Hark, did you hear the sound of a broken Dame Slap clock chiming in 2016 as if it was 2006?

Now the pond could spend this morning meditating on the continued activities of the Abbott government.

As foreshadowed in these pages a few days ago, the prime minister Tony Turnabbott, insisted on the primacy of defence, and the pond is exceptionally pleased to report that Mal Abbottbull's vision is top of the reptile page this very day ...

This is exceptionally pleasing news - how else are we going to be able to bung on a decent do with the Chinese?

But sadly the pond must abandon the Abbott government (leader temporarily in physical but not spiritual exile) to attend to the important duties hinted at with that Dame Slap splash at the top of the page, and embark on one of its notorious William Burroughs' cut-ups.

This necessarily involves exceptional length, much suffering and much risk to eyeballs for those who bother.

Here's Dame Slap today:

Here's Dame Slap in 2006, demonstrating that she knows how to stay a stick in the mud like an Oscar Wilde rocket:

Here's Dame Slap speechifying in 2006:

Now it would possibly have been more honest of Dame Slap to have said in a couple of words, this tolerance of multiple cultures is all very well, but when it comes to Islamics, let it be noted I just can't stand 'em.

Instead she has to dress it up with all sorts of fancy talk. 

Here's the next couple of gobbets, first in 2016 and then back to 2006, a decade of symmetry, bigotry and prejudice:

So back a decade to 2006, where Dame Slap confronts the same villains in different guises, grinding over the same old same old like a diff where the bananas have stopped working:

And so to the final gobbets. The rousing conclusion in 2016:

And now back to 2006 and the rousing conclusion, with the messiah banging exactly the same drum:

So what has the pond demonstrated with this exercise, except that there's an exemplary continuity to the bigotry and prejudice?

Well there is much fine material on parade, but the pond would like to highlight a couple of exceptional examples from that 2006 speechifying, which can be found as a pdf here ...

First an enthusiastic suggestion that there was "so much more to Cronulla":

There was so much more to Cronulla than racism? Only a genuine, certified bigot could trot out that line.

And then came this rousing finale, when finally Dame Slap got around to explaining what was really Australian:

It made the pond think of its own heritage. It happened to include reading Raffaello Carboni's account of the Eureka Stockade.

Sure he was a wog, as we were trained to talk in Tamworth, but it chimed in with the pond's reading many of the best Irish writers.

It slowly dawned on the pond that maybe the British were just a little bit up themselves, in an Edmund Burke kind of way, and that perhaps other countries ... the French, the United States, others in Europe ... had a slightly different understanding of the world. Different, and not inferior, though often infested with the same sort of delusional jingoism and exceptionalism that manifests in Dame Slap ...

You won't see Dame Slap in her thumbnail guide to the best in heritage talking of James Joyce or his portrait of his sufferings under Catholicism. Nor for that matter many of the other bits and pieces that drifted the way of the pond ... like Dante, Goethe, the Decameron, Cervantes' wonderful Don Quixote, an abundance of French writers and film-makers (everybody must suffer through a Rosseau phase, even apparently Simon Schama), and casting the net a little wider, Sun Tzu, the I Ching, and Zen Buddhism ...

Why it took the pond years to discover that all that bullshit about Gallipoli and Anzac Day and Simpson and his donkey was just the same sort of war-mongering as indulged in by war mongers around the world. Different flag, same nonsense ...

And that was just the beginning, as the pond experienced the joy of moving out and away from the stultifying imperial, colonial presence of the British to discover riches elsewhere, such as Einsenstein's story of Ivan the Terrible or the great Russian composers of the twentieth century ... and so on and endlessly on ...

And where did it all begin, this shocking multiculturalism? The pond suspects it was that moment eating the very first Indian curry to come its way, and the realisation that there was nothing more fucked in the world than the pond's heritage of three vegies (greens with bicarb of soda to keep the colour while boiled to a pulp) and chops or sausages ...

Perhaps this is covered in Dame Slap's talk of the "right to apostasy", but the narrow stupidity and blind irrational prejudice she espouses brushes over all the other things in Australia's heritage that she now emulates ...

And who is the natural heir to Dame Slap's honourable traditions and heritage?

Yep, it's Tony MalAbbott's government ...

Even as we fund chaplains in schools so that the bigotry, prejudice and crusading might continue ...

Well the pond rarely quotes any politician with enthusiasm, but this little Facebook post here, tickled the pond's fancy enough to quote it in full ...

Put it another way ...

Fuck the Islamic fundamentalists, but let's be fair and offer equal opportunity. Fuck Dame Slap and Cory Bernardi too ...

If tolerance isn't much of a virtue, then it's about time the pond didn't bother tolerating them ...