Month: December 2019

Australia’s coffee culture was introduced by Italian migrants, but it then transcended its origins. Twice I’ve gone back to Australia since I came to Italy and nowhere have I ever got a better coffee – in my favourite cafes in Oz, especially in Noosa and Hobart – than a double shot latte, Australian style. The Dutch, for example, make wussy coffee and as for Starbucks – wash your mouth out!

Mind you, I occasionally do find a very good Italian cappuccino, of course, but usually it is made too quickly and unless you specify ‘caldo’, not hot enough, which is why it is so quick [for my Perugian friends, the caffe’ at Porta Pisa isn’t too bad!]. Nobody could equal an Italian double shot macchiato con caffe’ doppio e latte caldo as a different and superior coffee after the time-limited cappuccino [not to be drunk after 11-ish in the morning], but it’s not my preferred Oz coffee.

From an international perspective Trump is not only unstable, a sociopath, a venal self-obsessed and emotionally and morally deficient individual, and probably not very bright. He is also lawless.

Non-Americans around the world who care about democracy find this deeply disturbing and threatening to world stability. Evidence given in the House of Representatives impeachment – something that Prime Ministers in other English speaking countries would not survive either as corruption tightens its hold on Western democracy – certainly indicates that Trump is an unworthy and unprincipled incumbent in the White House.

The LNP’s policy on climate change – that it will do nothing, that it will not acknowledge the science, that it will trivialise the link between the unprecedented burning of Australia and climate change, that it will do an accountancy exercise on emissions rather than upset its corrupt alliance with the coal and gas mafias – is nothing but corrupt and evil.

It is an abrogation of the government’s duty to protect the nation from the real security issues, some of them inflicted on the people, not by some Islamic radicalism that its racist policies have spawned with its official policies of violating the human rights of children and refugees, but by the essential sociopathology of its philosophy across all its portfolios. For you cannot isolate the failure of successive governments on the climate crisis.