I wonder about whether these people were as serious as they have been made to appear. The Fifth Columnists. It was certainly an unfashionable position to hold in 1942 - to celebrate the actions of the Japanese as true patriots.

Did Graeme Campbell understand when he echoed their name and established the Australia First Party in 1996 that they intensely hated the British and admired the Japanese? Perhaps he should find another name.

We sit around for hours together, night after night, plotting the overthrow of our government. Some of us even know, crudely, how it works and how we might sabotage it. We are incensed, horrified, desperate at the rapid slide back. This government has no redeeming qualities. Racist. Lacking in humanity. Corrupt. If we were to be infiltated by intelligence forces, would we, too, be charged with something? Treason. Something under the Security Act?

In 1998 in Perth, Western Australia, an eighteen year old boy dies in custody after being brutalised for weeks by prison officers, this hands and feet shackled, a mask used for his face. They beat it out of him and he killed himself. This information lands on our laps as a front-page story in the weekend papers at the start of February. An inquiry will follow, but the sketched-out facts are mind-blowing. This boy is not accorded the respect that you might have imagined any life held.