National Day of Mourning- Australia, a nation found wanting (Black Saturday bush fire tragedy)

For the last two weeks I have been grieving for the loss of life and suffering here in Victoria, due to the tragic bushfires that struck on February 7th, known as Black Saturday. 209 people have officially died in the fires, although it is thought that the final death count will be well above 300 people.

Many have grieved in this time. Many would ask about God's role in all of this suffering. I know without a doubt that God has been grieving too in this time. God is well acquainted with suffering. God entered this world in a very real and human way. He became a human in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus died a very cruel death, and faced much suffering in the lead up to his death. He suffered for our sake to pay the price for our sin.

God has not been absent in this time of suffering for Victoria. Every time that people have called out a desparate prayer in the last two weeks, he has been near and acting to answer people's prayers. But why did God allow such suffering then? At once this is a complex and simple question. Complex, because suffering is always so hard to understand. It is even hard to understand how Jesus' suffering could be effectual for us, but it is. Simple because there is an explanation, even if it is not pretty. I see the simple explanation as this: Long ago people sinned, and God could not allow sin in his presence; this sin brought decay and death into the world; the planet earth is sick as a result, not all is as it should be. Tragedies and natural disasters occur because the world is sick, it has a disease, suffering is inevitable. This does not mean that God does not care. God does care and has indeed intervened for there to be an end to suffering. That is a complete story in itself, that I have only alluded to here.

But I want to draw the attention to Australia as a nation. There can be no doubting that Australia is a post-Christian country and is far from God. I have a thesis however that Australia (the quintessential working class, descended from the convict spirit Australia) has never really heard the gospel. The church has always been known as a distant authoritarian structure of the upper and eventually some of the middle class. The church has never been something that working class Australia has been able to relate to, nor has the church ever taken the time to relate to working class Australia. So in a sense it is not strange that much of Australia does not have a good relationship with God. In the words of Kenny (recent Australian comedy movie) "if God shows up mate, I will give him my full attention." This could easily be extrapolated that the evangelical church in Australia has taken little time to show up in the culture of working class Australia. There is certainly a large cultural divide there.

It would have been my hope that people would turn to God through the tragedy of the horrifying bush fires that struck two weeks ago. The response of Australian society though has been that "we can and we will rebuild." Don't get me wrong, yes it is good and right to rebuild, but it is not good to have the pride to think we can do this all by ourselves.

I attended the memorial service at the Rod Laver arena yesterday. It was an important opportunity for Australia as a nation to grieve the loss of so many lives. However, there was almost less grieving and pausing than there were affirmations of human strength and our ability to rise above any adversity that strikes us. If we stop for a moment though, we have to remember that some of these fires could not be stopped. We did not have the human strength to stop fires leaping 30 kms in 6 minutes. We were exposed as vulnerable and fragile. We are weak on this planet, and do not have the strength to face every danger.

My heart has been grieving for the last two weeks for the loss of so many lives, and the pain of so many families. God has been grieving too. But yesterday my heart grieved on a deeper level, for a nation without God. God was given only cursory mentions yesterday. No mention was made of the fact that he too has suffered. No mention was made of the fact that he shares our pain in this time. In short, God was not allowed to fully participate and show his love and compassion for us as a nation. God was censored yesterday. But it goes deeper than that.

My wife turned to me during the service and said "what does it take for a nation to turn to God?" What does it take for people to admit that we are weak and that we can not do it without God's help. The over riding religious paradigm yesterday was that we as humans can triumph without God's help. The presence of various religions were there, but they were ALL impotent. None of them actually offered a voice of true hope in God's love. They were found wanting. I found it particularly embarrassing that neither the Catholic or Anglican Archbishops could not actually offer a message of hope. Kevin Rudd himself actually had more positive things to say than them. Of course I expected nothing of the Uniting Church moderator who could not even bother to take the time to mention the name of Jesus (surely their realisation as a humanist liberal religion has come), nor a Buddhist abbess who neither had a message of hope.



I don't actually expect that the nation of Australia would somehow have miraculously fallen on its knees and worshipped God with abandon yesterday. But surely a simple cry of "help!" would have been enough. I actually think that if as a nation yesterday some leaders (any leader, please) had taken the time to simply ask God for help in getting us through this crisis, that something special would have happened. A simple cry of help from the Prime Minister or one of the Archsbishops (even the Buddhist, but that wouldn't be possible as Buddhists are atheists) would have started a transaction with God that would have opened a new day for our nation.

We are found wanting as a nation. Kevin Rudd says that we passed the test, because we have pulled together in unity. But that unity can never be complete until we ask God for help. If we think we can go it alone, then we are found wanting.



The most telling moment for me was an eerie one. In the thick midst of pluralism a young man was called forward to play the Jewish Shofar. A watered down description was given, platitudes about the Jewish new year and a call to prayer were given as an explanation of its purpose. This is inaccurate. The Jewish Shofar is used as a call to Worship. I have played a Jewish Shofar before, and I have gotten a sound from it. It fills the room, with an all encompassing trumpet call that speaks to the deepest depths of our souls. When the young man stood yesterday to blow the Shofar, he tried at least ten times to get a sound from it, but nothing but sputters came. Now I am sure that they would not have asked someone to play it that was unable. At first I thought it was embarrassing that he could not play it. But nobody in the arena (well very few) would have known that he failed to make the Shofar play. I then realised what was happening. The Shofar is a call to worship the LORD. As a nation it would have been a call to worship. It would have been the beginning of the transation of which I spoke. If we had have called on God as a nation for help, then he would have responded by calling on us to worship Him. But we could not call out for help. Sadly, (but I completely understand why) God would not call us to worship either. I fully believe that God did not allow the Shofar to blow. It was eerie. Most people in the arena would have had no idea.

God is not punishing our nation. I don't believe that his time for judgment is now. There will be a time for judgement, but I actually think that God reserves this for the end of our lives. Hebrews 9:27 explains this simply : "Man is destined to die once, and after that to face judgement." God is waiting for our nation to call to Him. He loves us and has compassion for us in our suffering, but he will not force himself upon us, he will wait patiently. Again the question remains, "what will it take for us to turn to God as a nation?" Perhaps war, or economic depression?

Last evening we had a time of prayer and worship back at Kangaroo Ground with some of the other students. We took some time to pray for Australia, a nation without God. As my wife prayed, she admitted that she would like to pray for rain, but that she had a sense that God is even more concerned that Australia would turn to him. There is a very telling promise in scripture, that I think is timely for Australia. It comes from 2 Chronicles 7:14 "If my people who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land." This is a promise of good things, not of punishment. But it will first take humility from Australia, not pride as we have been showing recently. God is waiting and will act when we turn to him.

We have now had 12 years of drought in Victoria. Our water reserves in Victoria are below 30%. The fires have furthered damaged our water catchment areas. We are facing a dire time, of potential water shortage. Water is the essence of physical life. Our spiritual lives as a nation, at least in Victoria are progressively void. In a symbiotic kind of way, the sicker we get spiritually as a nation, the sicker the land gets.

How long will we wait before we turn to God? I hope not too long. The land is getting sicker. What will it take for us to turn to God as a nation? I hope that it will not take more suffering for us to wake up. But I fear we are quite deaf, and that worse tragedies are yet to come, be that economic depression or even war (that seems to follow such trends).

Australia I call on you, turn to your God.

Australia's darkest hour- Black Saturday bushfire tragedy

I have hesitated to write about this because I don't in anyway want to sensationalise this horrible tragedy. Victoria and indeed Australia is in the midst of its worst ever tragedy and national disaster. I have lived in Russia and Canada and at times felt that I was becoming something other than just Australian, but at the moment I feel the pain of being an Australian in a very deep way.

We have had drought for some years now. The land is very parched and dry. Just recently we had the worst heat wave in 100 years. Then to top it off on Saturday we had the highest temperature record for a capital city in Australia at 46.4 C. Where we are living it almost certainly was 48 degrees in the shade. There were high northerly winds of around 80 km/h, basically coming from the desert regions of Australia. With these kinds of conditions it almost inevitable that there will be fires somewhere.

I have grown up with a psyche of bushfires in my mind. I was in grade 3 when the last tragedy struck, the "Ash Wednesday" fires of 1983. But as a city boy, I never really connected. I felt safe. The fires were never going to reach us, deep in suburbia. This was always my subconscious thought through the years. I felt sorry for people who faced bushfires. But in some way they accepted the risk, as part of the location of where they lived.

On Saturday, it was just too hot for us to stay at home. It was too hot to be outside so we did not go to the swimming pool. We drove to the Greensborough library, and funnily enough did some study in the air conditioning. The AC was struggling to keep up, but it was ok. At 5pm we went for pizza at La Porchetta. It was still burning hot. The winds were burning Abigail as we walked from the car to the restaurant, and she really didn't like that. We sat for an hour and a half, relieved in air conditioning again, enjoying a nice meal with gelato. Some 20 kilometres away, people were facing hell.

At 6:30pm we left the restaurant, the air had cooled to about 30 degrees, and there were some drops of rain in the air. Melody looked in the sky and said "is that dust or smoke?" I replied, "oh, I hope it's not bushfires."

We drove back to our home in Kangaroo Ground. At 30 degrees, I was moaning about the "fake cool change." But some 20 minutes drive north of us, people were burning, literally.

It wasn't until I sat down on Facebook, that I noticed someone had written in their status, "I can't believe that 14 have died today in the bushfires. "Oh my goodness" I realised, "something bad has happened".

I turned on the radio that evening as I often do, and it was wall to wall bushfire coverage. Warnings were being given about imminent urgent threats. People had to decide whether to stay and defend their properties, or to leave and flee. By this point the towns of King Lake and Marysville were completely ablaze. People knew that there could be bushfires, but it actually happened so suddenly, that some had no chance of escaping. In the high winds, burning embers covered 30 kilometres in 6 minutes. This was akin to an earthquake. The people caught in the epicentre of the fire were completely stuck.

I stayed awake half the night listening to the radio, and thinking that it wasn't that far from where we lived. I began to connect with people's stories, in a way that I never had when I lived in the city. "This could have been my family" I began to realise. I was terribly confused and starting to feel people's pain.

In the morning before leaving for church, I heard that there was an alert message for Hurstbridge. This meant that they could possibly face fires within a few hours. On Sunday morning the temperature had dropped to 20 degrees and the winds had died down. But the major damage had already been done, and there were many fires still burning. We packed a bag with our computers and passports and a box of photos not yet scanned. (Our lives are so minimal that it was so easy to decide what to take.) We would not return that day until we knew it was safe.

At church, yes we prayed for victims of the fires. But I had this sense that the reality had not really hit. Throughout the day the death toll started to climb. 26, 45, 66, even up to 100. What kind of tragedy had just struck? There was a ring of fires circling Melbourne and many other dangerous fires throughout the state. In the afternoon, we were at my parents, and I was making calls to the CFA and looking at their website trying to understand the situation.

We did return later that evening when it became clear that Kangaroo Ground was safe. There were still and indeed are fires to the north of us. Some of them are becoming contained, and the wind is blowing from the south.

The last couple of days I have been quite shaken. I feel people's pain. I feel like I can hear the cries coming down the road from the north. There are so many people who have lost loved ones. I have felt a deeper love for my own wife and daughter than I have known before as I realise how precious they are and I how blessed I am to have them alive with me. I have found it quite difficult to concentrate on my studies.

The national response has been swift and appropriate. Both the Premier John Brumby and the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd have poured out emotion to people and on tv. They have been fine leaders and I can not fault them at all in how they have handled this tragedy. Kevin Rudd has been hugging people and having them cry on his shoulder. The Aussie "sentimental bloke" (a famous Aussie poem) is alive and well.

The Country Fire Authority made up of volunteers has worked ceaselessly and tirelessly to combat the fires. They are heroes of immense proportion. There have been many personal heroic stories, such as an 18 year old taking a bulldozer through the bush to rescue his trapped family.

Australians band well together in tough times, and this is surely a cultural strength. But it is also a weakness. The effort to help those suffering has been unanimous. People have given a lot of material goods and money. But there is also a temptation to cope with the suffering by getting to work. I am afraid that we will not mourn properly as a nation. I have contacted a key person in the Anglican church to get a message through to the Archbishop, that perhaps we could have a day of mourning for the sufferers. We need to pause and feel their pain. It would be an equal tragedy, if we just got on with our lives and forgot their loss. Up to 300 people are thought to have perished now. The official toll is close to 200.

My hope is that all international people I know would be able to identify with Australia's pain. Please pray for our nation. Please pray for people who have lost loved ones. Please pray that people would find God in their loss.

We are ok, we continue to keep an eye on things. Our biggest concern is for the ones who are victims.

This is truly Australia's darkest hour.

I knew I wasn't out of touch

In recent years I have tried keeping up with modern music and have found it increasingly more difficult to do so. Truthfully I have lacked the desire. I have often wondered if this is because I am aging or because there is nothing of real quality out there. Some would argue that it is because of my age, but I will lay out my case.

Groups like Jet and the White Stripes just don't do it for me. All they are doing is rehashing 60s music. Today's i-generation may not have heard 60s music and so it is new to them, but really it's uncreative. I just asked a 23 year old today what she listens to, and the first thing she mentioned was Michael Franti. "Well" I replied, "I was watching him play when he was "The Disposable heroes of hipropisy," that gained an impressed response from her, and validated my sense of not feeling 'out of it'.

In 2008 the only music I added to my collection was the latest albums from- King's X, Delirious? and Coldplay. In 2007 it was Radiohead (barely listened to In Rainbows), Silverchair (loved Young Modern) and Vineyard UK's "Love Divine." This year I'll add U2's "No line on the horizon" in March, and maybe not much else.

It's not that I don't want to listen to new music. I do. I have enjoyed a bit of Snow Patrol over the last couple of years, some Jack Johnson and some Audioslave. But let's face it, none of them are from the younger generation. Silverchair are probably the only musicians who are younger than me that I listen to. Perhaps the younger generation don't cut, or simply are not mature enough.

Then I stumbled on this short article in yesterdays Herald Sun called "Today's music is dull" by Eleni Hale:

Generation X thinks today's music is rubbish. Baby boomers are angry that songs from their youth are repeatedly ripped off and ruined.

And even Generation Y thinks their parents' music is more meaningful than theirs.

A study into the music views of each generation by McCrindle Research found many believed today's tunes lacked staying power.

More than 50 per cent of 1300 people surveyed said today's artists and their music would be forgotten in a decade.

The study was launched to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the plane crash that killed Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper and Buddy Holly on February 3, 1959.

The crash inspired Don McLean to write the very successful song American Pie.

The study found most Australians, including Gen-Yers, believed songs from the '60s and '70s were more memorable and meaningful than today's music.

Baby boomers said they deplored hearing songs from their youth remade by modern bands - the most hated cover song was Madonna's version of American Pie.

I feel validated. Maybe that is why U2 are still as big as they are. They have no competition. Although I must admit that "All along the watchtower" was the lowest point of the career, which is a good lesson in being creative with your own material instead of trying to rehash old stuff.

Global financial crisis- where has all the money gone?

The global financial crisis has got many thinking. In fact it has many worrying quite a lot. It has got me thinking, but thankfully not worrying. Where did all the money go?
There have been great losses on share markets across the world. This apparently was brought about my financial institutions collapsing due to bad losses on credit. Simply put they lent out too much money, or more accurately lent out money to people who could not repay the loans. These bad debts have triggered the crisis. There is no doubt that the greed of many banks in the US is to blame.

I have always thought of money as a finite resource. I am sure that many have thought the same. But I am coming to change the way I understand that concept. It used to be that a nation would only print as much money as represented the gold that they had in reserve. Back in those times, money was a finite concept. To go even further back in history, people had gold and silver coins, and there were no banks. Of course they could always find more gold in the ground. How things have changed in todays world.

Money is now a relative concept, not finite. It is fitting that such a concept has come about in a post modern world. The house of cards that is the US economy is crashing down. The rest of the world have been attaching our own economies to the US economy, and now the whole thing seems to be crashing down. Recent news reports have said that the global economy has now come to a complete stand still. This means that there is no net economic growth in the world, in fact there are losses, and this is what economic recession is.

But what is economic growth anyway? Well it represents productivity in a society, be that national or global. So there are some tangible things to attach the concept to. On a tangible level we have seen factories closing all over Russia and China. They are no longer productive. (India is still productive and I believe Canada is too.) If there is no product then there is no money. It's a little like if there is no wheat then there is no food for us to eat. Just like there can be a bumper crop of wheat some years, there can also be a bumper crop of money.

A bumper crop of money is when banks reap big dividends. People pay back their loans. Companies post big profits and their value soars. Essentially this means there is more money around to work with. Yes it is true that banks fictitiously create money, but this is only a part of the picture. In today's global economy money needs to be circulated. None of us need to hold on to the money all the time, so it is circulated around for some one else to use. It's a bit like a game of musical chairs. And just recently a whole bunch of chairs have been taken away.

Where did all the money go? Not into the hands of some other person. The money simply disappeared, burned in a fire, got washed away out to sea. Since there is less money to circulate, companies can not afford to pay their staff. This means that productivity goes down. Since there is less money to circulate, people become afraid to spend and then consumer demand drops, so productivity is in essence no longer needed.

Three quarters of Australia's economy depends on consumer spending. I am confident that many other western economies are built on similar principles. If we all spend our money happily then it will circulate and demand for productivity will go up.

Recently Kevin Rudd (Australian prime minister) thinks he knows the solution. He says that it is time to bring an end to traditional capitalism, and that a new age of social capitalism needs to begin. It sounds like a big experiment to me. Somehow I think the SRC School president does not know what he is talking about. Australia's economy is headed for a major deficit and a deep recession. The word depression is not on people's lips yet. But I think that is now a possibility.

Spend your money happily. It may be worth nothing tomorrow anyway.

Cheating in the game of Twenty 20

What the heck are NSW thinking? Brendan Mc Cullum has never played a single game for NSW before, but now they feel they can recruit him for the Twenty 20 final this Saturday. Yes it is true that a state can select one international player, but that was really a rule intended for when a player would stay a whole season, such as Imran Khan and Ian Botham did in the past.
Twenty 20 is still at representative level, but the competition is a little like a league. There is a bluriness between the two at the moment. It is my guess that the rule will change after they are given a big stretch by NSW this week. Still they have gotten away with it this time, and gone against the spirit of the game.

Australia, South Africa and New Zealand are in talks about starting a Twenty 20 Super League in 2011. If all players are available for all of the competition it should be a huge hit. There will be 3 teams from RSA, 3 from Australia and 2 from New Zealand. I am glad that something will finally happen. The stocks in cricket will go up in Australia over the next decade. The Super League may start out small, probably with teams in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, but will undoubtedly expand when there are more media friendly stars known to the public.

When such a league starts NSW can recruit Brendan Mc Cullum, but in the mean time, they are practically cheats.

Vertigo part II..... oops "Get on your boots" (U2 review)

It's that time again, it comes around every four years or so. It's U2 time. I always love the day when the new U2 single comes out. I get a hold of it as soon as possible (in the past that meant waiting to record it on to a tape off the radio; I did this for "The Fly", "Beautiful Day", "Electrical Storm" and "Vertigo") but now it means downloading and putting it on the iPod. Then I proceed to listen to the song 50 times over or so, to the amusement of my wife.

Actually my first listen this time was on U2's website. It disappointed at first, because it just wasn't loud enough on my computer. But as soon as I transferred it to the iPod and plugged into the stereo at full volume, it impressed immediately.

This song is really in exactly the same vein as Vertigo. But hey, Vertigo was a fun song, and the rest of Atomic Bomb was a serious album. Boots, is just as fun a rock song, with a few meaningful lyrics thrown in..... to boot. I sometimes wonder if U2 are the last rock band on the planet when I look at the charts these days. Thank God for 'em, they're keeping it alive, and Boots actually truly does rock, hard and fast. I don't have to explain the music much, just give it a spin, oh I mean a mouse click.

My favourite lyrics at the moment are- "Satan loves a bomb scare, but it won't scare you." It seems to me that Bono is suggesting Satan is behind all those scary things out there in the media a la military and terrorist action. Metaphorically the devil does try to create bombscares in our lives, but with the love of Jesus, he's all talk. This leads me to the chorus- "You don't know how beautiful you are." Immediately this lyric said to me, that God's love for us is much bigger than we can imagine. Bono has found a way to weave God's love and protection into his lyrics once again, in a way that sneaks up on most.

This song itself gives us no indication of what the record "No line on the horizon" will be like. Apparently we are to expect the epic, weird and Arabic style scales in the album. Most U2 albums come with a lot of pre-hype, but still I will be pre-ordering mine. (Otherwise I'll miss out on the bonus tracks).

Rock on!

Can you hold down the Pleiades?

Have a look at these stars for a minute. How beautiful they are, how huge they are. This is the Pleiades constellation. God challenged Job, "can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?" The Psalmist declared of God, "He determines the number of the stars and calls them each by name."
I sat and watched a documentary tonight about the stars. The Milky Way itself is full of hundreds of billions of stars. If each star were counted, 1 per second then it would take 2500 years to count them all. That is how huge our own galaxy is. Yet there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the Universe. How huge is God, that he created all of this? As I sat and watched the documentary and took in some of the numbers and images and realised how small I am, and yet how great God is, things fell back into perspective for me. This amazing and great Creator God loves me and the whole world so much that he gave himself as Jesus on the cross to pay for my awful sin.
His love is so great, he has made me clean. And he is so great that as my life is in his hands I have absolutely nothing to worry about.
Now that's perspective.

Mugabe must go

It's been quite a while since I have talked about Mugabe. Every day he makes me sicker.

Dear Lord, please bring an end to this evil man's regime and do it soon, any way that you must.

Where to start? Thousands are dying daily from cholera now. Eighty percent of the country are in abject poverty. The only people who have any money are his army. Just today he has issued the "trillion dollar banknote" series. If you think that sounds crazy, it was just last week that the billion dollar bank not series was released, but those notes have already lost value.

Recently Mugabe told a gathering of African leaders that he would never give up Zimbabwe, and that he "owns it". We have long suspected that he believes that, but to hear it is the absolute pits. I guess the west is standing by wanting African leaders to do something about him. South Africa have dropped the ball. Jacob Zuma is implicitly to blame. Desmond Tutu has even admitted that South Africa have lost international credibility for doing nothing.

I didn't write on this topic during the last Zimbabwe election, because I hoped beyond hope that Mugabe would step down, but he did not. The power sharing arrangement has been a farce.

I really don't want to write about this again until he is gone, and I pray that is very soon.

Thank you Matty... and goodbye

I said I would be happy when Matthew Hayden retired. Relieved is a more accurate word. I thoroughly enjoyed his career. His career was a brilliant one. It would be fair to say that he was in the top 3 batsmen for Australia over the last two decades along with Ricky Ponting and Steve Waugh. That's a fair call, considering he never captained Australia. So no hard feelings Matty, thanks for all the good times, and thanks for stepping aside to give the young blokes a chance.

Speaking of young blokes the question now falls as to who should fill Hayden's shoes. An obvious choice would be Phil Jaques at 29, going on 30, although that's not very young, but has been the common age of selection for the test side in the recent era. Jaques was the opener who replaced Langer when he retired. He has played 11 test matches for 902 runs with an average of 47 and a high score of 150. These are very dependable figures. Jaques is currently out on injury and has not played much cricket this season.

Katich has played well in recent times and should happily keep his spot. He is 33 now, and probably only has 3 years left in him. But this may be perfect timing for David Warner who will then be 25 to replace him.

Phil Hughes is the exciting option in my estimation. At 20 years of age, he has already played 16 matches for NSW at shield level, with a very handy average of 53.48. Everyone knows that Sheffield Shield cricket in Australia is serious stuff, so his average should count for something. I wonder if the Australian selectors will take a risk and go for youth. I hope they do, but my bet is they will choose Jaques.

There are exciting days ahead for Australian cricket, if the right choices are made.

David Warner than Shane?

Wow, I really enjoyed myself at the MCG last night. I think the award should be changed from "player of the match" to "entertainer of the match." Warner's innings was so entertaining last night, that I have been completely won over to the Twenty20 concept. I am still a test purist at heart, but I have to say that Twenty 20 is ready to take on the world with games last night, that was frankly far more entertaining than any baseball match. Look out America!

I really enjoyed watching an Australian team with so many young players in it. It was right of the selectors to take some risks with their choices. I actually think that the selectors do not yet believe that Twenty 20 cricket counts, and are therefore happy to take risks. For the time being this is good for Australian cricket. It gives young players a chance to show their stuff.

David Warner is 22 years old. He has only plated a handful of games at Twenty 20 and List A level for NSW, but never a first class game. It's obvious that it is too early for him to play in the test side for the simple reason that he has no Shield first class experience. But it's still a shame that he has none, because he would be an exciting opener at test level. Maybe in a couple years time.

Apparently David Warner has already been picked up in the Indian Premier League by the Delhi Devils. This does pose an interesting question. Are we seeing the first of a new generation to specialise in Twenty 20, and never to play test cricket. I certainly hope not, but we will have to see which way the revolution goes.

Last night's Australian team had two test players in it. Ricky Ponting and Michael Hussey both looked like they needn't be there last night. Both were ineffectual with the bat, although Hussey did take a brilliant catch. Shaun Tait has played tests before. It was good to see him warm up again. It was extremely entertaining to see him knock AB De Villiers over at 156 kph and force a hit wicket.

For my brain, I still like to think of the future of the test team. The third test in Sydney and the Twenty 20 last night both give a lot of food for thought. Doug Bollinger and Andrew Mac Donald both had good debuts in Sydney. Peter Siddle is staking his claim for a spot in the side. David Warner has also staked his claim, but perhaps not for a year or two. My only two large disappointments now surround the omission of Jason Krejza and the inclusion of Matthew Hayden. Hayden, I have already talked about. Krejza had a fantastic debut with 12 wickets in India. He was then bowled on the flattest of wickets in Perth, and subsequently left out of the team. He needs to be brought back as quickly as possible. With Johnson, Siddle, Bollinger, Hilfenhaus and Jason Krejza the future of Australian bowling looks bright.

With David Warner's performance last night, the future of Twenty 20 looks hot, and the future of Aussie cricket looks bright too. Is he Warner than Warne?

Next time.... when is Australia getting a Twenty 20 Premier League.