In pre-internet 1980s Australia, maintaining long-distance relationships in real time was so expensive that for expats like me the decade’s most memorable movie line was not ‘I’ll be back’, or ‘Greed is good’, or even ‘That’s not a knife’. No, the 1980s Hollywood hero with whom I identified most closely was neither good-looking nor tough and, come to think of it, only had three lines. But the one he is best remembered for had a special poignancy for every expat. At a time when getting a detailed answer to the question ‘How are you, mum?’ took three weeks and depended on the cooperation of two mail services, at least one airline and who knows how many trade unions, which of us did not heave a sigh each time that glowing fingertip pointed shakily to the heavens as its owner croaked a plaintive desire to ‘Phone home’?

The phones we use today allow us to observe the ageing of distant parents in weekly rather than quarterly increments. And for the price of a postage stamp we can pester globe-trotting offspring as often as we like. So since the Collins diaspora is now established on three continents, I’m more conscious of time differences than I’ve ever been. And this has also made me more conscious of Australia’s susceptibility to the effects of SPATZIP, or the Societal Progress and Time Zone Inversion Principle, the central plank of which is that the number of hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time a country happens to be is equal to the number of years it has fallen behind on stuff that matters.

How else to explain our leaders’ continued subscription to beliefs which have now been largely discredited in most other Western democracies?  Why else would we have been so slow to follow the lead of much of Europe and the US in reducing or abandoning our net zero commitments? Why else would we still be so invested in what most of those other countries now know to be the busted flush of multiculturalism?  How else can we justify a defence budget which sees China being no more committed to regional hegemony today than it was in 1990? And why else, when almost every other Western country uses Australian uranium to boil its kettles, are we still so scared of using it ourselves?

To those who say that SPATZIP’s influence is confined to politics I need only point in the direction of Giggle v. Tickle. By ruling in favour of the latter, the presiding Federal Court judge showed that trans rights can still trump women’s rights in Australia. A ruling which explicitly contradicts the landmark decision three years ago in the highest court of the legal system Australia’s is based on, not to mention many similar rulings in the US, where the notion of gender as a social construct has long since been kicked officially to the kerb. But an Australian judge would not have taken such a regressive trans rights position without knowing he or she spoke for many in the Australian medical establishment. The depressing truth is that nowhere are the deleterious effects of SPATZIP more conspicuous than in our hospitals, where three years after the publication of the Cass Review in the UK, a worrying number of clinicians and administrators still seem completely ignorant of it, just as many continue to endorse our state and federal governments’ Luddite view that vaping tobacco is as bad for your health as smoking it.

But there is one area of Australian healthcare which, for a long time now, has been not just dragging its heels but actually going backwards. If you think the current diphtheria outbreak in the Northern Territory and Western Australia is an isolated anachronism, you have not been paying attention. The embarrassing truth is that for many years now our remote indigenous communities have also been decimated by tuberculosis, rheumatic heart (aka scarlet) fever and scabies – all diseases which in most other Western countries are no more than a bad post-war memory.

As a post-war child in England my first impressions of Australia were created by a TV show called The Magic Boomerang, the beguiling premise of which was that whenever the eponymous boomerang was thrown, time stood still for everyone except the little boy who’d thrown it. Before it was exported, the show was almost as popular with Aussie kids as the iconic Skippy. But given the baleful influence of SPATZIP in so many areas of modern Australian life, it’s tempting to conclude that the impression which The Magic Boomerang made on some of those 1960s children – a young Anthony Albanese amongst them – was the more enduring.