It was like being a part of a medieval street fair, as many of the observers and most of the paraders were in wonderful, colourful costumes, everything from gowns to rags to armour. Many wore masks. There was dancing and drumming and an air of gay abandon, as one used to say. We had the impression that anybody who wanted to just joined in. We, being inhibited, stayed on the sidelines of course.

In the afternoon there were open-air concerts on the plaza of the Carrington, the historic and grand hotel at the top of the street. And why shouldn't everyone feel happy, as the days are finally starting to get longer? Dark at 5, dawn at about 7:30 makes for a pretty tight day.

-and to update Iguanagate (from below), the fiery MP Belinda Neil, whose "Do You Know Who I Am?" harangue allegedly started the argument with the nightclub staff, has been "stood down" from her role as ... get this, the chair of the parliamentary Communications Committee! It was a stroke of genius worthy of Catch-22 for the prime minister to put such a personality in that role. Meanwhile, everyone is awaiting the police report, and the pundits are suggesting that if it can be proved that Neil bullied her staff into changing their statutory declarations she could do jail time.

-and, in the battle of the scientific studies, last week's report that Aussies were the world's fatsos was trumped by yesterday's, declaring Aussies to have the world's second-longest life expectancy (after Japan). A bit of a disconnect there... ?

- we came back to New South Wales in the middle of Iguanagate, the latest scandal to beset the Labor state government. The NSW education minister and his wife, a federal Labor MP, got involved in a shouting match at a daggy nightclub called Iguanas in Gosford, a town on the coast north of Sydney. Apparently they refused to move to another table when the staff tried to rearrange things for dancing and, allegedly, they threatened the staff and management with the loss of their business license, etc. It's now the "battle of the stat decs" (statutory declarations), the politicians' vs. the staff's. After doing nothing for a week, the NSW premier finally "stood down" the minister; in the case of the wife, Prime Minister Rudd gave her a "last chance" order to take anger-management classes. Reading between the lines in the papers, it's her volcanic temper and sense of self-importance that started the stoush (i.e. battle in Ozspeak).

State politics is simply awful. The Labor government has been in power for 13 years and is arrogant and self-serving to the extreme. The list of scandals includes the former minister of Aboriginal affairs, who has just been sent to jail for 13 years for child-sex and drug charges during the time he held the portfolio. Their latest "success" has been to push through changes to planning legislation that effectively strip the power held by local councils to craft locally sensitive zoning, building and heritage-protection policies. Like its other big ploy -- the privatization of the energy industry -- it will doubtless benefit Labor's buddies and benefactors at the Big End of Town, as it's called here.

-and yesterday Australians were celebrating, in a grim way, the news that they had become the heavyweight champions of the world. That is, Oz has the most fat/obese people per capita in the world. It's hard to imagine that the USA has fallen to second place, but then we don't spend much time in the suburbs where the problem is said to lie (and occasionally get up and go to the fridge).