Today's maximum temperature in Canberra of 41.5˚C (106.5˚F) is probably the highest I've ever experienced. It is the highest January temperature ever recorded in Canberra, and the second highest ever. With a strong breeze blowing, it was like a blast furnace walking outside in the middle of the day.

Sydney is even hotter, with 45.8˚C (114.4˚F) recorded at Observatory Hill at 2.55pm—an all-time record. Many suburbs have experienced temperatures over 45˚C, including 46.5˚C (115.7˚F) Penrith and 46.4˚C (115.5˚F) at Sydney airport—also all-time records.

Astonishing.

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality."

— John F. Kennedy (misquoting Dante Alighieri) at the signing in Bonn of a charter establishing the German Peace Corps, 24 June 1963. (Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963, p. 503.)

The always insightful Dave Walker offers this as a representation of the cartoon-making process. I would say that it's also a fair representation of Australian government policy making.

As a veteran of many meetings, I reckon Dave Walker's Cartoon Church is on to something here.

According to the Canberra Times the Heritage Division of the federal Environment Department will have its budget reduced by 30 per cent next financial year, resulting in 30 job losses and the end of work on important projects.

The division's funding will be cut by $3.8 million, leaving $7.6 million and a list of undone tasks. Projects will end and jobs will go, assessments of new places for the National Heritage List will be reduced to almost nothing and the work program of the Australian Heritage Council will be gutted. The cuts are a departmental response to government-imposed cuts, rather than a specific government decision.

Greens heritage spokesman Scott Ludlam said he was not surprised by the budget cuts. "They have been bleeding them dry by attrition for the past couple of years," Senator Ludlam said. "We don't have a national heritage strategy, what we have is good departmental people working in somewhat of a vacuum and I can't see how reducing staff numbers that way is going to help the situation."

Already there have been failures due lack of staffing in the Department. (Remember the pink batts?).

The Rudd/Gillard Government has shown a distinct cultural cringe, slashing vital heritage and cultural programs and institutions to save few tens of millions, while spending multiple billions on some programs that have been ill-managed and wasteful. But calculated to be popular.

In similar vein the Labor Government slashed the National Capital Commission to save a few million, leaving management and maintenance of the national capital parts of Canberra in disarray. Good management of the nation capital does buy votes in Western Sydney and the majority of Canberra voters are rusted-on lefties anyway.

Now it appears that the ACT Government must consider a broad-based environmental levy on households and businesses to help Canberra maintain its environmental amenity. ACT Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment Maxine Cooper will make the recommendation in a on the management of the Canberra Nature Park.

Old-time Liberals like Sir Robert Menzies must be turning in their graves, as would be former Labor leaders and culture-buffs Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating, if they were not still living!

If the Liberal weren't such ratbags, I'd be tempted to give them a preference vote for the first time in my life.

When I become dictator, the following words and expressions will be banned forever from conversation: 'like', 'and stuff', 'you know', 'sort of', 'ummm', 'aah', 'went' or 'goes' (when meaning 'said'), 'no problem', 'but' (at the end of a sentence or clause).

I would have people taught description and the articulation of abstracts.

In City Journal (Winter 2001), Clark Whelton investigates the liguistic phenomenon he calls, "Vagueness, the linguistic virus that infected spoken language in the late twentieth century."

Inability to say things, Whelton says, is "shifting the burden of communication from speaker to listener. Ambiguity, evasion, and body language . . . were transforming college English into a coded sign language in which speakers worked hard to avoid saying anything definite. I called it Vagueness."

Vagueness was on the march. Double-clutching ("What I said was, I said . . .") sprang into the arena. Playbacks, in which a speaker re-creates past events by narrating both sides of a conversation ("So I'm like, 'Want to, like, see a movie?' And he goes, 'No way.' And I go . . ."), made their entrance. I was baffled by what seemed to be a reversion to the idioms of childhood. And yet intern candidates were not hesitant or uncomfortable about speaking elementary school dialects in a college-level job interview. I engaged them in conversation and gradually realized that they saw Vagueness not as slang but as mainstream English. At long last, it dawned on me: Vagueness was not a campus fad or just another generational raid on proper locution. It was a coup. Linguistic rabble had stormed the grammar palace. The principles of effective speech had gone up in flames.

In 1988, my elder daughter graduated from Vassar. During a commencement reception, I asked one of her professors if he'd noticed any change in Vassar students' language skills. "The biggest difference," he replied, "is that by the time today's students arrive on campus, they've been juvenilized. You can hear it in the way they talk. There seems to be a reduced capacity for abstract thought." He went on to say that immature speech patterns used to be drummed out of kids in ninth grade. "Today, whatever way kids communicate seems to be fine with their high school teachers."