The results might be interesting.

• @kedgie The Murray River is named after the Red Wiggle, Murray Cook. So is Cook’s Cottage in Victoria #australianfacts
• @downesy Australia’s highest mountain is Mount Franklin and its longest waterway is Jacob’s Creek #australianfacts
• @stemcd You can tell the social standing of an Australian by the number of corks hanging from their hat. #australian facts
• @jeremysear Tennis Courts are named after a famous Australian homophobe, Margaret Tennis. #australianfacts
• @kedgie The Great Barrier Reef was Australia’s first attempt at border control #australianfacts
• @jeremysear The High Court was affectionately named for the in-court antics of Sam “Giggler” Griffith and Dick “the Bong” O’Connor. #australianfacts
• @kedgie The Hairy Nosed Wombat can achieve speeds of up to 70/kmh, and is responsible for 300 deaths a year in NSW alone #australianfacts
• @geeksrulz The Australian flag is not a colonial symbol except for the bit in the corner. #australianfacts
• @mitchedgeworth there is nothing more australian than the southern cross, a constellation visible anywhere south of italy #australianfacts
• @jeremysear The Australian Constitution consists of the first 13 chapters of Deuteronomy. #australianfacts
• @kedgie The Queens Birthday public holiday celebrates the release of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. #australianfacts
• @jeremysear Australian footballers are granted droit du seigneur. #australianfacts
• @downesy When Australians feel they are about to vomit, they reach for a Murray-Darling basin #australianfacts
• @jeremysear Australia Day celebrates the day in 1788 when God told Margaret Court he’d let her win Wimbledon six times. #australianfacts
• @colinfry666: Before the introduction of fancy coffees, like capuccino, there was a strict Flat White Australia policy. #australianfacts
• @jeremysear For those who’ve come across the seas, we’ve boundless plains to share. #australianfacts

*My darling wife

The usual suspects are outraged at the ‘immoral’ determination of Tony Abbott and the Coalition to stop the pernicious trade by people smugglers. Naturally the most vocal critics of the morality of Coalition policy are those whose policies are directly responsible for 14,800 illegal arrivals since 2008 and the deaths of an estimated 600 people.

The most sanctimonious and hypocritical has to be…

The big parties who insist on refusing to allow refugees to arrive by air, who destroy smuggling boats regardless of safety thereby encouraging them to be as disposable as possible, the big parties who would rather waste millions upon millions on mandatory detention than risk a couple of “undeserving” immigrants on Centrelink payments? Tony Abbott who cares so little for refugees drowning that he wants to order the Navy to drag these “leaky” boats back to sea?

No, of course not. It’s the minor party that’s opposed to the present system, whose policies have never been enacted:

The most sanctimonious and hypocritical has to be the Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young…

Talking of hypocritical:

…whose rhetoric and clamour for the media spotlight have regularly set new lows in party politics.

On the plus side, being detested by Bernadi is one of the finest testimonies to a person’s character available in Australian politics today. Congratulations Sarah.

Bernadi continues:

For the princely sum (even by Australian standards) of $11,500, a one way trip to Australia is then arranged. This begins with a flight to Malaysia, a quick trip across Indonesia’s porous borders and ultimately, a leaky boat to Australia.

Incredibly, somewhere along this route any legitimate travel and identification documents are lost, leaving little chance of confirming the identity or history of some of the new arrivals.

Presumably if they had legitimate travel and identification documents they’d get on a plane for a fifth of the price. Unless of course we had a system that refused to let people in the country on a plane if they were going to seek asylum here. Which we do.

And if we stopped pretending transporting refugees was a crime and returned the boats that were run safely, then legitimate businesses would enter the market, run safe boats, much cheaper, saving lives and making sure it’s not just those “privileged” desperate refugees who can afford to get on a boat. You know, if you’re serious about all that “what about the poor people who can’t afford a fare” stuff. (Yeah, I know you’re not.)

The demonising and pandering continues:

The advice to the would-be new Australian colonisers is to “have a good story”.

Colonisers?

The entire process is disheartening to anyone that believes our welcoming nation and accepting nature are being taken advantage of.

Welcoming? Accepting? The people paranoid about “colonisers”?

Imagine being the target audience for that article, the sort of person who’d respond not with revulsion directed at Cory, but self-righteous fury at his targets.

ELSEWHERE: And Tim Andrews at Menzies House has turned his fatuous rant against anyone left of John Howard into an email forward. Alienate your family and friends! Send it on! (via R.)

As I suggested in the comments to Keane’s piece, our government should:

• Stop passing ever more obscene one-sided, ludicrously punitive, unbalanced, anti-public legislation like SOPA, PIPA or – the upcoming and even worse – ACTA.
• Return copyright terms to some kind of sane length.
• Stop enabling the exploiting of local consumers. If copyright owners respond to the generous grant by the public of a temporary monopoly (which is what copyright is) by trying to rip us off – then don’t enforce it. Make it a complete defence to a charge of “copyright infringement” if the item in question is not available lawfully in the consumer’s region at the same price as elsewhere.
• And with region-coding rubbish in media players and consoles – make it clear that if a mod-chip or other circumvention device overcomes a region block that discriminates against local consumers, then it is lawful, even if it has the effect of undoing other anti-copying measures. Give the bastards an incentive to stop trying to gouge us.

The question is: does the Australian government represent Australian consumers or US conglomerates? Could we at least put some pressure on them so that they might consider doing the former?

Seriously, if you can’t build the necessary rail infrastructure because Australians today are less capable than our ancestors 150 years ago, can’t we at least build freight trucks a separate road or something? Get them away from cars. Everyone who’s driven up the Hume has experienced some twinge of concern for their family and friends as one of these monstrosities hooned past. Trucks and cars do not mix well.

PS When doing your cost calculations for this, please remember to factor in the lives saved.

“improving our skill capability by leveraging global scale of sourcing providers,” a spokeswoman said.

Bravo. I like the way that sentence in no way responds to the allegation that they are in fact reducing their “skill capability” by hiring cheaper, less qualified staff to fund obscene executive salaries.

Just out of interest – and obviously I’m not an economist – what would be the negative effect of offering tax incentives to companies who employ, say, 90% or more of their staff physically in Australia?

Cheered because I’m assuming that all those mocking Schettino for his “cowardice” have, of course, done similarly brave things in the past themselves. A majority have probably got back on a sinking ship so they can speak from experience, and those who haven’t definitely would have in other circumstances had the courage to stand up, when their body and mind were telling them to panic, and literally taken on board (so to speak) the serious and imminent likelihood of a painful, horrible death, in order to save others.

That so many people have apparently already done this is immensely reassuring. (It’s also reassuring to see how many have, apparently, survived their self-sacrifice so they can now commentate on others’.)

I refuse to countenance the other possibility – that most of the commentary is by self-righteous hypocrites savagely pontificating from the safety of their keyboards about how others they’ve never met, but who hold jobs they’ve apparently romanticised as requiring a willingness to stay aboard a sinking vessel to drown, should be held to a standard of self-sacrifice that they’ve ever managed themselves. That they’ve convinced themselves that somehow tearing down someone else for “cowardice” makes them implicitly more brave themselves – that the more vindictive and nasty they are about this man’s failure, the more it makes them appear to be the sort of heroic people who we should admire. The more they differentiate themselves from this person’s failure, the further from such a failure they must be themselves, even though that doesn’t actually make any sense.

I really hope that’s not the case. Because that would be horrible:

The captain of the Costa Concordia is being pilloried for abandoning his ship and passengers, but would we have shown more courage?

COURAGE is a virtue and heroism is admirable, but do we have a right to demand them? Which of us cannot look back on his or her own life and remember decisions or compromises made, or silences kept because of cowardice, even when the penalties for courage were negligible?

If we are cowardly in small things, shall we be brave in large? Have we the right to point the finger until we have been tested ourselves? When we read of the seemingly lamentable conduct of the captain of the Costa Concordia, Francesco Schettino, who left his passengers to their fate, do we say, ”There but for the grace of God go I?”

No, we’re all heroes. All of us condemning the Italian captain have proven ourselves in the same or a very similar situation. We’re not shameless hypocrites!

Meanwhile, apparently the Coast Guard official who bravely climbed aboard the stricken vessel putting his life at risk to save others berated the distressed captain over the phone has become an “overnight star” in Italy.

The rest of us ordinary mortals are left to hope that one day we might have the guts to order, from a safe distance, someone else to sacrifice their life – whilst shouting at them and calling them a cock.

I am not comfortable with you tracking down people who write offensive and nasty things on Facebook and contacting their employers.

You are not the Internet police. You are not 4chan. It is beneath you, and it changes no minds. It marginalises rather than educates. It’s indistinguishable from bullying.

Would you like everything you’ve written on a computer to be sent to your employer? Or certain edited highlights? No?

Then don’t do it to others, no matter how horrible they might be. You’re better than that.

Cheers,

Jeremy.

Today’s examples, courtesy of Retronaut: Vintage ad sexism and Tips for Single Women, 1938. (Follow the links for the images.)

“Don’t be familiar with your escort by caressing him in public. Any open show of affection is in bad taste, usually embarrasses or humiliates him.”

EWWW! Affection from a woman! How HUMILIATING!

A NEW union founded by a one-time Greens candidate in Tasmania has been pounced on by an unlikely alliance of 16 heavyweight unions and an employer lobby group in an attempt to block its registration.

Isn’t it lovely when the unions and the employers can come together to block any real competition? Isn’t their insistence on a completely closed shop endearing?

Why should unsatisfied workers get in the way of such a beautifully co-operative arrangement?