It seems that to rise to eminence in politics one must endure disappointment and failure. This is particularly true for a political leader. One cannot become a good leader without suffering “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” as says Hamlet in his famous monologue.

Italy and Australia have many things in common that many people, including government representatives, are unaware of. To begin with, they are together with Canada, the youngest nations of the western world. Italy became a sovereign state in 1861 and Australia in 1901.

The Tyranny of Distance is an expression used by the eminent Australian scholar, Geoffrey Blainey, as the title of a book he wrote some forty years ago and has since become a classic of Australia’s social history. The book argues that geographical isolation was a crucial factor in shaping the destiny of this country.

Migration has always occurred in human history as a result of what can be described as either a ‘push’ or ‘pull’ movement of people. If one considers the great shifts to or from the Western world, the first happened across the 4th and 5th century after Christ and it was a ‘push’, with hordes of people invading the Roman Empire and eventually causing its fall.

Europe, or rather what is left of it, seems to have reached a live-or-die situation. It was pushed into it from both within and without, and the two are connected. From inside, it is smitten by the radicalization of its Muslim inhabitants and the loss of the core structures of its society: the family, marriage, the Christian faith, and all the values based on those things.