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Is Kevin Rudd the new Bob Hawke? Certainly, the stratospheric approval ratings invite comparisons, if not their wildly different personalities. The 'Silver Bodgie,' Australia's longest ever serving Labor Prime Minister, drank like a dehydrated fish, swore like a truckie, and claimed that he could bank his weekly salary because he enjoyed so much success at the races.

By contrast, Kevin Rudd admits to having been been drunk on only three occasions in his life, and when he swears in public.

Hawke was messy, sweeping, chaotic and charismatic - an Australian Bill Clinton, if you like. Kevin Rudd is detailed, precise and devoid of much passion. Bob Hawke spoke fluent Aussie. Kevin Rudd expresses himself in bullet points, acronyms and, on occasions, impressive Mandarin.

But if the polls are to be believed, they can lay claim to being Australia's most popular prime ministers in polling history. At his height, Hawke could boast a Bradmanesque approval rating of 75%. Rudd has just scored a 74% rating, with voters by his handling of the economic slowdown and the Victorian wildfires.

For all their differences, I suspect that one key similarity might explain their shared popularity. Hawke was politically cautious, governed from the centre and did not get too far in front of Australian public opinion. The same is true of Rudd.

Consider this quote, for example. 'I don't think in Australia we are going to be able to dramatically change things. We are a very conservative country. And you have to move within the constraints of what the nation's economic performance will allow.' Were these words uttered by Rudd or by Hawke? Actually, it was Bob Hawke speaking before he became prime minister, when he was determined to avoid what he considered the reformist over-reach of the Whitlam years.

So aside from a major restructuring and opening up of the Australian economy, the Hawke government did not pursue an ambitious reform agenda on education, health, indigenous affairs or the Republic. 'Hawke is not out to change Australia,' wrote the journalist Craig McGregor at the time, 'he simply wants it to work more efficiently.' Again, could not the same be said of Kevin Rudd?

I like this quote from McGregor: 'No country in the world but Australia could produce a leader like Bob Hawke. In a way he sums up the best, and the worst, of us.' Again, this is where Hawke and Rudd diverge.

But although they were very different Australians, they essentially had same sense of their fellow Australians and the constraints that public opinion imposed upon their terms in office. Therein lies the root of their political success.

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The over-reach of an overbearing nanny state or a sensible approach to cyber safety?

The violation of Australia's long-held tradition of freedom of speech or a well-intentioned attempt to protect vulnerable children?

More evidence of a creeping social conservatism in Australian public life or a timely acknowledgement that the darkest corners of the worldwide web should not be free from government scrutiny and regulation?

The debate over whether the Rudd government should be allowed to filter the internet - or create what critics are calling the "Great Firewall of Australia" - highlights all sorts of ideological, ethical, legal, religious and political questions.

It has also intensified following the publication of what the Wikileaks website has claimed is the list of the 2,400 internet addresses which the Rudd government intends to put on the blacklist.

Many of the addresses are for child pornography. But the list also includes a school cafeteria consultancy firm, online poker parlours and a dental office, which was once hacked in to so that users would be directed to an online adult site.

The government has denied that the list is the same as a blacklist run by the Australian Communications and Media Authority, but that has not eased the fears of online civil liberties groups. Secrecy continues to surround the blacklist.

For all the ongoing arguments about censorship and the encroachment of the state, the question of whether to introduce a filter may ultimately be settled on practical and technological grounds: in short, the workability of the filter.

Here, there are two central issues: first, would the filter be able to block illegal material; and second, what impact would it have on the speed of the internet - the technical term is network degradation.

The government has conducted laboratory trials on various filtering technology, which showed 2% network degradation with the top performing filter product, and over 75% with two others.

Even with the most efficient filter, internet campaigners say there is a tendency to "overblock", thus restricting legal sites which have, say, high ratios of skin colour to texts.

Then there's the question of whether the filters will be effective.

In the laboratory trials, the best performing filtering product scored 97%. Internet experts say filters will not impact peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing networks, which are one of the main ways in which illegal material, like child pornography, gets sent around the world.

To bring you right up to speed, the Rudd government is hoping still to run field trials of the filter, and has signed up a number of internet providers to conduct them. Some of the ISPs have agreed to take part in the trials to demonstrate the unworkability of the filter.

With the country battling to stave off recession and given the importance now of e-commerce, the Rudd government might be reluctant to introduce a filter which the critics say would undermine Australia's international competitiveness and have a detrimental impact on productivity. So its plans for an internet filter might ultimately become yet another victim of the global financial crisis.

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We feel the hand of Australian political history hovering over our shoulder as we approach this weekend's state elections in Queensland, where Anna Bligh is seeking to become the first woman ever to be elected as a state premier. True, there have been other female state premiers before - in Victoria and Western Australia - but, like Anna Bligh, they inherited their jobs from male predecessors, rather than winning a mandate of their own.

Both her female forerunners - Carmen Lawrence in Western Australia and Joan Kirner in Victoria - were defeated in their first elections as premier. Anna Bligh is hoping to avoid the hat-trick.

Although Labor has won three consecutive victories, Queensland is arguably Australia's most conservative state - this was the home, of course, of the arch conservative, Sir Johannes "Joh" Bjelke-Petersen, who was the state's premier from 1968 to 1987.

So she has not sought to attach any feminist or crusading meaning to her candidacy. The Queensland election is not a referendum on her gender.

Instead, she is trying to stress her economic credentials in an election where the slowdown in the once-booming mining sector has cast a long shadow over the sunshine state. She called the election early, probably in the anticipation that the economy would get worse, and with it the voter backlash.

She faces a united opposition - the Liberals and the Nationals have merged in Queensland to form a new party - and the polls are close. But the newly-formed LNP led by Lawrence Springborg needs to gain 18 seats - which is a big ask.

Of course, another Queensland female politician has been in the headlines: Pauline Hanson, the former leader of the One Nation party, who is trying to mount yet another political comeback. Other, more gossipy, have attached themselves to her candidacy, but the more interesting one is what explains her decline?

A decade ago, her anti-Asian immigration One Nation party won over a tenth of the seats in the Queensland Legislative Assembly. Now she is widely seen as something of a comic figure, a minor celebrity who tried to foxtrot her way back into the limelight on Dancing with the Stars

The former federal MP for Oxley certainly became easy to lampoon when she asked an interviewer to 'please explain' after being accused of being xenophobic. She did not understand the word. After that, she became tagged as the 'Oxley Moron.' Many people thought her shrill and extreme, especially after her maiden speech in parliament in September 1996 when she claimed that Australia was 'in danger of being swamped by Asians' (although the switchboard at Parliament House received an unusually high number of calls with people asking for copies of her speech).

Another view is that as Hanson self-imploded, the Liberal and National Party started to inherit or claw back many of the disaffected voters who had started voting for One Nation. The Howard government took a tough line on immigration (though not as tough as Hanson), which carried appeal for some former One Nation voters. Pauline Hanson claimed to be speaking on behalf of what Robert Menzies called 'the forgotten people.' Under this argument, John Howard gave these 'battlers' more of a voice and a greater say.

Many of you will have lived through the Hanson phenomenon. I would love to hear your thoughts.

UPDATE: After double-checking the last blog with immigration officials before publication, I checked again. It is correct. For other ways into Australia, I would urge anyone with concerns to contact a reputable immigration agent or the Australian immigration authorities.

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So the reverberations of Australia's economic slowdown are to be felt 10,000 miles away in Britain, among the bricklayers, carpenters, plumbers and other people with trades who had considered heading down under to ride out the global financial crisis.

During the boom times, when skills shortages were the main brake on Australia's fast-paced growth, UK and other foreign skilled workers were targeted by successive Aussie governments.

Now, with unemployment reaching a near four-year high, they are being told they are surplus to requirements. The government says that Australian workers should not have to compete with their foreign counterparts.

The announcement obviously confirms what we have known since before Christmas: that Australia does not offer a safe haven from the worldwide downturn.

It is the first time in a decade that immigration has been cut - the skilled migration programme intake will be reduced from 133,500 to 115,000 - a 14% reduction.

Bricklayers, plumbers, welders, carpenters and metal fitters are no longer required, but Australia still needs doctors, nurses, engineers and IT specialists. You can read the .

The changes come into immediate effect. If your application is pending then it will no longer be considered. If you are already in Australia, and have a skilled working visa it is still valid. If your visa is about to expire then your best hope of staying in Australia, I'm told by the Department of Immigration, is to seek sponsorship from your present employer. The Department can provide more specific information.

Immigration policy has long occupied a central place in Australian political life. After Federation, the Australian parliament's first piece of legislation was the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, which became the cornerstone of the White Australia policy.

Net overseas migration has increased massively over the past 15 years or so, from 30,000 in 1992-93 to over 175,000 in 2006-7.

And although the former prime minister, John Howard, prospered politically by sounding tough on immigration - back during the "Tampa election" of 2001 when he famously commented: "We will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances under which they come" - the number of new arrivals showed a big increase during his 11 years in office.

Cutting immigration will likely prove a popular move from the Rudd government, and has already been welcomed by the unions.

To disappointed Brits, the Australians could point to the recent actions of the Brown government which placed new restrictions on professionals from India and other non-EU countries.

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It is with good reason that Australia is often called the "frozen continent" - a reference to the micro-climate of conservatism that surrounds its constitution.

It is over 30 years since the constitution was last amended, the longest that it has gone without revision, and there are many legal scholars and lawyers who believe that it is in urgent need of an overhaul.

Yet as George Williams of the University of New South Wales has put it, the country's preoccupation with renovation "stops at the front door", and is not extended to its constitutional arrangements.

The last change to the constitution amounted to little more than a bit of house-keeping or spring cleaning: a referendum which set, among other things, a retirement age of 70 for High Court judges.

It is against this backdrop that the push for an Australian bill of rights or human rights act has to be considered.

Back in the December, the Rudd government announced a process of national consultation on human rights - a team is presently touring the country canvassing opinions which

On Thursday, Amnesty International brought out a survey showing that 81% of Australians support a human rights act, which would bring it into line with every other Western, common law democracy, and offer a legal safety net.

Many supporters of a bill of rights think it should come about as an act of parliament rather than be put to a referendum, which are notoriously difficult to pass. The Labor Party has had a singular lack of success in advancing constitutional change, and has not won support for a single referendum since 1946.

Under the constitution, a successful referendum needs absolute majorities in the House of Representatives and Senate, and a "yes" vote from a majority of the people in a majority of the states. As this blog has noted before, only eight out of 44 referenda have been successful.

So why this constitutional conservatism?

There's the argument that rights for white Australians, at least, came early, fairly easily and largely without bloodshed. There is not the tradition of struggle for democratic rights in Australia which characterised the European and American experience.

By 1860, all non-indigenous adult males had been given the vote in Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, and New South Wales. By contrast, it was not until 1918 that Britain caught up, by eliminating property qualifications.

Similarly, Australia granted women the vote in 1902, more than a quarter of a century before the UK.

Supporters of the bill of rights or human rights act want Australians to reclaim this spirit of democratic adventure, but have also been forced to accept there is no rousing tradition of democratic struggle which they can draw upon to help propel their campaign.

Michael Coper of the Australian National University has suggested that this constitutional sluggishness is partly due to the contrariness of the Australian people, and can be traced back to the country's convict origins.

(I should add here, perhaps, that there was a Bryant on the First Fleet who hailed from the Cotswolds, not far from my West Country home). Australians love saying "no", says Coper.

Others would argue it has more to do with modern Australia's conservatism and complacency - what Alfred Deakin, Australia's first attorney general and its second prime minister, called "the inexhaustible inertia of our populace".

On that note, the Amnesty International survey revealed that 84% of respondents thought that their rights were adequately protected already.

Human rights is such a lively area for legal, ethical and constitutional debate - whether it be the treatment of asylum seekers, terror suspects or Aboriginal Australians.

Is it time to spell out precisely what those rights are with an Australian bill of rights or human rights act?

UPDATES:
Staying with human rights, the Rudd government has announced it will reverse one of the contentious aspects of the Northern Territory intervention, by reinstating the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act, one of the landmark reforms of the Whitlam era.

Thanks for all your lively contributions to the great Australian character debate, and apologies for breaking my no animal story doctrine to cover the frisky kangaroo story from Canberra earlier this week (in my defence, I did think that three shark attacks in and around Sydney in three weeks was genuinely newsworthy).

I can now confirm the change in the southern seasons. It's not the nip in the air or the turn of the leaves falling gently from the trees. Instead, we are seeing that other great autumnal staple: the sight of rugby league players on the front pages of the newspapers as well as the back.

And lest I be accused of only writing about the bad things about Australian cricket, Ricky Ponting's men secured an impressive series victory in South Africa this week, helped by the new Boy Wonder of Aussie cricket, the exceptionable Phillip Hughes.

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Just when you thought it was safe to return to the shopping centre, the Australian economy experiences a quarter of negative growth for the first time since the turn of the century.

On Tuesday, there had been optimistic soundings from the Reserve Bank of Australia, which justified its decision not to lower interest rates any further because the Aussie economy had not "experienced the sort of large contraction seen elsewhere.'' Twenty-four hours later, the Australian Bureau of Statistics confirmed that during the December quarter GDP dipped by 0.5% - its first contraction since December 2000.

Technically speaking, of course, Australia is not in recession. The country has not experienced two quarters of consecutive negative growth. But most Australians do not care for such linguistic and statistical niceties and distinctions. So for all the hope that China's continued growth would offer a wall of protection, Australia now appears almost certain to go into recession.

During the early 1990s, when Australia lived through its last downturn, the former Prime Minister Paul Keating famously said this was "the recession we had to have" - largely because it ended the period of soaring inflation and the stratospheric interest rates needed to combat them.

This, though, will be the recession that his Labor successor, Kevin Rudd, hoped desperately to avoid.

Certainly, the Treasurer, Wayne Swann, had set great store in what he helped dub the "socks and jocks" bounce. In one of those upbeat assessments that tend to haunt Treasurers and Chancellors of the Exchequer, he cited that spending on socks and underwear was a key element of a spike in retail spending in December and January, as low income earners spent their cash hand-outs from the government. But only last week, Pacific Brands, which owns the famous undies brand, Bonds, announced the closure of its Australian factories, and with it the loss of 1,850 jobs.

It is always dangerous to mix talk of stimulus packages with underwear, and Mr Swann's analysis was left looking rather threadbare. You can get his reaction to today's GDP figures .

As this blog optimistically noted, Australia was sitting fairly pretty back in September after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Its banks were strictly regulated and did not require bail-outs, there wasn't much of an Aussie sub-prime market to speak of, its government was cashed up because of the resources boom and China's growth still looked robust.

In six disorientating months, the resources boom has ended, the government has gone into deficit, and you don't need to be fluent in Mandarin to realise that China is experiencing a slowdown.

After surviving the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the 2000 dot.com bubble, Australia had hoped to complete the impressive hat-trick of not being forced into recession by the Global Financial Crisis. But given the turmoil elsewhere, this seems to be the recession that it could not avoid.

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To swim or not to swim, that is the question. Certainly, in and around Sydney in as many weeks have lodged doubts in a few Sydneysiders' minds. "Shark attacks leave city in fear," screamed Sydney's The Daily Telegraph this morning. A tabloid touch of poetic license, perhaps, but it may be on to something.

I happened to be at a Stag event - or buck's party, as they are called here - on Saturday afternoon, which started in the surf at Bondi. It's the kind of event where normally there would be no shortage of beer-fuelled bravado or dare-devil Dutch courage on display, but when someone suggested a headland-to-headland ocean swim there weren't many takers.

By strange coincidence, my mate's bride-to-be started her hen event with a surf at Avalon, on Sydney's northern beaches. It was there, early on Sunday morning, that a shark attacked a 15 year-old boy. The teenager suffered severe lacerations to his upper thigh, and might have been in an even more serious condition had it not been for the presence - and presence of mind - of his father, a gold medallion surf lifesaver, who immediately applied a tourniquet to his son's bleeding leg.

Not long after dawn this morning, I went down to Bondi to see if anyone had been put off by the latest attack, which came a fortnight after a mauling at Australia's most iconic beach, the first in 80 years. But the surf life-savers reckoned there were just as many people in the water as normal. One swimmer told me he was more worried about the blue bottles, while another suggested there was more to fear from the loutish "red lobsters" - the drunken British and Irish backpackers. Sure enough, a little way down the beach a few of my compatriots presented themselves in a somewhat tired and emotional state, having consumed a six-pack of stubbies for breakfast. The real sharks, said another, were at Bondi Junction, a shopping centre up the hill.

One surfer said he had once seen a shark, and added with classic Australian understatement: "Ah....it makes you get out of the water pretty fast." Perhaps that feeds into the lively discussion below by giving us another insight into the Australian character.

What is behind this wave of attacks? Some experts say that the cleaner waters in and around Sydney - particular in the harbour - have attracted more fish and with them more sharks. But Professor Ross Coleman of the University of Sydney reckons we have witnessed a "statistical anomaly".

"You're probably something like 200 times more likely to suffer a car accident on the way to the beach than being bitten by a shark," he says. Shark numbers are actually in decline, which is why they are a protected species, and they don't target humans per se. They not only rely on chemicals in the water and electrical pulses to identify their prey, but also taste. "You're not going to know its food unless you try and taste it," says Professor Coleman. "So often these animals aren't trying to eat a human or aren't trying to eat a surfer. They're seeing whether this is potential food or not."

I've learnt a bit about shark nets over the past couple of weeks. They're meant as a deterrent rather than a shark-proof barrier, and the aim to disrupt the sharks and to prevent them from staking out territory. Obviously, they don't stretch all the away along the coast, but most beaches have them and they're regularly moved to keep the sharks on their toes, or the anatomically correct version of that.

So a simple question: would you venture into the waters?

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