Author Tom Keneally recently observed: "Gallipoli has an almost mystic place in our minds . . . in 1901 we managed to federate a country the size of London to Moscow. But it's almost as if creating a nation peacefully wasn't good enough for us. So we transferred this identity from Federation, which was quite a triumph, to the Dardanelles."

Ken Inglis, the author of Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, pointed out Anzac had become a "secular religion" for Australians.

Maybe this is why the Anzac Centenary Advisory Board, now overseeing commemoration planning, strikes such ecclesiastic tone to explain its determination "to ensure that the Anzac centenary is marked in a way that captures the spirit and reverence it so deserves and that the baton of remembrance is passed on to this and future generations".

Some Australian spending ($32m to upgrade the first world war galleries at the Australian War Memorial) mirrors that in the UK (£35 million on London's Imperial War Museum). But a fundamental of Australia's commemoration is the $100,000 that Labor granted to each of the 150 federal electorates for community commemoration projects.

A spokesman for Senator Michael Ronaldson, who holds the newly-created portfolio of minister assisting the prime minister for the centenary of Anzac, confirmed that, consistent with its election pledge, the Coalition will increase that amount by $25,000 per electorate "to support grassroots commemorative activities to ensure that all Australians, no matter where they live, can participate in this important period of national commemoration".

The spokesman confirmed the Abbott government will meet all of Labor's centenary spending and programme commitments.

"The Coalition has given a commitment to ensure the centenary of Anzac commemorations are the success they must be . . . We will maintain those projects which have been budgeted and announced by the previous government."

The auditors may sigh at how the $18.75m on electorate-by-electorate spending will be reconciled. But proposals on how to spend it are already well advanced in some electorates.

Australia's centenary spending will include: $8.1m on restoring memorials and graves; $6.1m on an Anzac interpretive centre; $3.4m on an Anzac community portal to share Anzac stories; $4.7m on an Anzac arts and culture fund; $14.4m on overseas commemoration services; $2.8m on a televised re-enactment of the first troop ships to sail from Albany in Western Australia; $10m on an Anzac centenary travelling exhibition and $10.4m to support the work of the Anzac centenary advisory board.

It's an awful lot of money.

But then again, it is a very complex story to tell.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/14/australia-anzac-legend-centenary-war

Only the Aussies can turn a defeat into a glorious remembrance...

The independent senator Nick Xenophon will hold a summit on the international surveillance scandal and the activities of the US National Security Agency in Australia, accusing the major parties of “sleepwalking” on an issue causing outrage around the world.

Xenophon has been pressing the government to disclose the extent of surveillance of phone and email records by Australian security agencies, possibly working with the NSA.

Leaks from the former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden showed the US-led electronic surveillance operation had harvested address books from Gmail, Facebook, Hotmail and Yahoo accounts around the world, including Australia.

Asked about the revelations, a spokeswoman for the attorney general, Senator George Brandis, would say only: “All communication interception activities carried out by Australian agencies are conducted in accordance with Australian law."

The French newspaper Le Monde has published new revelations from Snowden suggesting the NSA has been intercepting French phone traffic on what it termed "a massive scale".

The White House conceded on Monday that revelations about how its intelligence agencies have intercepted enormous amounts of French phone traffic raised "legitimate questions for our friends and allies".

The US National Security Agency has spied on French diplomats in Washington and at the UN, according to the latest claims in Le Monde newspaper.

NSA internal memos obtained by Le Monde detailed the use of a sophisticated surveillance programme, known as Genie.

US spies allegedly hacked foreign networks, introducing the spyware into the software, routers and firewalls of millions of machines.

It comes a day after claims the NSA tapped millions of phones in France.

The details in the latest Le Monde article are based on leaks from ex-intelligence analyst Edward Snowden, through Glen Greenwald, the outgoing Guardian journalist, who is feeding the material from Brazil, says the BBC's Christian Fraser in Paris.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-24628947

Millions of webcam conversations were intercepted by spies, including many that involved nudity

BRITISH intelligence agents, assisted by their American counterparts, intercepted millions of private webcam conversations between people not suspected of any crime.

The latest revelations from documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden published by The Guardian yesterday reveal that between 2008 and 2010, the UK intelligence agency GCHQ conducted a wide-ranging programme called Operation Optic Nerve to collect images from Yahoo webcam chats "whether individual users were an intelligence target or not".

In a six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency intercepted images from 1.8 million people, many of which contained sexually explicit material. The agency came to recognise the collection of such images as a problem.

One document said: "Unfortunately... it would appear that a surprising number of people use webcam conversations to show intimate parts of their body to the other person."