This day has taken far too long to arrive but I feel privileged to have the chance to experience it. Truly the proudest moment in our nation’s history. On this day I feel the deepest pride in being Australian. As a citizen of our united country I wholeheartedly endorse the words of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.

Today we honour the Indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history.

We reflect on their past mistreatment.

We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations – this blemished chapter in our nation’s history.

The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia’s history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.

We apologise for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.

We apologise especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.

To the mothers and fathers, the brothers and sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.

And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.

We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation.

For the future we take heart; resolving that this new page in the history of our great continent can now be written.

We today take this first step by acknowledging the past and laying claim to a future that embraces all Australian.

A future where this Parliament resolves that the injustices of the past must never, never happen again.

A future where we harness the determination of all Australians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, to close the gap that lies between us in life expectancy, educational achievement and economic opportunity.

A future where we embrace the possibility of new solutions to enduring problems where old approaches have changed.

A future based on mutual respect, mutual resolve and mutual responsibility.

A future where all Australians, whatever their origins, are truly equal partners, with equal opportunities and with an equal stake in shaping the next chapter in the history of this great country.

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.

Slim of The Dog’s Bollocks has launched a new website that aggregates Australia’s best blogs in an easy-to-read and taxonomic fashion: Blogotariat. The site has real potential so go and check it out.

It doesn’t get much better than highly anticipated cricket on a Thursday afternoon. Well, it does: knowing that there are 24 more days of it to come.

I spent the first few hours of today’s play laying on the lounge room floor, bathed in sunlight, watching the cricket on the telly, and texting back and forth with jLo who was watching the game from a pub in London after midnight. At one point jLo wrote:

Ps. How hilarious was that first ball? Funniest opening delivery ever. Why the fuck isn’t Flintoff putting himself on?

And sure enough he picked the ball up the very next over.

Some overs later I was reading another of her texts and missed Hayden being caught out. I wrote:

Missed that because I was reading your text. Neanderthal in the showers.

In response, and referring to GrodsCorp’s relentless ridiculing of Matthew Hayden over time, jLo wrote:

Sorry matey! No great loss, really. Where was Jesus right then, huh?

Informing her that I intended to blog her comments she declared:

I am ever conscious of the fact that my texts may be blog fodder. I’ll look forward to reading it all again tomorrow.

Consider it done, jLo.

Australian bloggers shouted out in glee this morning when they took the three steps from their bed to their computer and read the news that a blogger in the USA has successfully sued another blogger for libel, winning US$5 million dollars in damages.

Within minutes, Australian bandwidth consumption skyrocketed as thousands of bloggers furiously travelled the internet archiving copies of their mortal blogging enemies’ web pages containing accusations against them of being “idiots”, “retards”, “lefties” and “Nazis”. At the same time, each of these bloggers was furiously trawling their own blogs deleting any insult they may have thrown towards their mortal blogging enemies, all the while nervously preparing defences for imagined court proceedings. By 9am this morning the Australian blogosphere resembled a desert with almost all content deleted and replaced by 404 errors, while emails were flying back and forth between Hotmail addresses to faceless pseudonyms threatening in illiterate blogging prose to “bring teh full forse of the law upon you becos of the outrite lies and unthuths youve been propegating about my charecter on teh internet.”

Make no mistake, threats to sue for libel will now become standard ammunition in any blog comments war, alongside Godwin’s Law which holds that most comment wars will end in a comparison of at least one party to Nazis. This new phenomenon will be known as GrodsLaw: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a threat to sue for libel approaches one.

Prime Minister John Howard has demonstrated the unquestionably superior nature of quintessential Australian values in his reaction to the Australian soldiers in Iraq who posted internet videos of themselves pointing guns at other soldiers dressed as Arabs. For your convenience I’ve isolated Aussie John’s Aussie values:

Tolerance
He is tolerant of Australian soldiers’ gunplay bringing the defence force’s professionalism into disrepute, along with the soldiers’ aggressive racism bringing Australia into disrepute.

A fair go
He wants a fair go for the soldiers, calling for everyone to lay off the lads because they were just “letting off a bit of steam”.

Mateship
He feels mateship for these soldiers because they’re white, male, English speaking Australians fighting his dodgy war.

“She’ll be right, mate”
He believes that she will, in fact, be right, saying that “the military is quite capable of dealing with this without a whole lot of gratuitous advice from me or other people in the political arena”.

Respect for traditions
He notes that soldiers have always let off steam through time (presumably an acceptable tradition) but the only difference now is that there are video cameras and YouTube.

Heard Andrew Robb on ABC774 with Jon Faine this morning (ahh, uni holidays and lazy weekday mornings in bed). He was talking about the government’s new proposed citizenship test and the possible questions that might be on such a test. When asked how one tests for an understanding of “a fair go” Robb got all confused and blustery, starting to waffle on about how it’s a “quintessential” Australian quality and it’s all to do with tolerance and stuff. You know, it’s the vibe, it’s Mabo. Robb said that, you know, it’s all about how Australians volunteer to fight bushfires.

“Yes, but how do you test for this understanding of a fair go?” repeated Faine.

Apparently (if I interpreted Andrew Robb’s ramblings correctly) you just put “volunteering to fight a bushfire” as one of the options in a multiple choice question about “a fair go”. “But I don’t want the test to become like Trivial Pursuit,” qualified our Parliamentary representative.

Genius.

Let’s get right to the bottom of this “middle Australia” riddle.

To: Kim.Beazley.MP@aph.gov.au
From: The Editor
Sent: 18 Sep, 2006 9:36 AM
Subject: Middle Australia

Dear Mr Beazley,

Regarding your “pact with middle Australia”, can you please clarify for me who is a middle Australian? Are there any statistics that are representative of middle Australia? Further, why are you only seeking a pact with middle Australia as opposed to all Australians?

Regards,
The Editor

More news as it comes to hand.

I realise I’ve been spending a lot of time laying into Kim Beazley recently and some readers may mistakenly believe I hold more positive feelings towards the Man Of Steel.

Wrong.

The jingoistic, xenophobic, tickbox race to the bottom continues. Prime Minister John Howard says that the Government plans to toughen up migration requirements, but they will not be difficult for “fair dinkum” migrants. Along with having to wait four years instead of three to apply (just in the nick of time, Billybob), citizenship applicants will have to pass an English test to be an Aussie.

Says Howard:

“I mean the great unifying thing about this country is language, I mean our culture, the culture of any country is heavily defined by its language.

“Because along with the language comes the literature and the cultural history bound up with it.”

“It won’t become more difficult if you’re fair dinkum and most people who come to this country are fair dinkum about becoming part of the community,”

But as the recent history-in-schools debate has shown, only the Liberal-approved literature and culture will come in the bundle. It’s not fair dinkum to question the official version of the past. It’s definitely not fair dinkum to have any sort of “black armband” view of history.

So, there’s another useless and loaded term to add to our list of citizenship requirements. You must respect hard work, have mateship and be fair dinkum. Basically, don’t be different to us, even though there’s no single description of “us” and many Australians don’t possess those qualities anyway (whatever they are).

Billybob, being too lazy to actually log in and write a proper post (he’s probably forgotten his password), has raised some interesting questions in this comment. As a native Londoner who’s only been an Australian for a couple of years his observations of this country are valuable. I also think they would make for some useful debate fodder so here are two of the points:

Can someone please explain what the Aussie work ethic is?
My belief is that this statement is based on the 1950s immigrants from the Med., who to quote Starship, ‘built this city’. It is not based on the current 25-40 year olds that I come across, who all seem to be in Marketing and work a 25-hour week. Added to this, the ‘true’ hard workers of this tax paying generation all seem to be ‘new’ immigrants, (last 15 years or so). Regardless of whether they have ticked a declaration to work hard, speak English and pour beer onto their onions on the BBQ, these are now the people many Australians rely on to get through their daily life. I for one require my local 7-11 to be open when I fall out of my taxi at three in the morning after falling in love with the barmaid.

Where is middle Australia?
I know who they are in theory, but I look through the real estate prices and think is middle Australia really where people think it is. Look at the number of restaurants and bars there are. They all seem to be full, even on a Tuesday night… Booking is not an option.

Get thee to comments and let’s get to the bottom of this stuff.

After being reported missing yesterday Kim Beazley has been sighted on the opinion pages of The Age. Accusing Amanda Vanstone of distracting attention from work visa issues by calling him a racist, Kim does the same, distracting attention from his being called a racist by focusing on work visa issues. Apparently it’s a race to the bottom in the brave new world of WorkChoices — and I can’t much argue with that.

So some ticks for Kim’s efforts to turn the debate around and have it on his terms, but some crosses for his continued oversimplification of the IR debate with lines such as this:

And in the end, this is not about xenophobia or rogue bosses — this is all about the Prime Minister’s wages race to the bottom. Labor will halt the race to the bottom by ripping up the mechanism that allows it — Australian Workplace Agreements.

And Kim even found the space in his article for an opportunistic plug for his pathetic and xenophobic values pledge policy:

But I am strongly of the view that workers who come to Australia should understand the Aussie work ethic, and a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

It’s one of the reasons I want these workers to sign up to these values when they come to Australia.

But most offensive is Kim’s ongoing pursuit of mediocrity, with his continued pitching of all policy to “middle Australia.” The article was bookended with claims that John Howard and WorkChoices are “delivering a one-two punch to middle Australia.” Can’t really argue with that, but I’d like to think that a Labor government would govern for all Australians, not just the middle, with a vision for greatness, not ordinariness.

On September 11 the slippery argument of whether Australia is safer or not after five years of “war on terror” was always going to pop up. John Howard says yes, we are safer and has called on Muslims to learn English, integrate, and denounce terrorism. Kim Beazley says no, we’re not safer and has called for tourists and immigrants to sign up to Australian values (”respect for each other, mateship, fairness, freedom and respect for our laws”), along with the teaching of Australian values to immigrant children in schools.

You see, if only all of them Muslims would become more like Steve Irwin everything would be okay and you could throw your fridge magnet out. Steve Irwin was so Australian he even died like an Australian. Does anybody else find this populist and xenophobic attitude offensive that “if only they were more like us, instead of more like them” our Way Of Life™ wouldn’t be threatened?

And what is this Way Of Life™ anyway?

But back to the point, and the superiority of Australians and Australian values. All Muslims should became Australian (because, you know, Muslim is a nationality, not a religion) because no Australian’s ever done anything contrary to our Way Of Life™ before.