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In a week when the highest rating Australian stories on the ´óÏó´«Ã½ News website concerned those snakes on that Qantas plane (I plead guilty, I filed on that one) and something about wombat toilet paper (not guilty), I'm glad that we did that piece on race, and that it generated so much comment. (not that raising the comment hit-rate was the intention, Anonymous Californian - if you really want to light the touch-paper, you mention Olympic medal tables and run links from the sports pages.)

Much as I love blogging, I willingly accept there's a superficiality about them, and they're not the ideal place to discuss such a sensitive and complex topic. But they're one of the few ways we have of soliciting your views, and on a subject like this I really think they are worth canvassing.

Whitlamite notes that 'no consensus has been reached [and] no credible conclusions made', which is true, of course. But the same applies to any other thread on any other blog. That seems to be an unfair standard to apply to any form of journalism, from the 500 word blog to the 5000 word essay to the full-blown studio debate.

Inevitably, these kind of discussions are also going to be impressionistic and feeling- rather than fact-driven. As PaulCrossleyiii notes, 'I don't really know how you'd measure racism.' For that reason, anecdotal evidence (like Robert's encounter in that supermarket in Brisbane to Britontour's experience in that Melbourne museum) can be just as valid as cold statistics. International comparisons are also historically and culturally fraught, as a number of you pointed out.

For all that, there's one fact that is worth restating, and it's this: almost half of all Australians were either born overseas or had a parent born in another country. Certainly, this often comes as a surprise to many people living outside of Australia, and perhaps many living here, as well.

As for the latest 'official' take on racism in Australia, it is worth taking a look at most recent findings from the Australian Human Rights Commission, which you can access .

On the question of the parameters of the debate, and whether it should take in the indigenous experience, my sense is that it is unavoidable. Is not discussing racism in Australia without raising the legacy of white settlement akin to discussing race relations in the United States without considering the modern-day impact of slavery or segregation? These are not parallel debates, it seems to me, but inexorably entwined.

Here are a couple more observations, for what they are worth. I thought that when I came to Australia I would spend much more time reporting on race relations than has actually been the case. I arrived a year after the Cronulla riots, when the Howard government's proposals for a citizenship test had clearly stoked a good deal of resentment, especially among Lebanese Australians, many of whom believed it was a manifestation of a creeping 'Islamophobia' in Australia society that had been fuelled by 9/11 and the Bali bombings.

Two years ago, for instance, I regularly find myself reporting from Lakemba in Sydney, the home to many Lebanese Australians. But race-related stories have fallen down the news agenda, which probably reflects our shifting preoccupations and an easing of tensions. In recent weeks, for instance, the biggest headline to come from Lakemba was that it has just been named as Sydney's best suburb for property investment, which is perhaps indicative of how our news priorities have changed.

Certainly, the tendency right now is to assess the state of the nation by looking at its economic health rather than its communal relations.

Has there been an easing of racial tensions since Cronulla? I suspect there probably has been, whether it is because of the efforts of local community groups (Surf Life-Saving Australia successfully recruited a number of Lebanese Australia surf life-savers, for instance), the widespread public revulsion at the scenes of violence there, or the failure of groups like the Australia First Party to establish any kind of political foothold in places like Cronulla.

Many would doubtless argue that a change of government has also played a part. I suspect that if we had had this discussion two years back, the debate would have been far more heated and anguished. Over to you.......

PS: Fast on the heels of the women who paid for a new tattoo with her cash hand-out from the government comes - the man who spent it on a .44 calibre revolver.

Economic indicator of the week: Kevin Rudd has finally used the R-word, and said that the Australian economy will go into recession.

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