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The Rudd government has decided to revive that perennial question: how do you go about rebranding Australia? It has invited advertising agencies to bid for a multi-million dollar contract to come up with a ringing new slogan and a wizard new logo.

Understandably enough, the government wants to get away from the "shrimp on the barbie" image that was popularised by Paul Hogan in the Come and Say G'Day! a quarter century ago, even though it's the most successful marketing campaign that Australia has even seen. Fun and lifestyle, which traditionally have been major selling points, are a bit passe.

Instead, it wants something altogether more grown-up and sophisticated, spruiking Australia's creativity, innovation, entrepreneurial spirit, spirit of social inclusion and ingenuity. In other words, it wants to project modern Australia to the world, not some pastiche from the early 1950s with a soundtrack from Rolf Harris (don't get me wrong, I love Rolf, but you know what I mean...).

"We need a cohesive brand that captures the essence of Australia and underscores the quality of all that we have to offer in sectors such as trade, investment and education," according to Trade Minister Simon Crean. "It is time for Australia to more actively promote itself."

This isn't a tourism campaign per se, it's a national marketing campaign. The aim is to persuade people that Australia is not only a good place in which to enjoy a holiday, but to live, invest and do business.

Ideally, the Australian government wants to emulate the success of New Zealand's 100% Pure New Zealand tagline, and South Africa's Rainbow Nation. Though it is confident about its product, it is suffering from a bit of brand envy.

Admittedly, neatly encapsulating Australia in one pithy slogan is going to be tough. "We have a physicality that defies belief in terms of desert to snow to rainforests to beaches to big cities," says Chris Brown of the lobby group the Tourism and Transport Forum. "We produce everything you can imagine from fine wine to iron ore, highest levels of education down to Billabong board shorts, I mean how do you put all of that together in one little logo or ad, I don't know that you can."

People are already having a go on the talk-back radio stations and in the papers. "The Best Country in the World" seems popular, if contentious. "So far so good," has a ring to it, though it reminds people of the long in long-haul destination. "Come and shake the sauce bottle down under," might have champions in The Lodge, although Kevin Rudd noted, in one of his less ocker moments, that the Where the Bloody Hell Are You? tourism campaign was a "rolled gold disaster".

"The Lucky Country" seems popular, though it would have the journalist Donald Horne, who coined the nation's most misappropriated phrase, revolving in his grave.

Can you do better?

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Though she hails from the land of song - Barry in South Wales, to be precise - Julia Gillard possesses possibly the most unmelodious voice in Australian politics. Just as the Australian prime minister speaks fluent Mandarin, his hard-working deputy communicates in a variant of 'Strine, a pinched and nasally dialect with harsh, penetrative qualities.

But a Thatcher-like retooling of her voice box seems underway, and as her speech drops in pitch so her chances of emulating the Iron Lady by becoming a female prime minister in a parliament dominated by men appear to rise.

Out of Kevin Rudd's cabinet, Julia Gillard is almost universally regarded as the most impressive performer. She's become something of a star turn on the opinion-forming current affairs shows, like ABC's 730 Report, Lateline and Insiders. She's a master of the political putdown in parliament, with an almost Keating-like ability to mock and humiliate members of the opposition front bench. The former Labor prime minister used to boast of slow-cooking his political enemies. Ms Gillard tends to favour the blow torch. That makes her a favourite of the Canberra Press Gallery, who no doubt welcome the entertainment.

Recently, she seems to have spent a good deal of time travelling abroad, with trips to Washington, Israel, Iraq, and India, which all seem part of her prime ministerial apprenticeship.

In recent weeks, the conventional wisdom is that she has started making mistakes. She underestimated the costs of the school refurbishments that were a central strand of the Rudd stimulus packages, leading to a budget blow-out of a staggering $A1.7bn ($1.7bn; £880m). Moreover, as Channel Nine's political editor, Laurie Oakes, recently pointed out, she was out of the country during the Ozcar affair, which meant that Kevin Rudd came up with some strong Gillard-like put-downs of his own. According to Oakes, it has restored a measure of parity to their relationship, since Kevin Rudd always looked on his deputy as a superior parliamentary performer.

Few political commentators wield as much clout as Laurie Oakes, and he had this to say of Ms Gillard: "Don't look now, but Saint Julia's halo has slipped. Suddenly, the Deputy Prime Minister's competence is being questioned." But that does have the feel of Canberra chatter, rather than a more widespread impression.

Queensland has already shown, with the tradition-defying election of Anna Bligh, that voters even in one of Australia's more conservative states are prepared to countenance female leaders.

So Julia Gillard remains well placed to shatter the glass ceiling that has so far prevented women from occupying the highest political office in the land. What's more, she can rely on her political talents to do so, rather than the penetrative power of that once-shrill voice.

UPDATES: Thanks for weighing in on the economy. The blog was by no means exhaustive on the reasons for Australia's resilience and many of you advanced other, equally plausible explanations.

BrentfromColumbus asked about the Indian student crisis, and thecamo helped out. I've just done on the situation. Already, this is a big story in India, especially, and in FISA, the Federation of Indian Students in Australia, the students have a media-savvy organization which will keep it in the headlines. After coal and iron ore, education is Australia's third biggest export - a remarkable statistic - and what will worry the Australian authorities is the number of Chinese students and Chinese media outlets which have been covering the recent demonstrations.

On the Australian banks, I think they are probably worth a blog all of their own. They are strictly regulated and their balance sheets are in good shape, but as a number of you pointed out they charge what, by international standards, are fairly exorbitant fees, which has put them in a strong position.

As for the Steve Fielding blog, many of you identified what you consider a wider problem with the parliamentary system: the blocking power of the senate. In the "Washminster" form of government, the Anglo-US hybrid, this is definitely a strong "Wash" element. For most of the last century, the US Senate was known for the legislation it blocked rather than the legislation it passed (it took until 1957, for instance, to pass a civil rights act, and then it was a fairly weak measure). That's partly why was such a colossus on Capitol Hill. He minted policy ideas into legislation. Again, it's worth another blog, does the Australian parliamentary system need an overhaul to limit the power of individual senators, like Fielding? Or is that just democracy?

I'm actually US-bound for a couple of weeks, but have left behind a blog which was supposed to have appeared earlier in the month on the government plans to rebrand Australia. Given that there was so much Ango-Aussie trashtalk after the Ashes, and that the blog might have sparked more of the same, we decided to hold it over. It will appear over the coming days.

Thanks to all: the regular commenters, the occasional commenters, and, the overwhelming majority, the people who read and leave it at that.

All very best, and speak soon...

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One of Canberra's most important and influential parliamentarians is a senator who refers to "physical policy" when he really means "fiscal policy", a term from the economic lexicon which he spells F-I-S-K-A-L.

I have been meaning to blog for some time about Steve Fielding, the sole senator from the Christian Family First Party, who often wields the decisive vote in an upper house where the Rudd government does not enjoy a majority.

A frequent casualty of grammatical fender benders, Senator Fielding's latest gaffes came in a press conference on Parliament Hill. ''You're talking about fiscal policy, are you?'' asked a reporter from Channel Nine, after the senator had used the expression "physical policy" three times.
''That's correct. Fiscal: F-I-S-K-A-L," he replied. I guess you could call it Fielding's "freakonomics"

Later on, Senator Fielding offered an explanation for his lapse. Since childhood, he has been battling a learning difficulty, which has made him a poor speller and an erratic public speaker. At school, he got 29% for English, but went on to get an engineering degree from RMIT University in Melbourne, and an MBA from Monash University, two highly-reputable institutions.

"I am certainly no dummy," he later said on radio. "I've got an engineering degree and an MBA and I didn't get it out of a Weeties packet."

Learning difficulty or not, Senator Fielding has long been something of an eccentric, and a natural self-publicist. Famous for his stunts, he once dressed up as a giant fizzy pop bottle to dramatize an anti-litter initiative, and turned up with a miniature shopping trolley to illustrate the hike in grocery prices.

As Annabel Crabb put it rather deftly in the Sydney Morning Herald, he is "the latest in a long line of boutique eccentrics to whom the Australian people, with their unerring collective ability to crack a joke at democracy's expense, have assigned a casting vote in the upper house".

Fielding has used that vote to block the government's alcopops tax legislation, and its emissions trading scheme. The senator says he has yet to be convinced of the scientific case that man is contributing to global warming.

What makes the Victorian senator so very controversial is that the influence he wields is so completely disproportionate to the votes he received. He was elected in 2004 with just 2,500 primary votes - or 0.08% of the total Victorian senate vote. Over 5 million people voted Labor at the 2007 election, but Senator Fielding has the senatorial power to block its legislation and thwart its mandate. Actually, the Labor party is partly to blame. In Victoria, it urged voters give the Family First party their preferences in a move to block the Greens.

His malapropisms are not the main issue. It is the might that he wields that, for many observers, makes Senator Fielding such a democratic oddity.

UPDATES: The Australian Federal Police has just announced it is launching a war crimes inquiry into the deaths of the Balibo Five ahead of Indonesia's invasion of East Timor in 1975.

As for ongoing saga of who performed first at the Sydney House, I returned to the library to triple check. Rolf performed on September 28th. The Mackerras/Wagner concert was September 29th.

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I write from Perth, the resources capital of Australia, and the powerhouse of the economy.

A year on from the financial convulsion unleashed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, it seems a fitting enough place to write about how Australia has managed to avoid a technical recession, just as it did during the Asian financial crisis in 1997 and the dot.com bust in 2000.

The June quarter saw 0.6% growth, which means that the Australian economy has expanded by 1% in the first six months of the year. Some economists are calling it the 'wonder from down under,' and this performance is all the more impressive when you consider that Australia is now entering its 19th year without recession.

But I wonder whether Perth really is the most appropriate place to compose this blog. For while the resources sector has helped buffer Australia from the worst effects of the global downturn, there are other, more important, reasons why the country has avoided recession.

Perhaps I should be writing this from outside the Reserve Bank of Australia, in the heart of Sydney's central business district, since the central bank's aggressive policy of slashing interest rates has been fittingly central.

Perhaps it should come from the steps of the Treasury Building in Canberra, where the Rudd government produced its multi-billionaire dollar stimulus packages - or 'fiscal Viagra', as some have taken to calling them.

Perhaps it should come from any number of suburban shopping malls around the country, since it is domestic consumption, more so than mineral exports, which chiefly explains Australia's continued economic expansion. Australians spent their hand-outs from the government. They responded to the global downturn by going shopping.

Who else deserves the credit? Reaching further back into economic history, you could argue that the successive governments which tightened up the regulatory framework governing the banking system played a key part. After all, there was no need for any bail-outs of Australian banks.

Perhaps you could dispatch a herogram to the former Treasurer, Peter Costello, whose fiscal prudence meant that Australia was cashed up when it went was hit by the downturn, which meant the Rudd government could spend its way out of trouble.

Now the debate in Canberra is over whether the stimulus packages should be pared back, to limit the national debt. For the Rudd government, this will be a matter of very careful political and economic calibration. Moreover, a hike in interest rates could now come before Christmas.

Forgive me for returning to Donald Horne yet again, but this does revive the old Lucky Country argument: that so rich is Australia's endowment of mineral resources that it will always compensate for the paucity of political leadership.

But it seems to me that many of the factors which have delivered 18 years of consecutive growth are man-made rather than God-given. Above-ground strategies and solutions have arguably been just as important as the country's below-ground treasures. In other words, Australia has made a lot of its own luck.

Australia is not basking under entirely cloudless skies. Unemployment will probably continue to rise for a while, and there are fears still that a housing bubble is about to explode. The booming education sector - which, after coal and iron ore, is Australia's third biggest export - could be hammered by the Indian student crisis.

But over the past twelve months, the Australian economy has performed better than any other advanced economy. So who should take the credit?

UPDATE: Thanks for weighing in on the Opera House, and Blues Point Tower, one of Harry Seidler's less successful buildings which overlooks Sydney harbour. Bren54 raises Robin Boyd's Australian Ugliness, which was one of the Oz-loathing books that seemed particularly fashionable at the start of the 1960s. Was Rolf the first to perform in the concert hall, asks Whitlamite? Of course. For the record, Sir Charles Mackerras, and a full programme of Wagner, came the following night. He performed alongside Birgitt Nilsson, a Swedish soprano who should not be confused with Sylvester Stallone's second wife.....

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The Sydney Opera House has always struck me as an especially appropriate icon for post-war Australia.

As you can , it's a structure of multiple entendres: a reminder both of the country's outward-looking internationalism (the New South Wales government held an international competition to find an architect) and its narrow-minded parochialism (the winner, Jorn Utzon, was famously replaced by a local architect following a dispute over cost over-runs).

In its inception are elements of our old friend the cultural cringe (a Danish architect, Utzon, was selected at the instigation of another international architect, Eero Saarinen); but also cultural self-confidence (what epic vision from the New South Wales premier of the time to think that the site of an old tram shed would one day accommodate one of modern architecture's most glorious landmarks).

It was built with the help of new arrivals from southern Europe, funded by lottery money and opened by the Queen in a ceremony which also featured an Aboriginal actor who appeared atop the highest shell.

Three weeks before the opening celebrations, Rolf Harris performed the first concert. He opened with the specially-composed Come to the Sydney Opera House, which was truly dreadful, but redeemed himself later on in the concert with Two Little Boys, Jake the Peg, and, of course, Tie Me Kangaroo Down Sport ("it was an incredible thing [that song] because it proved to me... that you can be Australian and be a success," Rolf told the audience that night).

The troubled story of one of the world's most charismatic buildings is oft-told and suitably operatic, and the latest act involves the attempts to gain funding for much-needed backstage improvements. While those renovations take place, the SOH also wants to realise one of Utzon's original visions for the opera theatre.

The price tag is a cool $A600m (£300m) - and that is probably a conservative estimate - and Kevin Rudd has indicated already that the money would be better spent on schools. What do you think?

The Opera House has a habit of monopolising architectural attention, but even without it, Sydney's skyline would be spectacular. There are and the Italian "starchitect" , which references and compliments the Opera House. There is the fabulous art deco of the in Hyde Park along with various colonial gems, from the to the .

Often, Olympic cities are endowed with some breath-taking games-related structures. Sadly, Sydney missed out on that front, and Ö÷²¥´óÐãbush, as Olympic Park is popularly known, is unloved by most Sydneysiders - although its train station is a winner.

Obviously, there are riches elsewhere. Adelaide, the "city of churches", probably has the country's best ecclesiastical architecture, not least St Peter's Cathedral which towers over the Adelaide Oval (which, itself, is an architectural gem, though not for much longer if they go ahead with plans to tear down the . Then there is the city's elegant Northern Terrace, the Nineteenth century wings of in particular.

Along with some fabulous civic and state buildings, and some Seidler skyscrapers, Brisbane has some striking new buildings, like the by one of Australia's most prolific architectural practices, Denton, Corker, Marshall. , the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, is winning international acclaim.

Architecturally, Perth has never quite done it for me, although the early 1960s is arguably one of the best modernist buildings in the country - having survived an attempt in the 1990s to demolish it.

As for Canberra, there are some who think that the new Parliament House looks like a chemistry experiment, but it has always worked for me - especially from the sky where you can appreciate its boomerang styling. The new is a very stylish addition to the capital.

Clearly, you have to get out of the cities to savour some of Australia's finest architecture, from which blend so seamlessly with the landscape they occupy, to

Without reviving and revisiting all the usual civic rivalries, Melbourne is surely Australia's most complete architectural city. Flush with all that 19th Century century gold, it's no surprise that two of its finest buildings are the . There's a lot of Gothic Revival (St Paul's Cathedral), Venetian gothic (the Rialto Building), French-influence (Princess Theatre), Roman revival (Fitzroy Town Hall), Edwardian baroque (Melbourne City Baths and Flinders Street Station), exotic (the Forum Theatre), Spanish (the conservatory in Fitzroy Gardens) modern Gothic (), art deco and lots of European modernism, which was brought to the city by a lot of European émigrés.

The modern stuff is really strong, from the Exhibition Centre and Melbourne Museum, both of which were designed by Denton, Corker, Marshall, and, more controversially, Federation Square. The is very funky as is , which was designed by the British architect, Nicholas Grimshaw. And what of Melbourne's new .

But I digress. So back to the original question. Should Utzon's original vision for the Opera House finally be realised? Or is Kevin Rudd right, and the money is better on an "educational revolution" rather than an architectural rehabilitation?

UPDATE: A final word on the saintly Cate Blanchett. Having waited nine months for the chance to see her in A Streetcar Named Desire, I happened to be in the audience when she got biffed on the head by a flying prop and had to retire hurt, a cultural casualty...

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