I’ve been lucky in my career. In the early days I worked on farms, in factories, built stages for bands and roamed the outback as a shot firer for a seismic team in WA and Queensland.

I’ve worked as a journalist and in PR and in senior roles for a Prime Minister, three senators and a state opposition leader. I also worked at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and Adelaide and in Labour Market Strategy for the APS in Canberra.

I’ve started two successful businesses but I’m slowing down now. I’m a fairly good judge of character.

Do I have any regrets in my career? Only one.

Taking the role of program leader and manager of the creative and professional writing programs at RMIT in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. It was a horror story.

The students were great. They were inquisitive, ‘bolshie’ and some even got published. I enjoyed teaching them and in that marvellous symbiotic way, they taught me too. I also taught political communication, organisational communication and Australian political history in another school.

Arthur Clover, David Astle, Delia Falconer and Susan Johnson were first class professionals, but many of the other teachers were passive aggressive and psychic prisoners of group think.

They were so unprofessional and institutionalised, any change was a threat. They slandered me, each other and the students behind their backs.

I’d joined a social club of spineless, dysfunctional retards.

I sometimes get old staff from the writing programs snooping over this blog.

My advice to them is simple.

Fuck off.