Australia is often a good place to observe the workings of political agency. There is a blatancy here, in the connection between cause and consequence, and the alacrity with which sectional interests exploit procedures, that is both appalling and, in a perverse kind of a way, simultaneously appealing. Political parties and business lobbies seem to feel little compulsion to concealment: there is not the sense of layers of subtlety having to be peeled back to reveal what is ‘really going on’, that one might encounter in Washington, say, or London, Paris, Delhi or Jakarta.