When the great majority of people voted for either of the two main parties, that was a defensible position.
Cable believes the coalition, after some false starts, has landed on a defensible policy that amounts to a graduate contribution based on the ability to pay.
Security measures including gates and internal doors elicited a similar response, with residents illustrating that "defensible space" can increase fear of strangers.
SBD has its roots in the idea of "defensible space", created by the American architect and town planner Oscar Newman in the early 1970s, as a result of research he carried out in three deprived New York housing projects.
Both in the US and in Britain the idea of defensible space was very popular because it provided a simple solution: rather than engaging with complex social relations as the underlying causes of crime, SBD promoted the idea that environmental design was the biggest influence on behaviour.
Related: Malcolm Turnbull denies influencing SBS sacking of Scott McIntyre for Anzac tweets Whether you think McIntyre's comments about Anzac Day were factually and historically defensible, compare them with the comments about Indigenous Australians that landed Andrew Bolt in the dock.
Today, SBD is based on a combination of defensible space ideas and the purchase of security products, strongly backed by the insurance industry, which provides lower premiums for properties with SBD.
So far, so defensible, but he then made a show of signing a pledge not to raise fees during the election – only to revert now to his prior position that abolition would be a mistake.
But while this is certainly a more defensible position than breathless technophilia, or the blithe stories of triumphally self-regulating urban ecosystems the vendors themselves peddle, I happen to believe this is not the case.
"Unless you can deal with these social and political issues then any kind of geoengineering would be unviable anyway – or at least any remotely ethically defensible version would be unviable".
All of which may be defensible in terms of FoI law.
