Paul Sheehan in the SMH is expounding on how we are the root of all evil:
Canberra is lush right now. The trees are high, the vegetation thick, the birdlife dense and from those trees comes a beautiful wall of sound – black cicadas, in great numbers. “Black princes”, we called them as kids. Australia has created a green capital, the nation’s only major inland city, with 350,000 people, a very comfortable city. But what lies beneath the greenery is increasingly worrisome.
It’s not just the city’s shockingly lacklustre public architecture, which itself represents a poverty of imagination. This has been a terrible year for Canberra, as expressed in the reputation of the federal public service and the very idea that Canberra should be an imperial power within Australia, constantly expanding its reach into the rest of the nation.
Sadly I think he might have a point.