Anti-towelhead test
 | Posted by The Editor on Wednesday 29 August 2007, 8:55 am Categories: Politics Tags: Tags: CatherineDeveny, CitizenshipTest, immigration |
Catherine Deveny perfectly sums up GrodsCorp’s attitude towards the government’s populist, xenophobic and divisive citizenship test.
YOU can shove your citizenship test up your poxy date. No one has the right to decide what being Australian is. I was born here and I have no idea. But I do know what it isn’t, and what being Australian isn’t is testing people on what they know about some white pen-pusher’s idea of Australia. This is the country whose citizens pride themselves on not knowing the words to their own country’s anthem.
[...]
Who are we trying to keep out with this test? How will knowing the name of Australia’s first prime minister or the date of Federation keep out terrorists, wankers or bludgers? The citizenship test questions are irrelevant and offensive.
Read the whole article and take Deveny’s awesome alternative Aussie citizenship test.
UPDATE: Humourless Andrew Bolt reckons that Deveny’s first line is symptomatic of The Age’s inability to argue a case. Of course, it completely escapes Bolta’s attention that the line, “you can shove your citizenship test up your poxy date”, is a beautiful mixed example of the Australianism metaphors used by Deveny throughout her article as an illustration of what Deveny holds to be more “Australian” than anything in the government’s citizenship test.
By the way, did anybody else choke on their cornflakes when Bolta accused another journalist of “emotive and poisonous writing” on Insiders last week?
GrodsThink Ep.29 (26/8/08)
Wednesday 29 August 2007, 10:07 am #Bruce
No. But when he accused another journo of being ill-informed, it got more than one laugh around my neck of the woods.
Wednesday 29 August 2007, 10:27 am #The Editor
Bolta’s informed. But only of the information he wants to be informed of.
Wednesday 29 August 2007, 2:40 pm #Bridgit Gread
Andrew Bolt tut-tuts when an Age columnist uses a few crass but common bits of our vernacular.
Andrew Bolt’s view of the movie Kenny, which uses a few crass but common bits of our vernacular, supplemented by a stream of poo jokes:
“Those on our cultural heights too often choose not to see in the valleys beneath them are not just the Kennys, but the great virtues of so many of these invisible Australians. Kenny, in fact, is rather like many Australians I’ve grown up with and met, and I like him and the country that produces such people a lot.”
Thursday 30 August 2007, 7:57 am #jLo
Sniff. That made me a little bit homesick.
Thursday 30 August 2007, 8:24 am #The Editor
We got a Google hit with the search term “poxy date” yesterday. Maybe it was Bolta trying to work out what it means?
Thursday 30 August 2007, 12:43 pm #John Surname
I’ve been consistently getting hits for “Andrew Bolt” from Technorati for about six months now. Could it be?
Thursday 30 August 2007, 12:50 pm #John Surname
And while we are on the subject of Catherine Deveny, our good friend from the blog Double-Think has brilliantly trashed one of her articles (http://doublethinkblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/all-australians-deserve-free-stuff.html)
Don’t you love it when middle-class university students who are given everything fail to understand that there are some Australians who can’t afford health insurance?