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Australia lives with a strange contradiction - our national image of ourselves is one of the Outback, and yet nearly all us live in big cities. Move outside the coastal fringe, and Australia can feel like a foreign country.

But Australia faces additional regional and global challenges also crucial to our nation's future - climate change, questions of energy and food security, the rise of China and the rise of India. And we need a strong system of global and regional relationships and institutions to underpin stability.

It's beyond belief that any Australian could be so stupid as to carry drugs into any country in Asia.

Ironically, I find it harder to get a foothold in Australia than I do in the U.S. When I was in Australia, I struggled. It can be a bit of a closed shop; it can be hard for a newcomer to break in, whereas in the U.S., it has much more of an open-door policy, and they will give anyone a shot.

Australians have a free spirit and an ability to think outside the box, and that is why I like Australia so much.

There isn't a lot of work in Australia. I think that's why everyone comes over to America to find jobs and pilots and things, because there's not enough work to justify staying there, unfortunately. Like, I wish there was. I would love to stay home and be working with my family around the corner, but the work just isn't there.

America has given me everything Australia couldn't. I grew up on a dairy farm. Now I live in Isleworth, a gated community in Orlando with Tiger Woods down the street.

I wonder if it is Australia's great distance from more populated land masses that allows its inhabitants to be left to their own devices, to be incredibly creative and, at times, to be wonderfully weird.