I have no strong views one way or t'other on the virtues or otherwise of the Brexit. But say what you will, it bespeaks their confidence as a nation to go it alone, and that confidence is admirable.
Meantime, here in Australia, well over a century after Federation, we are seen to be lacking confidence to go it alone, to run our own show, and are still pathetically clinging on to Mother Britain's skirts, even as Mother Britain races to the exits. 
It is time to end this farce. Both personally, and as chair of the Australian Republican Movement, I note there will never be a better time to have a Constitution that reflects reality: we are our own people, forging our own destiny, and we need our own head of state.
The Brits have turned their back on the EU, and good luck to them. But the EU is our second biggest trading partner. As ever, Australia's interests are different from Great Britain. We need a head of state who is one of us, to help steer that course!
Shorten shows dexterity
Who saw Bill Shorten being interviewed by Leigh Sales on 7.30 on Thursday evening? The host took some heat afterwards on social media for being too aggressive but, for what it's worth, I thought she did a great job going after the Opposition Leader on the Medicare scare campaign.
For 15 minutes she pursued him, refusing to be fobbed off, coming at him from every angle and trying to corner him into the admission that the ALP was ramping up the whole thing on Medicare because it is doing so well out of it - without actually believing the LNP plans to dismantle it at all.
And Shorten, in turn, was remarkable for the dexterity and calm with which he parried every thrust. Nothing rattled him, and when even Alan Jones acknowledges on 2GB radio that "Shorten has run rings around the Coalition in this campaign", you'd have to think this bloke has more in him as a politician than most of us gave him credit for.
But is it still a scare campaign, with little actual substance to it? I do believe so. Just as I believe the Coalition is ramping up its own scare campaign - with no substance - that, if Shorten is elected, our distant horizons will suddenly fill with asylum seekers, heading our way.
Unbelievable
We all know that America is filled with gun-nuts, that the National Rifle Association is the most powerful lobby group in the country and all the rest, but sometimes, well, sometimes they still manage to take your breath away.
This week, the US Senate rejected four proposals to tighten the nation's gun laws.
Two of the proposals was directed, get this, at "restricting suspected terrorists' access to guns and strengthening the background-check system." Rejected!
Ex-PM's profound words
And speaking of readers, one of them is my friend, the erstwhile opposition leader John Brogden, now chief executive of the Australian Institute of Company Directors - who this week sent me a copy of the best and most evocative speech I've ever read, delivered by a prime minister not known for his oratory.
It was delivered just after World War II by local orchardist and former RAAF Flight Lieutenant John Grey Gorton on behalf of local returned men at a welcome home dinner in a community hall, in Kerang, rural Victoria.
"We did not go to war to make a new and better world," Gorton said.
"We cannot expect to make a new and better world as the result of the exercise of brute military force. We can only expect to achieve the kind of world we want by the use of brains and effort during peace."
When he spoke of the only local man killed in action, his oratory went to new heights: "I want you to forget it is I who am standing here. And I want you to see instead [the late] Bob Davey. And behind him I want you to see an army; regiment on regiment of young men, dead. They say to you, burning in tanks and aeroplanes, drowning in submarines, shattered and broken by high explosive shells, we gave the last full measure of devotion."
Google it. Seriously moving and poignant.
Joke of the week
I had a dream the other night. I was in the old west riding in a stagecoach. Suddenly, a man riding a horse pulls up to the left side, and a riderless horse pulls up on the right.
The man pulls open the door, and jumps off his horse into the stagecoach. Then he opens the door on the other side and jumps onto the other horse.
Just before he rides off, I yell out, "What was all that about?"
"Nothing!" he replies. "It's just a stage I'm going through."