On Australia Day 2010 as we enter this second decade of the 21st century Australians can be optimistic about our future but we cannot afford to mistake optimism for complacency.

Like many other touchstones of twenty-first-century pop culture 'The Sopranos' was hatched in the late Nineties predicting a future that never arrived. It was designed for a decade that would be just like the Nineties except more so in an America that enjoyed seeing itself as smarter and braver and freer than ever before.

If GE's strategy of investment in China is wrong it represents a loss of a billion dollars perhaps a couple of billion dollars. If it is right it is the future of this company for the next century.

The Islam of the 18th 19th and first half of the 20th century was a poor thing. Nobody bothered about it. Islam was that funny sort of pure system of beliefs that depressed people in the Middle East held as their religion.

At the beginning of the new century it is the common aspiration of the peoples of the two countries to deepen mutual understanding enhance trust develop friendship and strengthen cooperation.

Latinos have fought in all of America's wars beginning with the Revolutionary War. Many Latinos are fighting and dying for our country today in Iraq just as several of their ancestors fought for freedom in Mexico over a century ago.

I don't look so closely at women's fashion but from the 20th century on people have had the freedom to express themselves and their individualities and fashion is one of the most fundamental ways in which they do this men and women are equally able to express themselves.

Just as the Security Council was largely irrelevant to the great struggle of the last half of the twentieth century - freedom against Communism - so too it is largely on the sidelines in our contemporary struggles against international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The hope of the nation which throughout the nineteenth century had not for a moment reconciled itself with the loss of independence and fighting for its own freedom fought at the same time for the freedom of other nations.

Let us build a 21st-century rural economy of cutting-edge companies and technologies that lead us to energy and food security. Such an investment will revitalize rural America re-establish our moral leadership on climate security and eliminate our addiction to foreign oil.