The year is ending badly with the death of a long-serving industry veteran

The year is ending badly with the death of a long-serving industry veteran and a former colleague. It was shock news to hear that Glenn Daniel has passed on at the age of 60 after recent major heart surgery. I'm sitting here today wondering how come I'm still up and about at the age of 84? It doesn't seem right.

I knew of Glenn originally as a high-profile journalist at WS FM. We worked together briefly when he switched to 2 DAY FM, where he took over as ND. I only knew him for a short time but he seemed to be a really decent bloke.

His career reached a peak in the last decade when he co-hosted the Breakfast show on SMOOTH FM, one of the major FM success stories of recent times. The tributes have been rolling in for "a beautiful soul" and "a guiding light". It's my understanding that Glenn had just signed a new contract with SMOOTH when fate decided to step in. It seems fitting that we can salute Glenn's career with the final survey for 2021, which saw the SMOOTH FM breakfast team come home with a nice half-a-percent increase. He was a winner right up to the end. Overall 2GB held on to a solid lead, ahead of ABC and WS FM. The News-Talkers lost a little ground while the music formats on FM picked up fractionally in the latest survey.

We've just battled our way through yet another "Climate Change" Conference where the world it seems is divided between two opposing sides... On the one hand those who believe Earth is going to self-destruct around 2050 and those who regard climate change scientists as being one step left of 1950's used car salesmen. It's hard to find middle ground but my opinion is roughly summed up by the view that ANY POLICY AIMED AT GIVING US CLEANER AIR, LESS POLLUTED WATER AND NON—POISONOUS SOIL CAN HARDLY BE WRONG. I know... the critical trick is how we get there.

I do keep having this recurring dream these days: we're driving down to the beach and alongside the road for 100's of K's are these giant wind turbines... relentless giant windmills turning and turning. "Never mind," we say to the kids, "it won't be long and we'll be down by the beach and it'll all be worthwhile." And then we're there and we jump out of the car and plunge our toes into the sand. We Look up to the sea and there they are in front us - as far as the eye can see out across the water... those giant wind turbines, turning relentlessly, unstoppable. And as I write this, I'm wondering how long do these massive turbines last… 40 to 50 years? And what happens to them when they finally fall over? Does somebody come and cart them away or do they just lie there forever? And when we convert all of our homes to solar and our cars to electric, where does all the lithium come from to power all these batteries? And what happens to them when they die - do they just stack them up somewhere alongside the broken turbines?

Nor can I look you in the eye and argue that India and China will turn-off their coal-fired power stations on the stroke of 2050... more like 2080 really. And does anybody expect Europe to switch-off its oil and gas pipelines from Russia in 30 years time? Especially as they've only just commissioned a massive, 1200-kilometre gas pipeline under the Baltic. What if Europe is facing an arctic-style freeze, threatening the lives of 10's of thousands of vulnerable citizens? Do we seriously think the Europeans will just turn the gas off and let them die?

We're just about to head into another Australia Day, an ideal time to ask what is this place Australia and how best can it be organised to serve its citizenry? Allow me to hand over to Sir Edmund Barton, our first Prime Minister:

"The very heart of liberalism in this country was a belief in Australia, in Australians and what the Australian people can achieve when government permits them to strive after the things they value, rather than trying to impose some political ideology on to them."

Everybody on Earth knows that men and women are completely different... like, really, really different, but we're no longer allowed to say that publicly. These days the prevailing code of social conduct demands that we all acknowledge that men and women behave identically. We're completely the same. Fortunately, this political correctness hasn't filtered down to our novelists or movie/TV screenwriters. They're still free to depict the behaviour of males and females exactly as they've seen and recorded it for thousands of years. Let me introduce you to an absolutely delightful scene from the British TV crime masterpiece, UNFORGOTTEN, written by Chris Lang.

Cassie is the female lead Detective and is shown heading for the crime scene, followed by her assistant, a male Detective called Sunny. He is a single father, complaining about the bizarre behaviour of his two teenage daughters the previous night.

Sunny: "You're a woman, aren't you?"
Cassie: "Apparently."
Sunny: "What is it with girls crying - for absolutely no reason?"
Cassie: "Which one?"
Sunny: "Gem, till 1 in the bloody morning!"
Cassie: "I cried last week - with my dad."
Sunny: "Why?"
Cassie: "Don't know really - I just felt like it."
Sunny: "What did he do?"
Cassie: "Gave me a hug."
Sunny: "And that made you feel better?"
Cassie: "Not Really - No."

(UNFORGOTTEN. Series 1, Ep. 4)