Posted on 10/30/2005 9:12:20 AM PST by Mobile Vulgus
not arguing with that... just seem strong...
Thank you for the reply. It helps to appease the anger I feel towards those who have expressed otherwise.
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Come on, can't a sheila (and her sheep) take a joke?
Sydney Morning Herald, 20 September 2001
Australians have always enjoyed taking pot shots at Kiwi sensibilities. The sniping over Ansett is nothing new, writes Padraic P. McGuinness.
So poor little New Zealand is suffering from Kiwi-bashing, is it? Complaints about Australia's nasty bullying tendencies towards New Zealand have always been around. As a former NZ high commissioner to Australia, Laurie Francis, used to say plaintively: "Don't clobber yer cobber." But is it really true?
To most people it was funny when the airline unions blockaded the plane which was to fly NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark home out of Melbourne last week. After all, she was elected as a Labour prime minister, in coalition with the old Stalinist-unionist Left of her party which calls itself the Alliance. So it was a matter of one mob of unionists biting another. To call this a diplomatic incident is silly. The Australian authorities provided a helicopter to rescue her from her erstwhile political friends and at no time has the Australian Government alleged that the NZ Government was at fault for the closure of Ansett.
But certainly the management of Air New Zealand has displayed breathtaking incompetence in its treatment of Ansett. Maybe News Limited, which sold its half of the airline to Air New Zealand four years ago, got a lucky break - it sold a dog. But it was not another animal, it was not a pig in a poke. Air New Zealand had every opportunity to conduct due diligence and it made no complaints about the state of the books or the condition of Ansett's business; rather, it paid a good price. So Rupert Murdoch is entitled to wash his hands of the whole affair. The present disaster is entirely Air New Zealand's fault. As Prime Minister Clark has said, this is not just a matter of Kiwi incompetence - there are both Singaporean and Australian directors on the board. Perhaps they should join the queue of directors of recent notable failures.
To the extent that Australians are blaming the NZ Government they do so only because it is suggested that there is some responsibility for Air New Zealand - and indeed Clark has accepted some commitment to its debts and survival. This should be entirely gratifying to those who blame every vicissitude of modern economic affairs on privatisation and deregulation - they are about to acquire a nationalised and regulated dog, which will be used to ferry NZ politicians, business people, academics, journalists and other beneficiaries of taxpayers' dollars around the world. And especially to Australia.
All the old barriers to competition will be re-erected, so that ordinary fare-paying passengers, paying for themselves, will subsidise the rest - as used to be the case when Australia had a safely regulated duopoly. All for the sake of a national "flag carrier".
What many Australians neither know nor care about is how sensitive some Kiwis are about criticism or, especially, ridicule. There are plenty of Kiwi jokes about, many of them involving sheep - to a suggestion in a light-hearted conversation about trans-Tasman relations that one day the NZ army might be a formidable force, the response was: "You mean a flock of sheep in wolves' clothing?"
Like some humourless Irish diplomats responding to Irish jokes, Kiwis are so easy to wind up that it is irresistible.
The reality is that Australians find New Zealanders far too like themselves to be really interesting. Australians can pick the differences of accent (I am always charmed when a Kiwi friend addresses me as "Peddy") but others cannot. We make jokes about them in the same way we make jokes about Tasmanians. They are so like us that tiny differences or alleged quirks are seized upon, or rather, invented, just to make them more interesting. So as well as the supposed affection of the Kiwi male for his sheep, there is an allegedly high incidence of cleft palates (or even two-headedness) in Tasmania on account of inbreeding. Pure nonsense all round, of course, but it survives only because the butt of the joke gets irritated. The differences between the populations of Australia and New Zealand are about as different as those between Sydney and Melbourne.
That comparison does point to an interesting difference. There is a harder edge, a tougher minded approach to many issues in Sydney compared with Melbourne. There you tend to get more of the politics of the warm inner glow, along with pretensions to intellectual, cultural and moral superiority. Typically, the Fabian Society - wishy-washy socialism for idealistic and ineffectual intellectuals - flourishes there while it never did in Sydney. There is a similar difference between Sydney and New Zealand. Wellington is rather like a Canberra recruited entirely from the ranks of Melbourne school teachers. Not surprisingly, the NZ economy is in trouble when such people are in government.
There are real differences cross-Tasman, of course. The ethnic origins have always been rather different, with Catholic Irish much more heavily represented in Australia. We had a higher intake of non-English-speaking-background European migrants over the past 50 years. And the Maoris (and, increasingly, Pacific Islanders) are a much more significant proportion of the population than are Aborigines (however defined) here.
The do-gooders in New Zealand are, as in Melbourne, much more determined to get things wrong so they will feel good inside than are the majority of Australians, so they have set up disastrous institutions like the Waitangi Tribunal which fritter money away on compensation for past wrongs in such a way as to make the present day situation even worse. They are still strongly affected by old-fashioned pacifism, so they think that they need not spend money on their own defence. Traditional hardware may indeed not be the answer but, as recent events have demonstrated, spending on intelligence and counter-terrorism is likely to be the key to national security in the future.
But none of this matters very much. The best argument against political union with New Zealand is that we don't really need it, since we are so much alike already.
If you spent 3 years in the Corps ... my response to an obvious idiot would seem tepid.
I served in Clinton's Navy... we were forced to be the kinder gentler Navy... (Actually I have seen that wraith of full fledge Marine Corp anger.) Not a pretty sight. :)
Good article.Thanks.AWB
The "Globe and Mail" is VERY liberal. What do you expect?
It seems to me that there are two types of Canadians - the sane, sensible and generous, and the ferals who hate everything that is not Canadian liberalism. Perhaps the word liberal should be dropped as so-called Canadian liberalism is really left-wing authoritarianism.
The results of their latest survery:
Which side of the political spectrum would you nudge Canada toward to most improve the country's economic and cultural future?
The Left
1134 votes (57 %)
The Right
843 votes (43 %)
Total Votes: 1977
"You are an uneducated f***ing idiot buddy ... you give real thinking Americans a bad name ... why don't you just slither back into your hole maggot."
Ha, ha. Well you CERTAINLY made Canada look sensible, didn't you?? good thing most Canadians aren't as stupid as you, eh?
I know a lot of Canadians think differently and I wish them well.
Now come on all you Canadian conservatives. How about this one posted at the Globe and Mail:
JL R from London, Canada writes: For those of you suggesting the Liberals need to be voted out, I have only one question.Who would you replace them with?
How about Robert Mugabe for starters? He is from the left.
How about this one from the 'Globe and Mail'?
JL R from London, Canada writes: For those of you suggesting the Liberals need to be voted out, I have only one question.Who would you replace them with?
Any other suggestions besides Robert Mugabe? I am sure his countrymen would be happy for him to move on.
Yes, that and the fact that so many BP and Customs were pulled from the Mexican border to the Canadian border. We have slowly gotten more and we are getting a large influx lately and you can tell.
I see the Chamber of Commerce is involved. I am sure they are far more sensible than some elements in Canada that shall remain nameless.
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