Tetherd Cow Ahead

Tonight all sensible Australians cry tears of joy! The Weasel is no more! Begone you horrid little man, and let us attempt to repair the damage you have done.

Americans – take a leaf. You know what you have to do.

The Weasel has this week opined that the world is not facing a problem of climate change so much as climate shift.

And in a stunning revelation he asserts that the reason that we have any problem at all here in Australia is because of ecologically minded people:

… if some years ago we had not bowed so much to the greens and had built more dams, maybe things would have been different, and that applies all around the country.

So, to recap – don’t be concerned, the climate is not changing, just shifting, and that’s not something you should worry your pretty little head about. If people tell you different they’re probably evil Greenies who, as everybody clearly knows, want to cause the world to shrivel to a dessicated husk due to a lack of dams.

The Chinese Government has just passed into law a 14 part regulation banning Tibet’s ‘Living Buddhas’ from reincarnating.

Aside from the obvious idiocy of the notion of an atheist government attempting to impose laws on a system of belief that they deny has any basis in reality, the natural question must arise: if someone should disobey the law and reincarnate, what is the government going to decide is a suitable deterrent?

The Death Penalty?

This last week has been an extremely aggravating exciting time here in Sydney, with the city being comprehensively ground to a standstill by the carnival of clowns that is APEC (aka ACROCK). Today we have George Bush, Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin slowing down the traffic and stealing the media attention away from more important issues like footballers getting busted for doing drugs.

As APEC has progressed, we’ve been treated to some terrific banter between these great minds of our age (the Leaders, that is, not the footballers. Although, really, there’s not much in it). The press was all over this exchange between George W and John Howard at a barbecue lunch:

George (loads plate up with steak and sausage): I’m a meat man.

John: I think we know that.

Onlookers: Hahahahahaha!

Honestly, I didn’t stop laughing for a full attosecond. And to think they hold Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw up as the finest examples of English language wordsmiths.

Mr Bush said in a speech this morning how much he loved Sydney and that he was hoping to be invited to the ‘OPEC’ summit next year (now was that ever a Freudian slip). It would seem that he thinks APEC is held in Sydney every year. This man is the Leader of the Free World. SpaghettiMonster help us all.

Some of the other fine word manglings I’ve heard this week include annualized, disendorsed and our own Beloved Leader’s stadia (which he evidently thinks is the plural of stadium but it isn’t. It’s a made-up modern word that someone thinks follows the rules of Latin. It doesn’t. A more correct and wholly less pretentious thing to say would be stadiums)

Meanwhile, since International Talk Like a Pirate Day is imminent, and you all know how much I like to get into the swing of things here on The Cow, I propose we start celebrating a little earlier this year and keelhaul the lot of ’em.

…and I apologize to the world on behalf of many of us who are embarrassed at the behaviour of the intellectual vacuum that is our government.

This week the Australian Federal Minister for Immigration, Kevin Andrews, formally announced the introduction of the Australian Citizenship Test, colloquially known as the Aussie Values Test. I’ve spoken about it before on The Cow, but I had hoped that it would just evaporate back into the Formless Void of Moronic Ideas from whence it originally came.

Not so it seems.

Basically it works like this: soon, if you apply for citizenship in Australia, you will be asked a set of 20 questions (chosen from a possible list of 200) that define the proper values you would need to embrace to be accepted into this country.

This whole idea is odious and small-minded and speaks right to the undercurrent of racism that flows just beneath the surface of uneducated Australia. It says, to put it into simple language: “We don’t want you here unless you’re like us, and hold the same ideas as us”.

But who is this ‘us’? Yes, you guessed it, ‘us’ is White, middle-class, Judeo-Christian, heterosexual, television-watching consumers.

I submit for your consideration some of the questions that ‘might’ be asked in this test, according to Minister Andrews:

1. What sports are played in Australia

2. Are Australian values based on the Koran, the Judeo–Christian tradition, Catholicism or secularism?

3. Which of the following are Australian values? A: Men and women are equal; B: A fair go; C: Mateship; D: All of the above

4. Who was the first Prime Minister of Australia?

5. What is Australia’s national flower?

6. Who is Australia’s Head of State?

7. How long have the indigenous aboriginal population lived on the Australian continent?

These questions can be roughly divided into three categories: Irksome, Stupid and Irrelevant.

Few people would know or understand why the answer to question 6 is: ‘Queen Elizabeth II of England’, and how this has relevance to Australian citizenship. Question 1 and 5 are plainly daft and prove nothing at all, and question 2 is just offensive (it may as well say ‘Don’t bring your foreign religions here Sajid’). I doubt that ninety percent of fourth generation Australians would know the answer to question 4.

And question 3. I cringe. The answer is, if you didn’t get it, ‘All of the above’, but the question is so banal, mindless and hypocritical that I really want to biff the person who made it up. And biffing would have to constitute a fairly well-held Aussie Value.

Men and women are equal? Then why does the major religious organization of Australia, the Roman Catholic Church, deny women the right to participate equally with men in all aspects of the church?

A ‘fair go’? Not if you’re an immigrant seeking political asylum, or a disenchanted and exploited worker. Or a telco trying to compete with the monopoly of Telstra over the Australian telecommunication infrastructure. Or a customer trying to get service, for that matter.

Mateship? Not if it’s politically or ethically difficult.

And speaking of hypocritical… what, exactly, is the point of question 7? If it’s to emphasize that the Aboriginal people have been here longer than us, then why does the current government repeatedly and stubbornly refuse to acknowledge the rights of those people?

This country is full of dumb greedy people getting dumber and greedier.

Here are some questions I guarantee won’t be in the Aussie Values test:

1. Name one Australian scientist.

2. How much water does it take to maintain an average Australian suburban lawn?

3. Out of 171 states, territories and countries around the world, only two have not ratified the Kyoto protocol. One is the USA. Who is the other?

4. Name any Australian play.

5. Which country in the world produces more carbon dioxide per capita than any other?

6. President George Bush is Prime Minister Howard’s: A: Best Buddy; B: Intellectual equal; C: Favourite dinner party conversation topic; D: All of the above.

7. Australian troops went to fight a war in Iraq because: A: The majority of Australians wanted it; B: John Howard ‘took an executive decision’ and overruled all the tenets of a democracy because he knows what’s good for us; C: They had nothing else to do; D: the political situation in the Middle East was critically and significantly important to a minor country on the other side of the world.

The American rapper Snoop Dog has been banned from entering Australia where he was due to host the Australian MTV Awards this weekend because he was deemed by the Australian Department of Immigration as being of ‘unfit character’.

“He doesn’t seem the sort of bloke we want in this country,” said Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews.

Oh no sirreee! We only admit persons of much higher moral fibre. Like, oh, er… this guy!