Foreign Correspondent

In China they’re setting blistering speed records. From the go-fast, rich kids quickly amassing stables of super-cars to the developers building sky-scraping hotels – start to finish – in just 14 days. One local rich list estimates China has almost a million millionaires, 600 billionaires and the numbers keep growing at a staggering rate. Private jets are flying out of showroom hangers at mach 1. The economic transformation of China has been electrifying, but with Europe teetering and the U.S. plodding can the biggest tiger of all keep on roaring? The super-rich you’ll meet in our 2012 return certainly think so.

If Europe’s going down the gurgler why are the good burghers of Bavaria singing, dancing, laughing and toasting their good fortune over a litre of beer or six? Well, they have a secret. They even have a word for it that only Germans really understand. It’s called Mittelstand and it's made many of the businesses in this uber enterprising part of the world solid, successful, optimistic and fearlessly forging into the future. Germans have another word for how that makes them feel about the many of their basket-case neighbours in Europe: Schadenfreude – a kind of delicious pleasure at the misfortune of others. If only they didn’t have to prop them up.

They’re two women from utterly different worlds so what do a seasoned Australian television producer and a 19 year old student from Kabul, Afghanistan have in common. It’s a shared hope for the ascendency of female rights, aspiration and opportunity in one of the most dangerous and oppressive places on earth. The outsider is shaping some of the country’s TV drama, tackling confronting issues that challenge the orthodoxy. The teenager is boldly fighting violence in the street and at home. It’s a massive battle against an age old order but don’t discount her – Noorjahan Akbar isn’t about to take a backward step.

There’s a new resident moving into America’s cities and suburbs, peeking over backyard fences and casting a shadow over shopping malls. Some folks are being right neighbourly and are welcoming the new arrival. But many more are fretting about how the stranger might dramatically impact their safe and peaceful suburban lives. It’s setting neighbour against neighbour and dividing communities. Honey, meet the Frackers.

If life’s two certainties are death and taxes then who blinks first in a face-off between God and The Taxman? Italians are buckling up for very bumpy, very bleak ride into economic gloom and doomdom but many are asking if everyone’s paying their way - particularly the very wealthy. The Catholic Church for instance. As a get-tough Government doles out some harsh medicine, it has at least signalled the Church may need to toss a lot more into the collection plate. But will it come to pass?

Bird flu is already aggressively lethal so why did laboratory researchers engineer a super strain that can be contracted far more easily, just like normal flu? It’s a question that has provoked raging arguments within the scientific community and provoked an extraordinary reaction from security agencies worried about the prospect of bio-terrorism. At the moment there’s a tense truce between the camps but inevitably the research projects will publish their work. Some experts also believe it’s only a matter of time before the bug itself leaves the lab and goes to work on a very unprepared world.

Have visa, will travel. Sounds simple, but until now, it just wasn’t that easy for journalists to visit one of Asia’s most fascinating and under-reported countries. Now Burma has lifted the curtain and the ABC’s South East Asia correspondent Zoe Daniel and her crew have been able to travel widely and openly there for the first time, talking to ordinary Burmese and showing the rest of us what this beautiful place looks like. It’s still early days for the reform process and no-one really understands why the changes are happening, but one thing seems clear – Burma will be the next hot spot on the tourist trail.

Foreign Correspondent was born in 1992 in a rusting tin shed at the ABC television studios at Gore Hill on Sydney’s North Shore. Glamorous, sophisticated, cutting edge – it wasn’t. At least the program aspired to all those things and it succeeded brilliantly, delivering memorable insights into international events and issues through the eyes of people who were directly involved. It looked wonderful. Great storytelling, beautiful cinematography and fine editing became trademarks of the show. Surviving 20 years in the cut-throat business of television is an outstanding achievement. The job of creating Foreign Correspondent was entrusted to Jonathan Holmes, these days best known to ABC audiences as the smiling assassin of journalistic frauds and failures on Media Watch. Back then he was a Four Corners veteran. Holmes recalls, ”I’d been asked to come up with an hour program about foreign affairs using the ABC’s bureaux and that was really the only brief that I had. So we came up with a format. The other decision we had to make was to find someone who could present the program, who would really put it on the map. I think that George Negus was my idea, I’m pretty sure it was. And we we’re thrilled when he when he accepted.”

Q&A host Tony Jones looks back on his time as a Foreign Correspondent reporting on the Bosnian-Serb conflict in Sarajevo and across the former Yugoslavia.