Category: Australia

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Xenophobes in Australia about to choke on their cornflakes

THE xenophobes in Australia — and that’s a goodly proportion of the population — will find themselves in a difficult position if Fawad Ahmed is granted citizenship and selected to play for Australia in the Ashes cricket series against England later this year.

You see, Ahmed is an asylum-seeker from Pakistan. Asylum-seekers are a class of human beings whom the average Australian, with his/her devotion to a fair go, deems to be sub-human and only deserving of being sent back to their country of origin. Or drowned at sea.

Ahmed applied for permanent residence last year and while he was awaiting a decision, it emerged that he was a more than capable leg-spinner. Australia was a few weeks from taking on South Africa in a Test series and so he was asked to go over and help the Australians in their net practice. South Africa has a spinner of Pakistani origin, Imran Tahir, in its ranks and the Australians needed to play a good spinner to prepare to face Tahir.
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Xenophon should come into the 21st century

AN Australian senator goes to Malaysia on an unofficial visit. His intention is to meddle in local politics. And when he gets thrown out of the country, he makes a noise!

What did he expect? That any white man who goes to an Asian country during election time, and is known to be a supporter of the opposition, will be welcomed with open arms? Perhaps Nick Xenophon has forgotten that the colonial era is long over.

Asian countries run their own affairs today. They realy do not need people from so-called Western democracies coming over and trying to lecture them on how to run their own affairs.
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When the offenders become the story

IT COULD only happen in Australia. Two DJs stage a prank call to the hospital where a member of the royal family, Kate Middleton, had been admitted as she was suffering from morning sickness; they pose as Queen Elizabeth and her son, Charles.

The call is passed on by an unsuspecting nurse who is doubling as a telephone operator, and her colleague in the ward provides an accurate rundown of Middleton’s condition.

The DJs, from 2Day FM, play the recorded conversation without asking the hospital for its permission as they are required to do by the rules of their own station. The recording was played by several other stations and the nurse involved, Jacintha Saldanha, was made to look like a fool.
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Cheating is universal (not that this excuses Armstrong)

WHEN the Australia dollar shoots past the greenback, it enables people to buy goods that they previously avoided due to the cost.

On the internet, for the most part, the outlets keep to this rate, or at least stay close to it.

But on the ground, this does not always work out. In other words, exchange houses will not give you what you are supposed to get.
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US voters go one way; Australians are different

GIVEN the fact that the Democrats were returned to power in the recent US elections, there is a tendency for people in Australia to see a similar trend emerging in the elections due Down Under in 2013.

One should be extremely careful when drawing such conclusions.

Those who incline towards the view that the leader of the Coalition, Tony Abbott, will suffer a fate similar to that which befell Mitt Romney, should take into the fact that voting is compulsory in Australia.

That fact tends to change things a great deal.
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Money, money, money…

LET’S assume a man has an income of $2000 per month. Let’s further assume that his income dropped by 50 per cent – he now has to manage on $1000 each month.

What would he do? Well, the logical assumption is that he would cut down on his expenses and manage.

Only a fool would suggest that he keep spending at the level he was when his income was $2000, and pay for it by borrowing.
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Getting blind drunk and acting stupid is the hallmark of a hero

An Australian rules football player goes on an end-of-season trip to Las Vegas with some of his teammates. He gets blind drunk, ends up at a hotel where he is not staying, tries to jump from the balcony of a room onto a palm tree and falls to the ground.

Unfortunately, the man dies as a result of this fall. He is just 22, not anywhere near the age where one thinks of death.

A local paper in Melbourne describes him as a hero.

Which means that many others should aspire to be like him. After all, we all want to be heroes don’t we?
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Destroying the joint?

AUSTRALIA is a a sexist country. There’s that phrase again. And with good reason.

Last Friday, one of the country’s well-known radio broadcasters, let fly a tirade against the prime minister Julia Gillard and women in general.

In the words of shock-jock Alan Jones, known for his sympathies to the conservative cause, the women he cited — he also mentioned Clover Moore, the mayor of Sydney, and a former police commissioner of Victoria, Christine Nixon — were “destroying the joint”.
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Dinosaurs should not be given oxygen

AUSTRALIA is a sexist country. This is something I’ve said before. It bears repeating in view of the behaviour of a Liberal party hanger-on this week.

Grahame Morris is a former chief of staff to John Howard, who held the office of prime minister from 1996 to 2007. For some strange reason, Morris, who is best described as a slime, is given lots of air by the radio stations and TV channels to comment on political matters.

He is a card-carrying Liberal apologist but is still championed.
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