australian Federation of Scientific and Technological Societies found 30 per cent of Australians thought dinosaurs and humans co-existed and one-quarter believed the Earth took a day to orbit the Sun.
Mr Dowler says despite the potential for science fiction to blur the line between reality and fiction, it serves a very useful purpose.
"Science [fiction] films can be very inspirational to scientists and the general public, getting more people interested in science and setting the bar for the types of technology we would like in the future," he said.
Darren Osborne @'ABC'
It may be the lucky country, but it's certainly not the intelligent country obvs. Thank heavens we have people who can ride bicycles...
David Cameron's solution for broken Britain: tough love and tougher policing
Thousands more police officers are to undergo riot training, it emerged on Monday, as David Cameron pledged to tackle 120,000 of the country's most "troubled families" as part of the coalition's "social and security fightback" against the "slow-motion moral collapse" of Britain.
The prime minister ruled out race, poverty and spending cuts as factors behind last week's riots, but showed signs of wanting to look deeper into their causes by acceding to Labour's demands for a public inquiry.
As part of the "security fightback" section of the government's response, the home secretary, Theresa May, wrote to Sir Denis O'Connor, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary, asking for clearer guidance for forces on their preparations to tackle riots. Senior officers complained that they did not have sufficient number of officers trained in riot control to respond immediately to last week's events, but Home Office sources confirmed on Monday night that they now expected a massive expansion in riot training for the police as a result of May's request.
"I have asked him to provide clearer guidance to forces about the size of deployments, the need for mutual aid, pre-emptive action, public order tactics, the number of officers trained in public order policing, and appropriate arrests policy," the home secretary is to announce on Tuesday in a speech detailing the "security fightback".
As part of the "social fightback", Cameron had a tough-love message for 120,000 of the UK's most "troubled families". He set himself the rigid target of the next election to put all of them through some kind of family-intervention programme.
In a speech setting out his analysis of what led to the riots, Cameron highlighted those families across the UK who were dealing with multiple complex social health and economic problems. Lifting them out of extreme worklessness would be regarded as a measure of his success in his wider agenda of fixing Britain's broken society, he said. Cameron said he would now put "rocket boosters" on attempts to rehabilitate those 120,000.
Speaking at a youth centre in his Witney constituency in Oxfordshire, the prime minister said: "The broken society is back at the top of my political agenda … I have an ambition, before the end of this parliament, we will turn around the lives of 120,000 most troubled families … we need more urgent action on the families that some people call 'problem', others call 'troubled'. The ones everyone in their neighbourhood knows and often avoids."
He said would ask the chief executive of an organisation called Action for Employment, Emma Harrison, who he appointed his "families champion" in December, to use her current experience in dealing with 500 troubled families in three pilot areas to overcome the bureaucratic problems that have prevented the rapid expansion of Labour's similar families intervention programme, which has been running since 2006.
A former coalition government adviser, Dame Claire Tickell, head of Action for Children, which runs some family intervention projects, later told BBC Radio 4 that she was concerned about funding for the intervention. Ringfencing was scrapped last May.
In 2008 Gordon Brown promised to target "more than 110,000 problem families with disruptive young people". The latest official figures show that, in 2009-10, only 3,518 families were actually in the intervention programme and it has helped only 7,300 families since being set up in 2006.
While the intent of Cameron's pledge received cautious cross-party support, Labour echoed Tickell's concerns and doubted whether it could be funded.
Matt Cavanagh, of the Institute for Public Policy Research, and one of the Labour advisers who helped draft the policy when Labour was in power, suggested it would require £100m a year over the next four years. He said: "Local authorities used to part-fund [these programmes] but the government has dismantled all the ringfences and given LAs more autonomy in their reduced budgets. The result for problem family programmes has been neglect and confusion, as ministers now seem to admit."
While the government said it would be making available £200m from the European Social Fund to help fund the target, the rest will come from the early intervention grant, which is to be cut by 11% by 2012 and has funding for Sure Start, teenage pregnancy and youth centres to meet. Labour said Sure Start had been cut by 20% while more than 30 had closed.
A government source acknowledged that using these resources to fund Cameron's new target could vary around the country. They said: "It is for local authorities and their partners, including the voluntary sector, to decide how much they wish to prioritise on families with multiple problems in their area."
Alan Travis and Allegra Stratton @'The Guardian'
Full Transcript
Love the background you chose to deliver yr speech in front of Dave...
The prime minister ruled out race, poverty and spending cuts as factors behind last week's riots, but showed signs of wanting to look deeper into their causes by acceding to Labour's demands for a public inquiry.
As part of the "security fightback" section of the government's response, the home secretary, Theresa May, wrote to Sir Denis O'Connor, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary, asking for clearer guidance for forces on their preparations to tackle riots. Senior officers complained that they did not have sufficient number of officers trained in riot control to respond immediately to last week's events, but Home Office sources confirmed on Monday night that they now expected a massive expansion in riot training for the police as a result of May's request.
"I have asked him to provide clearer guidance to forces about the size of deployments, the need for mutual aid, pre-emptive action, public order tactics, the number of officers trained in public order policing, and appropriate arrests policy," the home secretary is to announce on Tuesday in a speech detailing the "security fightback".
As part of the "social fightback", Cameron had a tough-love message for 120,000 of the UK's most "troubled families". He set himself the rigid target of the next election to put all of them through some kind of family-intervention programme.
In a speech setting out his analysis of what led to the riots, Cameron highlighted those families across the UK who were dealing with multiple complex social health and economic problems. Lifting them out of extreme worklessness would be regarded as a measure of his success in his wider agenda of fixing Britain's broken society, he said. Cameron said he would now put "rocket boosters" on attempts to rehabilitate those 120,000.
Speaking at a youth centre in his Witney constituency in Oxfordshire, the prime minister said: "The broken society is back at the top of my political agenda … I have an ambition, before the end of this parliament, we will turn around the lives of 120,000 most troubled families … we need more urgent action on the families that some people call 'problem', others call 'troubled'. The ones everyone in their neighbourhood knows and often avoids."
He said would ask the chief executive of an organisation called Action for Employment, Emma Harrison, who he appointed his "families champion" in December, to use her current experience in dealing with 500 troubled families in three pilot areas to overcome the bureaucratic problems that have prevented the rapid expansion of Labour's similar families intervention programme, which has been running since 2006.
A former coalition government adviser, Dame Claire Tickell, head of Action for Children, which runs some family intervention projects, later told BBC Radio 4 that she was concerned about funding for the intervention. Ringfencing was scrapped last May.
In 2008 Gordon Brown promised to target "more than 110,000 problem families with disruptive young people". The latest official figures show that, in 2009-10, only 3,518 families were actually in the intervention programme and it has helped only 7,300 families since being set up in 2006.
While the intent of Cameron's pledge received cautious cross-party support, Labour echoed Tickell's concerns and doubted whether it could be funded.
Matt Cavanagh, of the Institute for Public Policy Research, and one of the Labour advisers who helped draft the policy when Labour was in power, suggested it would require £100m a year over the next four years. He said: "Local authorities used to part-fund [these programmes] but the government has dismantled all the ringfences and given LAs more autonomy in their reduced budgets. The result for problem family programmes has been neglect and confusion, as ministers now seem to admit."
While the government said it would be making available £200m from the European Social Fund to help fund the target, the rest will come from the early intervention grant, which is to be cut by 11% by 2012 and has funding for Sure Start, teenage pregnancy and youth centres to meet. Labour said Sure Start had been cut by 20% while more than 30 had closed.
A government source acknowledged that using these resources to fund Cameron's new target could vary around the country. They said: "It is for local authorities and their partners, including the voluntary sector, to decide how much they wish to prioritise on families with multiple problems in their area."
Alan Travis and Allegra Stratton @'The Guardian'
Full Transcript
Love the background you chose to deliver yr speech in front of Dave...
Monday, 15 August 2011
Sold Out in America
Another great week for Corporate America!The economy is flatlining. Global financial markets are in turmoil. Your stock price is down about 15 percent in three weeks. Your customers have lost all confidence in the economy. Your employees, at least the American ones, are cynical and demoralized. Your government is paralyzed.
Want to know who is to blame, Mr. Big Shot Chief Executive? Just look in the mirror because the culprit is staring you in the face.
J’accuse, dude. J’accuse.
You helped create the monsters that are rampaging through the political and economic countryside, wreaking havoc and sucking the lifeblood out of the global economy...
Continue reading
Steven Pearlstein @'The Washington Post'
The Corporations have their very own political party now with the so-called grassroots Tea Party. The concoction of unlimited funding for anonymous attack ads, passive-aggressive racism, and a smoke screen of social conservative concern is a heady mix indeed that has poisoned otherwise good hard working Americans into a state of fear that convinces them to vote against their own best interests.
First Listen: Stephen Malkmus And The Jicks 'Mirror Traffic'
That's a credit to Malkmus and fellow "slacker" iconoclast Beck — who produced the album — because the former's music is not always an easy listen. While his songs are often impeccably arranged with catchy, sing-song melodies, there's always been an off-kilter quality to his music, making it feel like it's about to fall apart. Chord progressions don't resolve where you want them to, he regularly changes keys mid-stream — often only for a few bars — and there's enough dissonance and squawks of guitar noise to give the songs a sneering edge.
Malkmus' lyrics are constructed to be elusive. His oblique stream-of-consciousness songs, with their sardonic wit and hyper-literate descriptions of mundane observations, ask willing fans to parse the lyrics themselves. Malkmus writes lines as much for their encrypted meanings as for the way the words sound rhythmically against his abrupt melodies and messy guitar riffs.
Still, while Mirror Traffic's punchy urgency has the feeling of being loose and unruly, Malkmus and his Jicks are deceivingly turn-on-a-dime tight as a band, thanks to stellar musicianship from Mike Clark, Joanna Bolme and especially Janet Weiss, whose drums give every song a throttling pulse. (Weiss has since left the band to form WILD FLAG.)
Malkmus has said that he and The Jicks were looking for a like-minded ally like Beck for Mirror Traffic. But of all the artists with whom Beck has collaborated recently (Charlotte Gainsbourg, Thurston Moore), here he leaves the smallest musical footprint. Beck practically sits back and lets Malkmus and The Jicks play; there are very few of the production flourishes that have become Beck's calling card, though he likely played a small part in reining in Malkmus' jammier side, and in sweetening the songs along the way. If anything, Beck's influence shows in Mirror Traffic's sonic focus, even as the album presents a variety of microstyles: fuzzy garage rockers like "Tune Grief" and "Tigers," intimate tunes like the solemn folk song "No One Is (As I Are Be)," or the warbling, buzzed-out ballad "Asking Price."
One of the major overarching themes of Mirror Traffic seems to be a reflexive coming to terms with nostalgia and the boredom of adulthood. But "Forever 28" also references a crumbling relationship — "I can see the mystery of you and me will never quite add up / No one is your perfect fit, I do not believe in that s—-" — while "All Over Gently" includes the kiss-off line, "Stay if you want, but don't forget we're through."
Mirror Traffic is about as brutally forward and honest as Malkmus has ever sounded, revealing a new side to the enigmatic songwriter. But it's also an album with plenty of hooks and lyrical surprises.
Michael Katzif @'npr'
Hear 'Mirror Traffic' In Its Entirety
Squelching social media after riots a dangerous idea
In an emergency session of Parliament on Thursday, British Prime Minister David Cameron said that the violence, looting and arson sweeping his country "were organized via social media." He said his government is now considering how and whether to "stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting violence, disorder and criminality."
On Friday, China's state-run Xinhua news agency published a commentary contrasting Cameron's latest statements with his Arab Spring-inspired speech earlier this year, in which he loftily proclaimed that freedom of expression should be respected in Tahrir Square as much as in London's Trafalgar Square.
"We may wonder why Western leaders, on the one hand, tend to indiscriminately accuse other nations of monitoring, but on the other take for granted their steps to monitor and control the Internet," Xinhua said. "For the benefit of the general public, proper Web-monitoring is legitimate and necessary."
The Chinese government has been making similar arguments since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered her first speech declaring Internet freedom to be a core pillar of American foreign policy in January 2010. For example, here is Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu responding to a foreign correspondent's question in May about heightened Internet censorship and surveillance: "The Chinese government's legal management of the Internet is in line with international practice."
While perpetrators of crime and violence, such as the kind we've witnessed this past week in Britain, must of course be pursued and prosecuted to the full extent of the law, it is critical that both the British government and Internet companies that operate in the U.K. or serve British users proceed responsibly.
Any new legal measures, or cooperative arrangements between government and companies meant to keep people from organizing violence or criminal actions, must not be carried out in ways that erode due process, rule of law and the protection of innocent citizens' political and civil rights...
On Friday, China's state-run Xinhua news agency published a commentary contrasting Cameron's latest statements with his Arab Spring-inspired speech earlier this year, in which he loftily proclaimed that freedom of expression should be respected in Tahrir Square as much as in London's Trafalgar Square.
"We may wonder why Western leaders, on the one hand, tend to indiscriminately accuse other nations of monitoring, but on the other take for granted their steps to monitor and control the Internet," Xinhua said. "For the benefit of the general public, proper Web-monitoring is legitimate and necessary."
The Chinese government has been making similar arguments since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered her first speech declaring Internet freedom to be a core pillar of American foreign policy in January 2010. For example, here is Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu responding to a foreign correspondent's question in May about heightened Internet censorship and surveillance: "The Chinese government's legal management of the Internet is in line with international practice."
While perpetrators of crime and violence, such as the kind we've witnessed this past week in Britain, must of course be pursued and prosecuted to the full extent of the law, it is critical that both the British government and Internet companies that operate in the U.K. or serve British users proceed responsibly.
Any new legal measures, or cooperative arrangements between government and companies meant to keep people from organizing violence or criminal actions, must not be carried out in ways that erode due process, rule of law and the protection of innocent citizens' political and civil rights...
Continue reading
Rebecca MacKinnon @'CNN'
Torture in the US Prison System: The Endless Punishment of Leonard Peltier
Leonard Peltier, a great-grandfather, artist, writer, and indigenous rights activist, is a citizen of the Anishinabe and Dakota/Lakota Nations and has been imprisoned since 1976. (Photo: Leonard Peltier Defense Committee)
Your visit to one of America's prisons may last only a few hours, but once you pass the first steel threshold, your perception of humanity is altered. The slammed doors, metal detectors and body frisks introduce you to life on the inside, but the glaring hatred from the guards and officials make it a reality. When you creep back into your own world afterward, you wonder what is really happening to the people who permanently languish behind bars. In June 2006, the Commission on Safety and Abuse in America's Prisons released "Confronting Confinement," a 126-page report summarizing its 12-month inquiry into the prison systems. The commission follows up the analysis based on its findings with a list of recommendations. Topping the list of needed improvements is better enforcement of inmates' right to proper health care and limitations on solitary confinement. Five years after the report's release and despite its detailed and well-researched studies, inmate abuse continues. More recently, news reports from California's Pelican Bay Prison amplified the need for change, but after the three-week inmate hunger strike ended, the torture of solitary confinement continues nationwide.
More than 20,000 inmates are caged in isolation in the United States at any one time. Originally designed as a temporary disciplinary action, solitary confinement has drifted into use as a long-term punishment. This act of inhumanity is a clear contradiction of the Eighth Amendment. During the Pelican Bay hunger strike that rippled into prisons across the country, a 66-year-old man with extreme medical needs, Leonard Peltier, was forced into "the hole" at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania...
Continue reading
Scientists Create Electronic “Second Skin”
A team of US scientists led by John A. Rogers, the Lee J. Flory-Founder professor of engineering at the University of Illinois, has developed an “electronic tattoo” that could make a huge difference in monitoring patients’ heart and brain. The tiny electronic sensor can be attached to skin like a temporary tattoo; it can bend, stretch and wrinkle and not break, says the BBC. The skin-like circuits could replace bulky equipment like wires, cables, monitors, pads coated with sticky gel, are much more comfortable to wear and “give the wearer complete freedom of movement,” says Science Daily.
Electrical and computer engineering professor Todd Coleman notes that these “wearable electronics” can connect a person “to the physical world and the cyberworld in a very natural way that feels very comfortable”:
The patches are initially mounted on a thin sheet of water-soluble plastic, then laminated to the skin with water — just like applying a temporary tattoo. Alternately, the electronic components can be applied directly to a temporary tattoo itself, providing concealment for the electronics….
Skin-mounted electronics have many biomedical applications, including EEG and EMG sensors to monitor nerve and muscle activity.
One major advantage of skin-like circuits is that they don’t require conductive gel, tape, skin-penetrating pins or bulky wires, which can be uncomfortable for the user and limit coupling efficiency. They are much more comfortable and less cumbersome than traditional electrodes and give the wearers complete freedom of movement.
“If we want to understand brain function in a natural environment, that’s completely incompatible with EEG studies in a laboratory,” said Coleman, now a professor at the University of California at San Diego. “The best way to do this is to record neural signals in natural settings, with devices that are invisible to the user.”
What’s more, the tiny electronic sensors can be placed on the throat and are able to recognize differences in words such as up, down, left, right, go and stop. Researchers were able to use them to control a simple computer game but someone with muscular or neurological disorders, such as ALS, could potentially wear one of them circuits and use them to interface with computers...
Continue reading
Way To Blue - The Songs of Nick Drake (Live Barbican January 2010)
Filmed at the Barbican in January 2010 and curated by Joe Boyd, producer and general champion of Nick Drake, 90 minutes of performance highlights from a diverse but renowned cast of modern day troubadours. Presenting their own interpretations of Drake's songs are Vashti Bunyan, Green Gartside, Lisa Hannigan, Scott Matthews, Teddy Thompson, Krystle Warren, Robyn Hitchcock, Kirsty Almeida and Harper Simon. A celebration of the songs of Nick Drake, the concert features the original orchestrations of Nick's friend, the late Robert Kirby. It includes a house band anchored by Danny Thompson, the legendary bassist who played on Drake's first two albums. Highlights include Teddy Thompson's version of the timeless River Man, Lisa Hannigan's haunting and compelling version of Black Eyed Dog, Krystle Warren's bluesy take on Time Has Told Me, Robyn Hitchcock's psychedelic spin on Parasite and Neil MacColl's accomplished rendition of the classic Northern Sky. During his lifetime Nick Drake found little mainstream success, but since his death at the untimely age of 26 in 1974 he has been revered as one of the most influential and important English songwriters of his era.
Download
Really looking forward to the Melbourne performance...
Sunday, 14 August 2011
Fresh 'social justice' protests in Israel
At 10pm local time about 70,000 people were mobilised throughout the country, according to police estimates, which did not give a breakdown of numbers in every city or town.
Protest leaders said they were hoping for a turnout larger than last Saturday's, when more than 300,000 people demonstrated in Tel Aviv and other cities calling for "social justice" and a "welfare state".
"The key for us is to show that the people are united, that we live in a single country and that everything must be done to bridge social gaps," said Stav Shafir, a protest leader.
The largest crowds were in the northern city of Haifa, where more than 30,000 protesters turned up, and just over 10,000 gathered in Beersheva in the south, less than the numbers expected by protest leaders.
"We finally hear the voice of the people of the south, not just Tel Aviv," said Adar Meron, a Flamenco dancer and among the first to pitch a protest tent in Beersheva, the capital of the
impoverished Negev region.
At Beersheva's main square, a huge banner read "The Negev awakens". Demonstrators carried banners and placards that read "the south is angry", and "toward a welfare state - now".
Crowds chanted "the people demand social justice", the slogan of the protests since they began a month ago with the appearance of the first protest tent along Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv's upscale district.
Smaller crowds also gathered in Afula in the north, in Galilee, in Modiin in the centre, and in Eilat in the extreme south.
The goal of the latest protests, organisers said, is to expand the geographic and demographic scope of the movement, as so far the middle class has been the driving force behind social justice rallies.
Rapidly growing protest movement
Israel has been gripped since mid-July by the rapidly growing protest movement demanding cheaper housing, education and health care.
An opinion poll released by Channel 10 television on Tuesday showed that 88 per cent of respondents said they supported the movement, with 53 per cent saying they are willing take part in protests.
Under pressure from the protests, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he was willing to alter his approach to the free-market economy and meet the demands of the demonstrators. He created a commission to propose reforms and present recommendations to the government within a month.
@'SBS'
Le Révélateur - Bleu Nuit
‘Bleu Nuit’ is made using video feedbacks as basic material. Through various processes of image manipulations, colors emerged from electronic light to create improbable landscapes.
Alykassem Aly Kassem
People used to take LSD to make the world look weird. Now the world is weird and they take Prozac to make it look normal. Bangstrom #2011
Penny Wong: Australia's non-story of the week
Imagine the outcry in America if a senior cabinet member in the Obama administration had announced she was about to have a baby with her gay partner.
I'm thinking protests from the Christian Right outside the Treasury Department. Fiery on-screen denunciations from some leading television evangelists. Perhaps one or two preachers might even have blamed America's demotion from AAA to AA+ status on the moral impoverishment of its financial officials. The unborn baby would have quickly become the latest proxy in America's ongoing culture wars.In Australia, however, the news that Finance Minister Penny Wong and her partner, Sophie Allouache, are expecting a child has generated a minimum of fuss. Indeed, I can report that it has been the non-story of the week.
They conceived using IVF with the help of an anonymous sperm donor. They underwent the procedure outside of their home state of South Australia because IVF for gay couples there is illegal.
Isolated criticism Ms Wong decided to announce the news earlier this week because she acknowledged there would be interest from the public as a result of her high-ranking position within the government and because she wanted to protect her pregnant partner from any undue publicity.
Though a strong advocate of same-sex marriage - a stance that puts her at odds with Prime Minister Julia Gillard - Ms Wong said she was not making a political point.
''You have a child because you want a family and you want to have the opportunity of raising a child together," she told Phillip Coorey of the Sydney Morning Herald.
"You don't have a child to make a political statement."
Julia Gillard publicly congratulated her friend and trusted colleague, as did Julie Bishop, the acting opposition leader.
The only politician I have seen publicly criticise Ms Wong is the Reverend Fred Nile of the Christian Democratic Party, a member of the New South Wales Legislative Council and a self-styled protecter of public morals. In the upper house of the New South Wales parliament, for instance, he claims to hold what he calls "the balance of prayer".
"I'm totally against a baby being brought up by two mothers - the baby has human rights," said Rev Nile. "It's a very poor example for the rest of the Australian population."
He also criticised Penny Wong's decision to make public the news. "It just promotes their lesbian lifestyle and trying to make it natural where it's unnatural," he said.
But his has been a fairly isolated public voice.
A host of firsts What can we draw from all this? The first point to make is that Australia's culture wars are very different from America's culture wars.
On the other side of the Pacific, the battles tend to focus on moral and faith-based issues, like abortion, creationism and same sex marriage. In Australia, the battleground is history, the related issue of indigenous rights, art and the environment. True, the question of same-sex marriage is starting to loom larger as an issue - the Labor Party national conference will debate it in December, and the emboldened Australian Greens are pressing for reform.
But it generates nowhere near the same passion as it does in the US.
When it comes to personal morality, Australia has moved away from the prudish censoriousness that was such a strong feature of national life until the early 1970s, and perhaps beyond. And though it remains a fairly socially conservative country - the continued influence of the Catholic Church is a key factor - it is also a socially tolerant country.
Again, this explains why Ms Wong's announcement has generated so little controversy.
Finally, Ms Wong is yet another reminder of the changing face of Australia. She is not only the first openly gay federal cabinet minister, but the first Asian-born minister. She came to Australia from Malaysia.
To these firsts, I dare say she would like another: that of being the first Australian politician to take part in a same-sex marriage.
Nick Bryant @'BBC'
David Starkey claims 'the whites have become black'
The historian and broadcaster David Starkey has provoked a storm of criticism after claiming during a televised discussion about the riots that "the problem is that the whites have become black".
In an appearance on BBC2's Newsnight, Starkey spoke of "a profound cultural change" and said he had been re-reading Enoch Powell's rivers of blood speech.
"His prophesy was absolutely right in one sense. The Tiber did not foam with blood but flames lambent, they wrapped around Tottenham and wrapped around Clapham," he said.
"But it wasn't inter-community violence. This is where he was absolutely wrong." Gesturing towards one of the other guests, Owen Jones, who wrote Chavs: the Demonisation of the Working Classes, Starkey said: "What has happened is that a substantial section of the chavs that you wrote about have become black."
An outcry on Twitter began with the Labour MP Jeremy Corbyn asking the BBC: "Why was racist analysis of Starkey unchallenged? What exactly are you trying to prove?" A spokesman for Newsnight said: "I think that [presenter] Emily Maitlis very robustly challenged David Starkey.
"The two guests [Jones and the writer and education adviser Dreda Say Mitchell] that we had also quite clearly took issue with his comments."
Jones told the Guardian he believed Starkey's comments were "a career-ending moment". He said: "He tapped into racial prejudice at a time of national crisis. At other times, those comments would be inflammatory but they are downright dangerous in the current climate.
"I fear that some people will now say that David Starkey is right, and you could already see some of them on Twitter. I am worried about a backlash from the right and he will give legitimacy to those views in the minds of some." On the programme, Starkey said: "The whites have become black. A particular sort of violent destructive, nihilistic gangster culture has become the fashion and black and white boys and girls operate in this language together.
"This language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that has been intruded in England and that is why so many of us have this sense of literally of a foreign country."
The historian and broadcaster, whose historical documentaries on Channel 4 about the Tudors established him as a household name, went on to name-check Tottenham's Labour MP: "Listen to David Lammy, an archetypal successful black man. If you turn the screen off so that you are listening to him on radio you would think he was white."
He was challenged by Mitchell, who ridiculed his theories about the speech patterns of young people.
"You keep talking David about black culture. Black communities are not homogenous. So there are black cultures. Lots of different black cultures. What we need to be doing is ... thinking about ourselves not as individual communities ... as one community. We need to stop talking about them and us."
Ben Quinn @'The Guardian'
I still can't believe this guy!
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