On his US trip Mr Howard met President Clinton to put Australia's case for the US to ease its unfair restriction on importing Australian lamb. President Clinton more or less told Mr Howard to sod off and then dumped him at the front gate of the White House to face the rain and the reporters alone.

This is typical US behaviour in all economic issues. The world's most powerful nation is only interested in increasing its wealth at all costs.

Following the perfidy and hypocrisy of the US over the issue of lamb trade, now would be a good time to address a far more important trade and cultural issue.

For decades the mighty US marketing juggernaut has swamped Australia with American films, TV, videos, music, and more recently, computer games.

The US entertainment industry sucks billions from our economy, while sowing the seeds of our cultural destruction. US pop culture brings us violence, greed, lawlessness and disrespect for others. Movies and videos glamorize extreme violence. Rap songs preach murder, rape, promiscuity and lawlessness. Video games encourage youngsters to blow their enemies to pieces. An Australian child, on average, has witnessed 15,000 movie and TV murders by the age of 15. Is it any wonder we are becoming an increasingly violent society? Over 1000 studies have linked TV and movie violence to aggressive behaviour in children and adults.

I suggest the Federal government would do all Australians an enormous favour if it had the courage to implement the following policies:

1. The Commonwealth Censor's function to be re-defined to give a cultural rating to all movies, TV programmes, computer games and songs, from all sources, by way of a points system. Each product to be rated according to its culturally destructive aspects, i.e. the more anti-social the more points.
2. The points to be translated into a cultural levy (tax) to be applied to that product. If the material was not anti-social there would be no points and no levy.
3. The funds raised from the anti-culture tax to be given to the Australian entertainment industry to promote positive-culture productions by Australian artists and companies.

This policy will not ban the material and drive it underground. It only seeks to charge the multi-national marketing machines a heavy premium for the privilege of flogging their culturally destructive material - 18 July 1999