Australian Values
Understanding Australian Values
Australia’s national song is about a thieving itinerant worker Walter Medildo who steals a sheep and commits suicide to avoid being caught.
Its national hero is the bushranger Dead Kelly who ran around with a saucepan on his head (left).
Australians love nothing so much as defeat. That is why Ricky Ponting will be seen as one of Australia’s greatest sporting heroes, for being the only Australian Cricket Captain to have lost the Ashes twice.
Punter will be compared favourably with Don (The Don) Bradman who famously scored a duck in his last Test innings, thus ensuring he spectacularly failed to achieve a test average of 100 by the sliverest of margins: 0.06 (The Australian Broadcasting Corporation identifies so closely with his example of almost succeeding, while actually failing, that its GPO Box number is 9994 (the Don’s ultimate average of 99.94).
Australia’s national military celebration, Anzac Day, which is commemorated as a biscuit, celebrates a massive and humiliating defeat caused by British arrogance, idiocy and bad management, predominantly by “Bulldog“ Churchill. That’s why we prefer English migrants above all others. They make the rest of us look less stupid. It’s also why John Hunt the Coward’s middle name is Winston, to celebrate his own personal massive and humiliating defeat in 2007.
Its most iconic food, Vegemate, is made from the dregs of the brewing process, literally by “scraping the barrel”.
Most of its national icons are owned by foreign companies.
Its most famous piece of architecture was designed by a Dane.
Its most coveted sporting trophy is a bunch of ashes.
The last day of an Ashes Test is called a “sickie“.
The country prides itself on its healthy disrespect for authority. It proved it at the Eureka Stockade when the miners fought the tax collectors.
Sadly, they lost!
Most Australians commemorate this heroic defeat every fortnight by giving the government 30% of their paycheck.
The only great success of the Coward Government, celebrated with wild champagne parties, was the fact that Ministers and senior public servants had evaded being gaoled, for corruption and incompetence over the Iraqi Barkey for Bazookas scandal through successfully blameshifting their disgrace onto private citizens instead.
In short, Australia has built an entire culture on being a nation of losers.
Although Australia is a monarchy – which means it has to tug its forelock to a little old lady who lives as far from Australia as she possibly can, isolated behind metre-thick walls from infection by ‘commoners’ – it is fiercely independent.
Yes, it went to war in 1914 and 1939 because the Monarch ordered it to.
Yes, it does whatever the US says.
Of course its immigration policy concerning refugees is to do whatever the global Far Right, the global religious fundamentalists, the global neo-Nazis and white supremacists, and the Indonesians tell it to.
But being the fiercely independent country that it is Australia makes the decision to capitulate all on its own.
Respect
Australians respect women, other people’s beliefs, democracy, and our mates and we always give each other a fair go.
We’re a tolerant society and if you don’t understand that you can piss off.
Women
Australia values and respects its women.
23% of women who had ever been married or in a de-facto relationship experienced violence by a partner at some time during the relationship. (ABS, 1996)
42% of women who had been in a previous relationship reported violence by a previous partner. (ABS 1996
100,000 women (1.5%) experienced an incident of sexual assault in the 12 months prior to the study.
An estimated 1.2 million women in Australia aged 18 and over had experienced sexual violence or its threat since the age of 15.
One in six adult women in Australia had experienced sexual assault since the age of 15 years.
45% of women sexually assaulted since the age of 15 had experienced more than one incident.
And that’s pretty good, huh? That’s a whole half of all Aussie women who may not experience violence or sexual assault in their lifetimes!
Mateship
Just to be clear:
1) Mateship is the one and the only Central Pillar of Australian values;
2) Only men are permitted to have mates;
3) Women are banned from having mates because women have actual meaningful interpersonal relationships with actual friends. which is against the Rules of Mateship.
4) Mateship is not the same as Shipmate, which suggests a different kind of relationship.
5) Mates do not touch each other.
5a) unless they are pissed, when a mate might use the term “Matey” and profess an unseemly level of affection. This transgression is only tolerated because the mates are so pissed they won’t remember it in the morning. This is the evolutionary function of the hangover.
So what is mateship?
Mateship is pretending to be friends with someone who doesn’t want your job.
A mate is someone who won’t sleep with your mistress without asking you first.
A great mate is a rugby league footballer who invites you to a gang bang with the other members of his team.
Ruby Murdocraci will be your TRUE Mate if you are a biddable politician and you stroke him just the way he likes, at least for as long as you are useful.
A mate is what men have who are incapable of attracting actual friends (see “Politician”) or of forming any kind of vaguely intimate relationships, particularly in their own families.
The only strange thing about mateship is that the people who have promoted this value most loudly over the last several decades have never had a real mate in their lives because they are such dorks and bogans. The people who call them mates only do it because they have useful stuff they can give them, like TV stations, or Australia (they gave that away to their “mate” Ruby Murdocraci).
A Fair Go
The Fair Go is quintessentially Australian.
We’ll always give everyone a fair go, no matter who you are or what you believe. Unless we don’t like you.
There was one case where even the RSL wouldn’t give one bloke a fair go, although he hadn’t done anything illegal. South Australia didn’t like him either and wouldn’t give him a fair go. The Australian government didn’t like him, even though he hadn’t committed a crime or anything. In fact the government didn’t like him so much that it was willing to violate its own laws to deny him a fair go. But maybe they thought that was just good “politics”.
But apart from that Australia’s fair as anything…as long as we like you.
So the real Australian Value is: we give everyone a fair go unless it is politically useful not to, or if it will do wonders for our media profile to attack them.
The current government said “if you have a go you’ll get a go”. What the fuck does that mean? Fuck all, actually but, again, they thought it might be clever politics.
Easy Going
Australians take people as they find them. And some of them, if we find them we take them back to Indonesia. Or Sri Lanka. Or Iran. We stole this country first and no bastard is going to come here and try to steal it from us.
We only like to find them in particular places. England, for example.
We don’t like to find them on the northern or western coasts. If we find them there we give them a nice getaway on a Pacific Island paradise called Nauru (left), but they ran out of birdshit to feed them. We used to send them to a Indian Ocean island paradise where it’s Christmas every day.
We like English people coming here because it makes it easier to give them heaps in person.
Respect for democracy
All Australians respect democracy. Except politicians.
The government respects the wishes of the people. It takes care to listen to the people and to their wishes, and then it does what it wants – in the people’s best interest, of course. Or at least of America’s. Or China’s.
Iraq, for instance, was in the people’s best interest. Lord Water Cunntiham, an ex-Prime Minister, knew public opinion in Australia was almost universally against it, but he knew it was the (far-)right thing to do.
He knew for a certain, absolute and incontrovertible fact that Iraq had WMDs and links to Al Qaeda and was responsible for 9/11 and that invading Iraq would make Australians safer.
Saddam, after all, was an evil dictator who terrorised his people, tortured them and killed them.
Of course it’s unfortunate that we terrorised, tortured and killed Iraqis just as he did. But it was in their own best interest. The ones we haven’t killed will learn to appreciate Western values, western democracy and western freedoms – or else – if they haven’t all killed each other first. And we know that for a certain, absolute and incontrovertible fact.
Anyway, just because all of those reasons turned out to be false and just because we might have known that at the time (and did secretly know that at the time), and just because it turns out we made Australia a much more dangerous place and made it a specific target for terrorists, that doesn’t mean we don’t respect democracy. We do.
Specifically, we respect the democracies of Burma, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, China and Khazakstan.
IndonAsia
Australian values are to agree with the Indonasians. And the Americans and the British, of course, but especially the Indonasians. Not that their values are similar to Australian values. Not at all. Far from it, in fact. For one thing, well, they have a different imaginary sky-friend.
Just between you and me Australia doesn’t really, you know, “like” the Indonasian racketeers . After all, you only have to hold your nose and glance as briefly as possible at their corrupt politics, their corrupt so-called democracy, their corrupt judiciary, their corrupt police, their corrupt economy, their corrupt military, not to mention their evil and barbaric delight in capital punishment for the entertainment of the masses, and
the fact they executed 7 innocent Australian journalists in Timor.
Of course the actual ordinary Indonasians and their culture are lovely, friendly, beautiful, generous and fascinating. But we don’t do business with them. So our representatives just have to bring a discreetly hidden bucket.
But we have to agree with the Indonasians because there are 300 million of them right there, hanging over our heads. We don’t want a pile of angry jihadists on our doorstep. Plus we get cheap matches from them. (Yes, we know they’re shit matches! Shhh! Don’t get them angry.) And we sell them stuff. we don’t want, so . . .
Respect for Diverse Cultures
Australians have a deep respect for a wide diversity of European cultures such as English and American.
However, we also permit others to come here. It’s quite strange. It’s a bit like your crazy aunt come to visit the family for a few days and she’s still there two years later. You can’t help wondering when she’s going to go home so you can relax and be yourself again.
Every year at Cronulla Beach*, Cultural Respect classes are held in December and January
* a famous sewer near Sydney.
Tolerance
Australia is an extremely tolerant country. For example, we tolerate homosexuals, rainbows and the way they’ve used up the entire alphabet to describe themselves. The Catholics and Sydney Anglicans just don’t like them in their churches and some octogenarians don’t want them getting married or having equal rights.
Of course we know that “same sex attracted” people can have a hard time.
16% reported physical assault because of their sexuality.
46% reported verbal abuse.
38% had experienced unfair treatment on the basis of their sexuality.
69% of the abuse happened at school;
47% in the street
10% were abused by friends
3% abused by teachers
14% reported feeling unsafe or very unsafe at school.
But if they would just stop being fucking poofters the problem would be solved. And we would respect them so much more.