SYDNEY LETTER: Remember those anti-nuclear iodine pills we got in the post in Ireland last year? Well, the Australian version just arrived in the mail here - the anti-terrorism fridge magnet.
So there it is on the fridge, beside the pizza coupons, calendar-magnet and a stick-on Sesame Street character (Elmo).
With the magnet came a book- let with the theme of "Be alert, but not alarmed" and "Keep an eye out for anything suspicious".
There is also a letter from the Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, warning us to be vigilant.
A national security hotline has been open for almost two months now. Operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week, it is capable of handling up to 2,000 calls an hour, 336,000 calls a week. It gets an average of 16 calls an hour.
Many of these are hoaxes, such as the student who phoned from Perth saying that a group of radical Muslim Aboriginals were going to set off a bomb there.
The campaign has been supported through television and radio ads in the Australian government's $15 million terrorism public information programme. The latest economic calculations reveal that this is just a fraction of the possible overall cost. It is estimated that a drawn- out war in Iraq could cost Australia up to $115 billion.
So is the sense of paranoia better reflected in what the government is doing or in how many calls are made to the hotline? Well, let's just say that working on the 15th floor of a skyscraper beside the Harbour Bridge for the last week caused no major discomfort - apart from when I was informed that the building used to be called World Trade Centre, Sydney.
Recent anti-war protests throughout Australia drew over half a million people, half of them in the biggest demonstration in Sydney since the Vietnam war.
Yet these are numbers the government seems willing to ignore. Mr Howard, a man whose every political instinct reaches for the light of populism, said: "I don't know that you can measure public opinion just by the number of people who turn up to demonstrations."
The Prime Minister infuriated many when he later said: "I don't think the mob, to use that vernacular, has quite made up its mind and it can't really make up its mind until we know what all the alternatives are."
One academic says the commit- ment of troops has made Australia the fourth most likely country to be targeted by terrorists. Mr Clive Williams, director of Terrorism Studies at the Australian National University, told a security conference that Australia's involvement in a war in Iraq "will inevitably increase our profile and I'm pretty sure that Bin Laden will quite quickly seize on the fact that we are one of the three countries that are combatants".
The national airline is a potential target, according to Mr Williams. "Clearly where a brand is identified with Australia, like Qantas for example, I think the level of threat to those sort of businesses will be higher."
Mr Howard later returned to the issue of the protesters, saying they "give comfort" to Saddam Hussein.
"We are all accountable for the actions we take," Mr Howard said, "and people who demonstrate and give comfort to Saddam Hussein must understand that and must realise that it's a factor in making it that much more difficult to get united world opinion on this issue."
The Labor Party leader, Mr Simon Crean, described Mr Howard's comments as a disgrace.
"The prime minister is question- ing the loyalty of more than a half a million mums and dads who marched for peace around Australia last weekend," he said.
In Byron Bay, 13 hours north of Sydney, 750 women all stripped naked and formed a heart shape around the words "No War".
The minor political parties have also gotten involved. The Greens have called for a referendum on whether Australia should take part in a war in Iraq. The One Nation anti-immigration party has been playing the race card in campaigning for the forthcoming New South Wales state election.
One Nation has stoked up anti- Muslim sentiment in one constituency by sending out leaflets suggesting that a mosque could be built on local land. In fact that particular plot of land is not even for sale, but One Nation has never let the facts get in its way.
Those bastions of protest politics, students, have not been slow about getting involved in the anti- war movement, even at a financial cost. Student newspaper editors at Sydney's University of Technol- ogy are leading a boycott of ads for army reserve recruitment.
Australia is also not immune to that great indicator of troubled times, the Marian apparition.
In Sydney, thousands of people are going to Coogee Beach every day where a vision of Mary is said to appear from a fence, while a statue of Mary in Perth is said to be weeping an oily substance.
The louts who firstly painted the Coogee fence black and then knocked it down have only succeeded in drawing more people to have a look though. The local council immediately rebuilt and repainted it anyway.
These are strange days indeed in Australia.