On my first visit some twenty years ago I was astounded to discover that people in Queensland are active outside their homes before work starts. Imagine that! Free of the tyranny of daylight savings time, their lives are not unnaturally skewed towards the evening; they are not artificially coerced into late-night shopping at Pacific Fair or double-dipping during happy hour at the Keg and Prawn.

New Zealand’s conservative Prime Minister John Key is indicating that his country’s offer to accept 150 refugees a year from Australia’s immigration system still stands and could include taking some, or all, of the 267 asylum seekers. The offer reflects the general paradox in New Zealand’s approach to refugees and asylum seekers: in a theoretical sense, it looks and feels comparatively generous, yet in a concrete sense it’s not nearly enough.

The sentiment is common, even if the frankness isn’t. Few Australians would be willing to admit their private thoughts on public television like Dawn Fraser did. Few could do it with the same irony too (Fraser’s father is from Scotland). But what’s more interesting than the sentiment, frankness or irony is the history underpinning the idea that those who aren’t performing the Australian identity should return to ‘where their parents came from’.

I value blogs and small magazines that can’t afford to pay for contributors, and all of the informal mechanisms that allow people to produce culture outside of the traditional channels, take risks, learn their craft. I’m quite convinced I wouldn’t be writing at all if I hadn’t been blogging first, and it’s a form that continues to give me pleasure and in which I believe. But equally I recognise the value of the other layers, of literary magazines and serious general interest publications that promote and organise new writing according to a logic that is not that of the author alone.

Edward Snowden! Julian Assange! Glenn Greenwald! Kim Dotcom! Also starring: your metadata! Whom you talk to, when, how and for how long. And introducing: the content of your conversations! Everything you say or write to people using electronic and telephone networks, analysed by algorithms and rendered searchable, then archived on a secure database.

David Shearer, the leader of the New Zealand Labour Party didn’t lose his job after an electoral defeat, but a mere twenty months into his term as Leader of the Opposition.

When I applied to become a resident ahead of moving to New Zealand, in 1997, I did it under the ‘de-facto partner of a citizen’ category. Since my partner happened to be a woman, the requirement was for us to have been together for at least two years, which we had to scrupulously document. Had my partner been a man, it would have been four years.