John Howard’s relentlessly banging on about how cool APEC will be.

APEC was “the most important international meeting ever to be held in Australia”, Mr Howard said, an opportunity for Australia to be paraded as a “modern, sophisticated, tolerant, multi-racial society”.

Um, after laughing out loud and spraying toast over the newspaper, here are some brief initial thoughts on The Man Of Steel and how those adjectives suit him…

Modern: Third world broadband.
Sophisticated: Look, where do I start?
Tolerant: Unless you’re a towelhead or a poof.
Multi-racial: But definitely not multicultural (the dirty ‘m’ word) because that would require tolerance of non-Anglo ways-of-life.

Now, I’m not saying that Australia and most Australians aren’t all of those things, but John Howard most definitely isn’t.