Perhaps OLO and other blogs can take some credit for newpapers going online and interactive. That's a pretty big change in the last decade. I couldn't give a damn about religion but I'm interested in energy and climate issues. Re which OLO is noted for giving a lot of time to GW deniers or quibblers. To be fair it has also pricked some green fantasies such as the limits of wind power.

I wonder however if a lot a change is going unnoticed. A physical principle (le Chatelier) is that systems tend to absorb shocks. For example if you put pressure on steam some of it condenses to ease the pressure. Thus motorists responded to oil price shocks by driving less. The question is whether the round of shocks in the next decade will be as easy to absorb as the last lot. If not tumultuous change could be on the way.

Graham Young says:

".... OLO was first and foremost an eDemocracy initiative.
.
.

The potential that we saw in the Internet was to make it easier for voters to talk to each other and to those who form, influence and administer policy, as well as to politicians. We thought that it would provide a venue where the whole resources of the community could be brought to bear on common problems when and as they arose. We thought it could add to social capital by increasing civility and understanding.

It hasn’t done that over the last ten years, and my fear is that in the next ten it will actually tend to raise global "nervous anxiety" by increasing the speed of dissemination of ideas and undermining the institutions, like newspapers, that used to provide checks on what found its way into the public domain."

Give it time Graham. There is a thing called inertia, the tendency for a body at rest or in motion to continue in that state unless acted upon by an external force. The body politic is, perhaps, no exception to this law.

Earlier in the article Graham said:

".... But what I do think we will see in the next ten years is the continuing growth of Independents. This will be as a result of the decline in the standard of candidate selected by the major parties, as well as the network opportunities offered by the Internet. ...."

Surely its important to explore the reasons for the decline in the standard of candidates endorsed by the major parties, as the prognosticated emergence of more independents is not an automatic guarantee, in itself, of better representation?

I think I detect some undue pessimism in Graham's expressed fears of OLO "[raising] global 'nervous anxiety' by increasing speed of dissemination ...". That doesn't seem to be what Twitter, which OLO is now on, promotes.

Perhaps if OLO was also able to run articles under the userID anonimity of registered users, conditional upon such articles otherwise meeting necessary standards, there might come to be an added dimension to OLO eDemocracy.

Graham ,Fair go,
"Modern Societies run on Trust ".

Half the world was stupid enough to believe the lies that emanated from our trustworthy [yeah right] Intelligence Sources and allies in the Middle East and our corrupted politicians.
These lies plunged Iraq into a Holocaust that has killed hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraquis,men ,women and children and also thousands of our soldiers that were told that Sadam had to go along with his weapons of Mass Destruction.

Deception by your trustworthy politicians of the West's citizens led to horrific results.

Our top bankers and economists sit at the tables of our esteemed democratically elected politicians nodding their heads .

Do your give them your trust ?

I will have a look at the thoughts of GetUp and feel quite comfortable about it.

OLO is to be congratulated for airing a truely diverse range of opinion - or at least sufficiently diverse that at one point the left-green bloc complained (unjustly) that it was biased. Not all the articles were in line with the green-PC orthodoxy! Well down OLO!

Graham, us wheat cockies felt there was something wrong when our Dalwallinu bank manager supported GET BIG or GET OUT economics now way back in the late 1970s.

The bankers even encouraged reasonably comfortable smallholders to sell out to larger neighbours heavy in debt.

Surprise surprise also, was that while grain prices were still slowly going down, land prices jumped from 35 dollars per acre to 300 dollars within seven years.

As one born in 1921 and going on nine in 1930, I can clearly remember the terrible finish to the Roaring Twenties and the end of terms like Making Hay while the Sun Shines, or the ones more profane like the end of the Rip Sh't or Bust years.

Some oldies now blame John Howard and Costello for encouraging the boom in land prices with profits still low, but certainly Australia was only a tiny portion of a lending mania by Western banks so deadly sure of a better and brighter future.

Though I do enjoy OLO, Graham, the one thing that upsets me is still the tendency for right-wingers to pooh pooh academia, making one wonder sometimes where they get their info' from, which still seems to support a system that has got us into the economic mess we are now in.

Regards, BB, WA.

Curmudgeon, if OLO ran regular pieces arguing that the earth is flat and that HIV doesn't cause AIDS, interspersed rarely with arguments to the contrary, you might think there was some bias involved, too. Unless, of course, the extreme views held by a miniscule minority fit nicely with your political ideology, in which case it would seem perfectly fair and balanced.

Happy anniversary to OLO and all who write and post here.

Happy OLO Anniversay Graham and Susan

In the 4 years I've been commenting on OLO and writing the occasional article, I've noticed that readers are now much more well disposed to discussion of national security issues (security AND defence). Their views are more sophisticated and tolerant.

Even when people rubbish my views I respect them if they argue their side well and keep on topic.

OLO provides an invaluable and instant communications service to expose and sometimes anticipate how Government's abuse the public and in doing so abuse security/defence employee's. This has occurred through such episodes as:

- invasion of Iraq/WMDs
- immigration concentration camps
- Tampa
- Children Overboard
- Haneef and
- Fitzgibbon's Silk/Smokescreen.

Any mention of ASIO or Federal Police four years ago used to bring on accusations of sundry shirtlifting - an opportunity for tired uni slogans about fascist gumshoes.

But the arrests that resulted from Operation Pendennis http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2005/s1500743.htm in November 2005 persuaded many people that there was some need for security. See also http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24350617-28737,00.html .

Howard probably then went overboard amplifying balanced threat assessments for his own political advantage.

The Haneef Affair in 2007 certainly exposed Howard's scare/electoral tactics.

Both sides of politics will continue to criticise, use and abuse security and intelligence bodies for cynical politicals ends.

It is up to OLO to keep the politicians honest, to walk where the mainstream media fears to tread, while critically monitoring the activities of security and defence bodies.

Regards

Peter Coates
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/author.asp?id=4452

Graham and crew,

Ten years eh? It seems like just yesterday. The diversity in contribution over the years is awesome.

Many many magazines over similar time spans simply become to be seen as more of 'the same old stuff'. That is something that cannot be said of OLO.

Well done and congratulations.

Thankyou for the privilege of participation.

...... Continued,

That said Graham, congratulations on the 10 Years of OLO and your team's effort in keeping it going .

It's ease of access is good , the subjects and writers interesting ,while the often opposing positions expressed, liven our thought processes up as they make us question our own argument.

Congratulations and thanks to Graham and Susan for your initiative in starting OLO and your continuing efforts to make it the interesting forum that it is.

Graham, as a member of GetUp! I think your confidence in this organisation is misplaced.

I have lost no opportunity to suggest to GetUp! that it should lobby for an enquiry into the loss of SIEVX.

Nothing has ever happened. I've never even had a response to my messages.

10 years!!??

As a relative newcomer may I offer my heartiest congratulations and most profound thanks to Graham et al

Yes, I'll add my Birthday congratulations to Graham, Susan and their team. I think that OLO is the most interesting Australian forum, and I think that this is largely a product of the approach that Graham describes:

<< We wanted a journal where anyone, no matter what their philosophy, could publish, believing that robust debate is the best way of dealing with wrong beliefs. >>

That's why I participate here far more than any other blog or forum - nowhere else does there seem to be such a range of opinions, beliefs, knowledge and experience. Of course this produces debates that range from the robust and intelligent to the boofheaded and ignorant, but I also think that Graham's editorial style and practice are pretty finely attuned to his readership. While I've occasionally fallen foul of his standards and we're obviously poles apart politically, I truly respect Graham's approach to debate and commentary, which is as fair as I've seen.

Yes, here's to the next ten years. I'm not sure that anything much is achieved here, but I certainly enjoy the exposure to a wide range of articles and discussions about them, by and with whom people I wouldn't otherwise encounter. I'm not all that optimistic about "e-Democracy", but I've always thought that any communication is preferable to none at all.

Cheers, to the OLO crew and everybody that publishes, comments and lurks here :)

Congratulations Graham. OLO has made a difference and for the better.

Congratulations Graham. I'm a fairly new poster and also contribute to your surveys of electoral opinion. By the way, unlike Taswegian (first blog comment), I *am* interested in religion and the heat that Peter Sellick’s articles generate!

I was interested in your call for Kevin Rudd to pay more attention to "the countries that will make the most difference to us in the longer term – India, Russia and Brazil." Of these, Russia is, to me, the most intriguing, not least because I speak and teach its language, history, culture and literature.

After the fall of communism, the Huntington thesis posited - I think correctly - that future conflicts would be between "civilizations". You can't understand Russia's position on anything without recognizing that it is not part of western civilization, but Orthodox and a product of its Eurasian geography and history.

After the fall of communism, the Yeltsin decade was a shocking period of economic decline and loss of national standing and pride. Putin arrested that and by 2007 the country's GDP finally recovered to what it had been in 1989. An amazing statistic: 18 years of economic growth lost - although a large loss was unavoidable in ending the command economy. Now, the country is rattling the sabre of past empire again, and 'democracy' is much less attractive than social stability, economic growth and national pride.

Russia has vast natural resources and enormous territorial expanse. It needs to arrest its serious demographic decline (population falling by 750,000 a year) but in the long term it cannot be ignored. In the medium term, it will worry the West most over its foreign policy recalcitrance, based on its totally different perception of interest - Eurasian versus "Atlantic" - and its bearish behaviour toward near neighbours like Georgia (old empire) and Ukraine (historic heartland).

Russia still has a fairly primitive, resource-export-based economy, without the sophisticated services sector that Australia, an otherwise comparable country, has.

But when Russian capitalism starts to mature and become more diverse and sophisticated, there will be no limit to Russia's future economic importance.

Well written and well done OLO and GY thanks for a great forum and I hope to see some of that next ten years.
Worth noting in this thread and at least another questions are raised by a few about others ability to think.
That ideas they do not share are wrong, the great unwashed majority type of thing.
OLO proves all views and opinions have value, right or wrong may lay on either side.
Future? we tread on soft ground in trying to harness it but the Senate may not even exist in ten years, a full election held now may well see no independents hold a seat.
Bill Shorten will hold a much higher position in ten years.

Let me add to the list of OLO congratulations. Great forum - warts and all. I only wish I had the time to contribute more.

Thank you Graham for the freedom of speech that you encourage on OLO. The range of views covered demonstrate that you have a wide cross section of the community participating. Some (like myself)have strong direct opinions while others try hard to back every opinion up with what they call science (although it is usually a worldview). The forum has certainly helped me in expanding my mind. The forum allows for people like myself who aren't academics to have a say. Cheers.

Happy birthday OLO and congratulations to Graham and Susan for an exceptional achievement.

Your approach has encouraged a huge breadth of viewpoint and experience to be shared in public to the betterment of Australia and the world. As a contributor of articles I have seen my thoughts reach mass circulation as other media took notice. Participating in the forum has sometimes changed my attitudes, values and ideas.

Associating with you has been a great privilege and pleasure. Please continue your wonderful efforts!

Stephen Crabbe

Thanks for all the good wishes. The article was not really written as a paean to OLO, so I left lots of people out. Susan Prior, as some of you noted, didn't get a guernsey. Neither did Hugh Brown, who was editor before Susan, and our first employee. Then there are people like Brian Johns and Peter Baume, who believed in us very early on. And Leonie Kramer, who secured Sydney University's original involvement. Simon Carlisle, our first chair and Assistant Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Sydney Uni, who kicked in the university's original sponsorship, and Anne Forster who kept it running a while longer.

Then there is Michael Kelly, from Church Resources, our second chair and an enthusiastic supporter, and Nicholas Gruen our current chair.

Our board also includes Peter Jonson (Henry Thornton), Greg Barns, Dale Spender. Special mention has to be made of Terry Flew, who has been a great supporter and responsible for the QUT link. Peter Spearritt brought in the Brisbane Institute. Editorial board members like Helen O'Neil and Tom Worthington have more than pulled their weight, as has Kathy Sullivan.

We also got early and continuing support from Kerry Jones and David Flint. Chris Sidoti also gave a lot of support.

Greg Hallam and the LGAQ have also been great supporters.

This starts to get invidious. In 300 words I could leave a few out. So I should perhaps leave it there, until my memory is jogged again.

Thanks to everyone, named, or unnamed.