(Above: and more Rowe here).
You take your joys where you find them.
Hits and comments are way up on the pond compared to the grim old days of yore.
Much the same applies to the cartoonists of the land. Are they having fun or what as the magnificent men take to the air and never mind cost of buying a failed fighter from the good ol' USA?
And why is that? Well because we're in the golden days of lead, when the unbelieving mob can't believe their ears and eyes, as daily there's a fresh bout of pure comedy gold.
Take this epic effort by our very own true Brit:
The Graudian must be dancing in the street.
Well over five hundred comments, and counting, for a classic bit of Abbottonian loonacy, Tony Abbott says first fleet arrival is the defining moment in Australian history.
You see how it works? The Pom PM makes a remark and the Pom press makes out like comments bandits ...
Now the pond can't steal the Graudian's thunder - it's a fair and full report - but what was astonishing was the way that Abbott delivered such a wonderful suck on the Murdoch sauce bottle, and sure enough the reptiles took a hearty chomp on the raw prawns:
Mr Abbott said any attempt to nominate a defining moment would be contentious, but recognised the project would help to popularise important episodes in Australia’s history, including, he said, the landing at Gallipoli in 1915 or even the launch of The Australian newspaper in 1964. (First Fleet; Australia's 'defining moment', says Tony Abbott, behind the reptile paywall, because you have to pay big for defining moments).
Yep, there you go, Rupert's rag mentioned in the same breath as Gallipoli, and with nary a hint of shame, unless you count that "even" in "even the launch" as a bizarre form of modesty ...
Look, a man deeply embedded in Australian history, and don't you go worrying about The Bulletin when it comes to reviewing the history of tree killers.
You can Greg Hunt it here, but remember it only ran from 1880 to 2008, and so isn't in the race with Rupert, even if it proudly took the Abbott line:
Sorry, the rag didn't employ Tony Abbott, and so the rag just doesn't count, no matter how PC it is.
This latest effort followed hard on all the fun of the fair that surrounded Team Australia:
With this sort of question: name the missing state:
And then failing the pond for answering "the state of delusion", "the state of hysteria" and "the state of ignorance".
But at least the latest fuss about a Pom PM who's British to his bootstraps has also seen a revival of birtherism in Australia.
Right at the moment doing the Facebook rounds have been all sorts of questions about Tony Abbott being a British colonising invader who isn't really Australian at all here ...
There is no FOI proof that Mr Abbott has renounced his British citizenship. It seems he has stood for parliament on 8 occasions as a dual national, well aware that doing so is in contravention of the constitution. This goes beyond forgetfulness into the realms of possibly intent to defraud the Commonwealth.
Oh indeed, and he's still banging on about the Pommy invasion and how good and right it was... (did he once fly over Kenya, the pond has begun to wonder, on his way down under)...
No doubt there will be indigenous folk coming out of the woodwork upset at Abbott - perhaps Warren Mundine will feel the need to talk to the radio, and hose down Abbott's British to the bootstraps ways ... wait, this just breaking, there he goes ...
It seems the likes of Mundine are simply incapable of understanding that Abbott is the sort of old fashioned British colonialist who just wants to keep on keeping on with his colonial ways and airs ...
Luckily the NLA has the perfect costume on stand by for Abbott when he retires, and the way he's going that'll be soon enough, so it's just as well they're prepared:
Talk about a stinker in hot weather ..
But enough already. Every so often there's an alarming outburst of sanity in certain remote parts of the country which, it has to be said, the pond finds very disturbing and tranquility-threatening.
Like this story:
JOY BURCH, ACT EDUCATION MINISTER: I think there is the potential of 24 counsellors to lose their positions at the end of this year and that just denies support to our students and denies the right to chose what is the best for them.
JOHN STEWART: At Dickson College in Canberra, the school has a secular councillor. The principal says some schools prefer a non-religious staff member to help their students.
KERRIE HEATH, PRINCIPAL, DICKSON COLLEGE (2006): Our community really was committed to finding the person who was absolutely the best fit for our school. And so, we actually have - ended up with someone who is not a chaplain. We have a youth worker in that role at our school. (Lateline, here)
Outrageous stuff. Secularists! A bloody youth worker!
Where will that sort of loose talk end? With Satan stalking the earth? The Empire shut down and turned into a pathetic Commonwealth?
Luckily the Islamics have worked out how to join in the shakedown:
The new funding arraignment is not just for Christian chaplains; other faiths are also included. Some Muslim groups say that having Islamic counsellors in schools in disadvantaged areas will help reduce the risk of young people becoming radicalised.
Yes, hand over your cash or the radicals will get you.
JOHN STEWART: But Silma Ihram says that not all Islamic preachers are suited to the role.
SILMA IHRAM: Well unfortunately a lot of our imams have religious knowledge, but they have very little understanding of the Australian environment. We'd actually like to propose and we're looking at a proposal to organise an appropriate qualification which covers the complete gamut of understanding Australian history and counselling skills, as I said, and women's issues.
Women's issues? What's so hard about a woman learning to walk three paces behind her husband?
And there you have it.
Tony Abbott, while yearning for Britain and empire, and boasting of his Murdochian master's role in history, up there with Gallipoli, is actively circumventing the High Court so he can fund chaplains, and doing it in such a way that he'd rather fund Islamic preachers than dangerous and heretical secularists and youth workers.
How much more weird and wonderful could it get?
And you dared to wonder why the pond and the cartoonists were having such fun standing in it?
Go Team Terra Australis ... and the more terra the better ...
(Below: and more Pope here).
Abbott is thus not simply a Pom, but a 'Ten Pound Pom'.
ReplyDeleteYairs, DP, any team needs distinctive kit. It also needs foes, symbols and a song. Have you heard of Martin Gilbert, the historian? He took a group of his MA students on a 2 week tour of middle Europe in 1996. I've taken the liberty of clipping a couple of pages from his book. As well as the above essentials, a Team is grounded in a piece of territory.
ReplyDeleteReminds me of a quote from Mark Twain when he visited Australia.
ReplyDelete"Australian history is almost always picturesque. Indeed, it is so curious and strange that it is itself the chiefest novelty the country has to offer. It does not read like history, but like the most beautiful lies."
The Australian is raising it's price to $2:50. Buy three copies for the price of visiting the doctor!
ReplyDeleteAnd the rumours are that Chris "Toilet Brush" Mitchell is about to be kicked sideways in a bit of family bloodletting.
This is the same Mitchell that in 1996, the newspaper he edited at the time, The Courier-Mail, claimed that the prominent Australian historian, Manning Clark, had been awarded the Order of Lenin. This claim was later shown to be false.
In 2010, Mitchell claimed that he had been defamed by academic Julie Posetti in a series of tweets she posted from a journalism conference claiming that reporter Asa Wahlquist had said Mitchell controlled election coverage of climate change issues. Posetti refused to apologise when tapes of the conference backed her version of events.
I'm most disappointed in their list. They mention the dismissal of the Whitlam government, but not its election. They also neglected to mention the coming of the wickedly funny David Pope to the Canberra Times.
ReplyDeleteNot much from Tim "cry freedom" Wilson or the Eye Pee Aye about forcing counsellors to be religious. Oh, that's right - freedom belongs to the one with the money
ReplyDelete"Rupert's rag mentioned in the same breath as Gallipoli..." and why not? Was not Gallipoli a costly failure? I have to take you to task though about the comment, "three paces behind her husband." You obviously haven't spent time in our neighbouring country, Indonesia, the world's largest Muslim majority country, or in Turkey or Bangladesh. Indonesia's President-elect had to pay his respects to his party's president, former President of the Republic Megawati before he could start assembling a Cabinet. And Mega's status does reflect the role of women in that country.
ReplyDeleteYou can take the pond to task all you like. Women are expected by traditionalist Japanese to walk behind men - the argument is only about how many paces - and there aren't many Islamic fundamentalists in Japan. But the wider point holds, that fundamentalist religions routinely assign women a place behind men, from Cardinal Pell's trucking country to Saudi Arabia's refusal to allow women to drive trucks, and citing one country doesn't get fundamentalists off the hook in terms of the abuse of women's rights.
DeleteCiting one powerful woman's role up against the plight of many doesn't cut it:
Indonesia’s official Commission on Violence against Women reported in August that national and local governments in Indonesia had passed 60 new discriminatory regulations in 2013 in addition to the 282 such rules already on the books. These include 79 local bylaws requiring women to wear the hijab, or head scarf. In August, H.M. Rasyid, a district education chief in south Sumatra, proposed that high school girls be subjected to mandatory “virginity tests” to tackle perceived problems of “premarital sex and prostitution.” Raysid later insisted he had been misquoted – but similar tests were also proposed in East Java.
http://www.hrw.org/news/2014/01/21/indonesia-rights-rollback-religious-minorities-women
And there's plenty of other examples that can be easily found ...
A 2010 government regulation permitting “female circumcision” remained in effect, in violation of Indonesia’s obligations under international human rights law. The CEDAW Committee called on the government to withdraw the regulation and adopt legislation to criminalize the practice.
http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/indonesia/report-2013#section-65-6
You might just as well have proposed that Imelda Marcos's collection of shoes meant things were fine for women in the Philippines or that having a feminist like Tony Abbott in power meant things were hunky dory
for women in Australia ...