May I share with you my earliest memory of a political row? It was with my mother about the Queen - classic Freudian stuff shrinks would say. I was eight and refusing to watch the Queen's Christmas Day broadcast.

If you do not feel yourself growing in your work and your life broadening and deepening if your task is not a perpetual tonic to you you have not found your place.

If to live is to progress if you are lucky from foolishness to wisdom then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

You must learn day by day year by year to broaden your horizon. The more things you love the more you are interested in the more you enjoy the more you are indignant about the more you have left when anything happens.

That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka goes and gets educated abroad and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.

My point was that the war was intrinsically wrong and as a result of our participation we haven't improved Australia's security but created a greater danger at home and abroad.

America's veterans and troops serving abroad today fought hard to preserve our red white and blue from the Revolutionary War to today's Global War Against Terrorism and Congress' action today is appropriate for one of our most sacred symbols.

And I believe that public broadcasting has an important trust with the American people it's an intimate medium of television and that we can do reading and language development for young children without getting into human sexuality.

Too often travel instead of broadening the mind merely lengthens the conversation.

Travel instead of broadening the mind often merely lengthens the conversation.