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Interesting you should ping me to this, risk (my great-grandparents were Irish).

That's nice, although I pinged you because I figured liberty-minded Aussies ought to weigh in on the EU issue.

The argument I hear from GB, Ireland, and commonwealth citizens is that they fear their economies will collapse if they don't participate in the EU. Is that any reason? "We have to give up a degree of our self-rule because we can't maintain our own economic viability alone." That sounds like collectivism to me.

I pinged you because I figured liberty-minded Aussies ought to weigh in on the EU issue. The argument I hear from GB, Ireland, and commonwealth citizens is that they fear their economies will collapse if they don't participate in the EU. Is that any reason? "We have to give up a degree of our self-rule because we can't maintain our own economic viability alone." That sounds like collectivism to me.

I'm not arguing with you on the collectivism issue, but the fact remains that this issue has stuff-all to do with the Commonwealth (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, India, Fiji and various Pacific Islands, a couple of countries in Africa etc)... have you looked at a map lately? The UK effectively turned its back on us (the Commonwealth) because we are not, by any stretch of the imagination, part of Europe.

That was my issue with being pinged to the thread. The UK told us to go jump in a lake years ago, and whilst there might still be wailing and gnashing of teeth over that on the other side of the Tasman, by and large Australians have just shrugged their shoulders and gotten on with life as a British "colony" in name only. If anything, we look more towards the United States, and have done since the post-World War II era. We might be a small nation in numbers (20 million), but we do know which way the cookie crumbles... and by the looks of it, the British insistence upon the EU is the final crumble of their cookie.