- Yet, after spending a month in Australia - our first visit - my wife, Penny, said: "If I was young, this is where I'd want to be."

- If, in Britain, you are struggling to afford your lifestyle; sick of our dank, wet winter; dismayed by urban squalor and creaking public services; if you want to become part of a society that is more interested in where it is going than in looking back over its shoulder, then Australia has a huge amount to offer.

- Australian politics is chronically corrupt. Mortgage-holders are suffering the same pain and fear - as in Britain - that they will struggle to cope with rising borrowing costs on their homes. Drugs are as serious a blight among the young as everywhere else in the world.

- We did not expect to find every woman looking like Nicole Kidman, but we never anticipated the plague of obesity. This supposedly sunny and sporty nation is one of the most overweight in the world - worse than Britain. Everywhere, there are vast, grotesquely waddling women and men with stomachs almost chafing their sandals. There is amazingly little beautiful humankind. The whole nation needs to lose two stone, fast.

- But, in the eyes of a spoilt Londoner, there is an inescapable provincialism reflected in the Australian media's cheap chippiness about any foreign comment on their country

- We seem much less confident of our future than they are. Though Australia is now dominated by immigrants it appears much less divided than Britain, because most newcomers want to become real Australians, rather than mere economic campers."