When social and political historians come to write the defin­itive history of the climate change debate, a chapter will surely have to be set aside to document the rise of one of the most cunning and media-savvy interest groups this country has ever seen. That chapter — assuming the authors strive for trans­parency of meaning and don’t adopt a naming scheme that is wilfully obnubil­atory — will surely have to be entitled “The Penguins”.

Scientists have suggested that for the species Eudyptula minor (the so-called ‘little’ or ‘fairy’ penguin) inhab­iting northern Tasmania, Victoria and the Bass Strait islands, rising sea temper­atures may in fact prove to be procre­at­ively advant­ageous. The theory is that warmer seas will encourage penguins to breed earlier, and breed better.

Before we consider the science, a few items of historical record. Penguins, you will recall, were one of the the first major lobby groups to spread misin­form­ation about the envir­onment. In the eighties, penguins ran a cynical, pro-cholorofluorocarbon campaign in a desperate attempt to forestall the collapse of the aerosol industry in which, as a species, they had massively over-invested. The penguins later changed tack, claiming that a hole in the ozone layer was in the best interests of human– and animal-kind in general. The ozone layer, according to the penguins, was simply an artificial, psycho­lo­gical barrier preventing the creatures of Earth from claiming their destiny among the stars — or, as the penguin-funded billboards proclaimed, a “no-go-zone layer”.

In these enlightened days, of course, we know that the ozone layer and its accom­pa­nying hole is in fact an elaborate costume devised for Lady Gaga’s 2010 southern hemisphere tour. In any case, the focus of the envir­on­mental cause has shifted. And when it comes to climate change, penguins have been gallingly obstinate. First, they denied the very existence of global warming. Now, embar­rassed at having to acknow­ledge that the climate really is changing, the penguin lobby is trying to tell us that an increase in ocean temper­ature is actually a positive devel­opment because it allow them to reproduce quicker, and more often.

But is this something we want to encourage? Just what are the evil forces that lurk behind behind this heedless rush to breed? Every cloaca is precious, and no penguin should have to sacrifice its urogenital integrity at the altar of fluctu­ating global temper­atures. Sadly, penguins already have enough excuses for indulging in hasty, ill-planned sex. How many times have we seen grainy images of penguins huddled in their shelters, caught in the act, filmed in that tell-tale “sex-o-chrome” night vision that speaks of a thousand Sphenisciforme sins? Some females even submit themselves to performing flipper-jobs and other profoundly humili­ating acts simply to obtain a few nice pebbles with which to decorate their homes. Do we really need to be engin­eering those very circum­stances which will propel these lasci­vious creatures to ever more depraved sexual activities?

Another question we might ask is whether we really need more penguins. A quick survey reveals that penguins are in major positions of power in nearly 0.0000001% of the companies currently listed in the Dow 30. You don’t have to be a mathem­atician to figure out that this works out to a total of 0.0000003 penguins. In fact, all you need to be is a person who has a general functional intel­li­gence, a calcu­lator, and fingers.

Now, most climate change deniers are as laughable as an author of an article on climate change stooping to a pun about the envir­on­mental debate “heating up”. But as the envir­on­mental debate heats up, the penguins have adopted sophist­icated tactics, twisting science to their own ends and fashioning themselves into several 40cm tall forces to be reckoned with. “Stressing the positives of climate change is a clever move,” says one public relations expert, who can’t be named due to having only just been invented by me for the purposes of this blog post, and whose ten word contri­bution to this piece scarcely warrants direct quotation in any case.

One wonders what is to be the next line of attack against the envir­on­mental movement — and from which quarter such an attack might arise. A number of leading giraffes, pointing (though not literally) to the growing obesity epidemic among long-necked ruminants, have already come out in favour of defor­est­ation because it encourages young giraffes to consider a more varied and balanced diet.

There is only one place all this can end. By which, I mean this article. And, because this article has in fact ended, that place is here.

Britain may soon hold a refer­endum to move from a “first-past-the-post” voting system to the kind of prefer­ential system currently used in Australia and other democracies throughout the Commonwealth.

The Australian colonies adopted Britain’s Westminster system of parlia­mentary democracy when they achieved responsible government in the middle of the nineteenth century, but the system was tweaked somewhat when, in 1901, the colonies federated and Australia became a nation in its own right. It’s tempting to consider that this youthful willingness to exper­iment has now, in turn, inspired Britain to consider altern­ative methods of electing its political repres­ent­atives. Indeed, it could even be seen as just the latest example in a relat­ively short but immensely rich history of mutual exchange between the British Isles and the Australian continent.

Take, for example, the arrival in Australia of the first fleet of convicts, marines and officers from Britain in 1788. It was immedi­ately apparent to the British that what the indigenous inhab­itants of the continent coveted more than anything else was blankets. They seemed, noted Captain John Hunter, “to go frigging mental for the things”. Striped woollen blankets, though they had not hitherto existed on the continent of Australia, were correctly judged by the new settlers to form the entire basis for the Aboriginal systems of kinship, thought and spiritu­ality. In order to placate the Aborigines and satisfy their incredible appetite for perfectly rectan­gular sections of Dorset wool, the British grudgingly handed over all the blankets they could retrieve from their ships, and in exchange were granted the oppor­tunity, over the next three-quarters of a century or so, to indulge their tendency toward wholesale exterm­in­ation. We can see here the germ of that generous spirit of give and take which aptly charac­terises the relationship between our two nations to this day.

Likewise, while Britain may have based its entire imperial enter­prise on slavery, it took Australian ingenuity to informally resurrect the practice three-quarters of a century after Britain had abolished it — and not just to resurrect it, but to finesse it. It’s true to say that the colony of Queensland was merely aping the tactics of the mother country when it began kidnapping Pacific Islanders to work as cheap labourers in its sugar fields toward the end of the nineteenth century — but what set Australia apart was enacting legis­lation, a year after the formation of the national parliament, to deport the kidnapped islanders back to the societies from which they had, by now, become entirely estranged. It is doubtful that this new and invig­or­ating form of cruelty could have arisen naturally in the British Isles without the additional spark of brilliance that fired in the brain of the Australian body politic.

But politics is not the only sphere in which the Australian people have applied their unique style to improve upon the achieve­ments of their Anglo-Saxon ancestors. For instance, it took a distinct­ively colonial genius to add a dash of anarchy to the English boarding school game of rugby, thus forming the bedrock for insti­tu­tional violence, both on and off the field, that is proudly the preserve of the modern Australian football codes. Likewise, it was an arguably Australian impetus that trans­formed the cricketer — the emblem of British grace and sports­manship — from a somewhat staid figure into the boozing, rutting and entirely admirable specimen that adorns the cricket pitches of the world today.

While the earliest British settlers in Australia may have arrived somewhat under duress, by the middle of the twentieth century there was a marked increase in British emigration to Australia. These so-called ‘ten pound poms’ were encouraged by an assisted passage scheme, whereby the Australian government subsidised the cost of their fare from Britain. The accepted view is that the scheme was attractive to the Australian government as a means of rapidly populating the continent with white people. While this wholly creditable motive was indeed a factor, it was not the primary one. Recently uncovered Cabinet papers from the 1940s reveal that the scheme was principally designed to ensure that Australia, having accepted large numbers of migrants from Britain and elsewhere, could, in exchange, export its unwanted supplies of Rolf Harrises, Peter Andres and Pauline Hansons.

But getting back to where we began — politics — we might now turn our attention to some of Australia’s more recent parlia­mentary innov­a­tions, which Britain, in her wisdom, may choose to adopt in any forth­coming review of its political processes. One example is the appro­pri­ately egalit­arian practice, pioneered by the Honourable Charles Wilson ‘Ironbar’ Tuckey and embraced in recent months by Senator Bill Heffernan, of providing comments to the media in the form of a ‘doorstop’ interview. The political observer will be quick to point out that this is nothing new. What distin­guishes the approach adopted by Messrs Tuckey and Heffernan is that they offer their contri­bu­tions in the background of doorstop inter­views convened by other ministers of parliament entirely.

It is only by advances such as these that democracy can remain relevant in a rapidly changing world.

I’m the first to admit that murder is no laughing matter, but the normal standards of propriety seem hardly to apply when the murder weapon is a curry.

It has been reported this week that a London woman was jailed for 23 years for fatally poisoning an ex-boyfriend via the medium of that most ubiquitous of spicy Indian dishes. Her motive: jealousy at her former lover becoming engaged to another woman. The poison: aconite, also known as wolfsbane. The curry: vegetable.

Details are vague as to how the poisoned curry was admin­istered. I’m choosing to picture an elaborate plan involving a cunning disguise and a fabricated story about a misplaced takeaway order. I’m choosing to picture it this way, because if historical precedent is anything to go by, the altern­ative methods of applic­ation are fairly grim. I need hardly remind the learned reader that there are a number of theories as to how Agrippina, prime suspect in the poisoning of Claudius, was supposed to have delivered the fatal agent of that weak-kneed, runny-nosed emperor’s doom. One theory is that she pushed a poison-dipped feather down his throat. Another is that she delivered the poison by means of an enema. (There is even a contro­versial and little spoken-about theory which suggests a combin­ation of the two.)

And on the topic of bottom-related ingress and egress, my research into the matter has revealed that one of the symptoms of aconite poisoning is diarrhoea. Which is rather clever on the part of the murderer, since it’s often also one of the symptoms of eating a bad curry. Almost incon­ceivably, this doesn’t seem to have formed part of the defence team’s weaponry in their attempt to acquit their client — nor has the fact that aconite, when prepared correctly, has tradi­tionally been used in Asian countries as a medicine. Rather than being a premed­itated killing, it’s entirely possible that this was an extremely poorly-executed attempt to restore the groom-to-be’s virility in time for the wedding.

One film studio, recog­nising the double-whammy appeal of a subcontinentally-spiced story of true crime, is appar­ently already hard at work on a script entitled The Bollywood Borgia. It’s a brave move, though, consid­ering the surpris­ingly poor box office takings of There’s A Slug Pellet In My Saag Paneer and Sonobe Sayonara.

I mentioned Agrippina above, and it’s worth pointing out that some recent historians believe she may have been judged too harshly by history. It’s probable that the dim light in which she is viewed is due to chauvinism on the part of historians past.

Perhaps the London curry poisoner will enjoy a similar attempt at rehab­il­it­ation in the not too distant future.

The seasons have provided inspir­ation for countless singers and songwriters. As we here in Australia approach the tail end of another soul-melting summer, it occurs to me that none of the popular music artistes of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have really captured my own feelings on that very season which terrorises me like no other.

A quick survey of summer-related songs reveals that Ace of Base once recorded a version of an old Bananarama number called ‘Cruel Summer’. At first glance, this seemed germane. Unfortunately, much of the Ace of Base version is in French — a language I don’t speak, and one which seems poorly suited to enumer­ating the ills of summer. (If the French were cursed with the sorts of summers we endure this far down in the southern hemisphere, they wouldn’t have had the inclin­ation to invent a language as attractive as French, for a start.) Add to that the fact that Ace of Base are Swedish, and that the Bananarama version featured on the soundtrack to the movie The Karate Kid (a film which seriously expects us to believe that a teenager would go to a costume party dressed as a shower), and it starts to look like we’re taking an excursion deep into Total Bullshitsville.

Or take Daryl Braithwaite’s ‘One Summer’, whose chorus exhorts us to “Remember the way-ay”, while conveni­ently failing to provide further specifics. I can only assume he means “remember the way in which your naked arse flesh got stuck to the vinyl of your desk chair while you mindlessly surfed the internet late into night”.

And you can stop smirking, Sir Cliff Richard, with your “fun and laughter” and “no more worries for a week or two”. Which is it, one week or two? Irrelevant, since the skin is still peeling from my knees a fortnight since the conclusion of my own summer holiday. Where’s the fun and laughter in that, I ask. (And while you’re puzzling over that one, think how screwed you would have been if you’d been knighted during the Crusades. I’m just saying.)

No survey of wildly disin­genuous summer-themed songs could ignore ‘Summer Lovin” from the movie Grease. Consider this tragically flawed poetic image, if you will: “Summer days drifting away / To, uh oh, those summer nights”. In other words, “isn’t it nice how in summer the temper­ature usually drops once the sun has gone down, because then we can engage in pleasant activ­ities such as under-age sex and/or sleep” . Sure, except when the temper­ature remains at 34°C for most of the freaking night.

The nearest a song about summer has come to expressing my own feelings is ‘Summer in the City’ by one of my favourite musical acts of yesteryear, The Lovin’ Spoonful. Its verses speak of “people looking half dead” (check), the city being “hotter than a matchhead” (hmm, the ignition temper­ature of sulphur is roughly 230 degrees Celsius, but let’s call it artistic licence — I’m willing to let gross negative hyperbole slip by where summer is concerned), and the back of one’s neck getting “dirty and gritty” (not sure why they’ve specifically mentioned the back of the neck there — the creases in the belly flesh, groin and arse areas would have been my go-to points of anatomy for that one, but anyway). Where songwriter John Sebastian comes undone, like Sir Cliff, is his promise, in the chorus, that “despite the heat it’ll be alright”.

No it won’t, John. No it arsing well won’t. Not until it’s the middle of June, and I’m wearing slippers.

Apple Inc. is renowned for hiding delicious features in its computers and gadgets, little operating system ‘easter eggs’ that pop up one day when you least expect it to enrich your computing life in subtle but important ways.

I recently discovered a new way of controlling an iPod without laying a finger on the scroll­wheel. Mine is a 5th gener­ation video iPod, so your mileage may vary (or as the computer geeks say, ‘YMMV’).

Step one: Travel on public transport. Find a seat next to the window, or otherwise ensure that your iPod is in your pants pocket on the side of your body nearest to a vacant seat.

Step two: Wait for an obese person to sit next to you.

Step three: Marvel at the genius of Steve Jobs as the pressing of your fellow passenger’s arse-flesh against your iPod causes tracks to skip backwards, forwards, pause and suddenly play at unbearable levels of volume.