Remember the charming bigot whose letter in mX the other day got so many GrodsReaders’ blood boiling? Well imagine my surprise when I was on the train last night on the way to GroupthinkFC’s latest courageous defeat and I saw this.

I was scratching my head about who this pen-wielding GrodsReader might be until I got to soccer and Jeremy was grinning from ear to ear.

So now we must turn our attention to Olivia of Camberwell who wrote this.

DOWN WITH PC NONSENSE

Good on Steve. It takes guts to say something that might offend a minority. We are an English-speaking country — to get a citizenship you should be able to speak our language.

Have at it, GrodsReaders.

I have to credit Ant Rogenous for bringing this story to my attention after he burst into the GrodsThink record last night straight off the tram, mX clutched in sweaty palms, eyes wide open, exclaiming that he’d found the most awesome-est letter ever to be published in Australia’s least newsey newspaper. After the GrodsThink record we all slapped our foreheads and cursed our stupidity for not discussing the letter so I’ll take this opportunity to steal Ant’s thunder and publish it. Why is it an awesome letter? Well, besides from the most appallingly discriminatory views on disenfranchising Australians, the author says it. He actually says it.

DIVERSITY HAS ONE MAIN LANGUAGE

After visiting the Victorian Electoral Commission website I was appalled at all the non-English support there.

Australia is an English-speaking country — the end.

If people are going to become citizens and then vote, at the very, very least they should be able to speak our language sufficiently to understand the issues.

If we have to convert everything to Somali or whatever, we are allowing people to vote who have not even made the most basic commitment to this country.

There are 20 languages on the site, and I know that each only provides a superficial overview, but I wonder why?

I don’t want anyone, regardless of citizenship status, voting if they can’t speak English well enough to understand the issues.

I’m appalled that people who are not sufficiently committed to Australia to learn English are forced to vote.

I love Australia’s multiculturalism.

SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS ARE not of Anglo-Saxon stock, and we are about where the US was 200 years ago — a great developing country finding its way with people from all over the world forming its core.

But at that core is a fundamental issue — the language. The US has given up the fight and 48 of the 50 states now produce almost everything in both English and Spanish.

Learning English should be free and mandatory.

People come here expecting that they’ll be able to continue their lives exactly as they were. It’s not that simple and we shouldn’t be making it that easy for them.

– Steve, Melbourne

I’m heading up to Cairns tonight to serve as best man at the wedding of the fella who was best man at mine in 2006. Robbie was my flatmate back in the late 90s when we maintained a filthy bachelor hovel with an awesome party backyard in the inner west of Sydney. We both went to the UK together in 2000; I came home in 2002 having met McBec, and Robbie came home in 2004 having met his bride-to-be. We’ve lived in different cities since 2001 but have remained close friends and have continued to have very excellent adventures together. In honour of Robbie’s big day (Saturday) I’d like to share with you one of the stories that have become Robbie folklore.

Robbie, Joey and The Editor are burdened with atrocious fashion sense c. 2000. Robbie always has his shirt unbuttoned or off. Always.

We were staying in a Turkish pension by the beach with our American travel companion, Joey. It was about 1pm and a huge morning of backgammon, tea and reading had worked us up some massive appetites. We asked the lovely Turkish girl who worked there if we could order some of the beautiful sandwiches that were the house specialty, and she replied, in broken English, that it would be no problem. We thanked her with one of only six Turkish words we knew, but then Robbie wanted to say more.

“Have you got any mayonnaise?” he asked.

“Ma-yo-ni… What is this mayoni?” asked the bemused employee.

“Um, mayonnaise,” clarified Robbie gruffly.

Joey and I stepped in and tried to describe mayonnaise using simple English words.

“It’s like, um, white, creamy, eggy…”

“You know, mayonnaise,” interjected Robbie a little louder than speaking volume and with an emphasis on the word.

“…in a jar, white, tangy,” we continued.

“Mayonnaise,” repeated Robbie, louder.

“It’s creamy. And white.” we mumbled as we ran out of adjectives.

“MAYONNAISE!” exclaimed a terribly frustrated Robbie, who just wanted some freakin’ mayo, almost screaming.

And as if by magic, Robbie’s culturally insensitive and rather insulting method of communication worked! The (quite shocked) girl went out the back and put mayonnaise on Robbie’s sandwich. So whenever for the rest of our travels we encountered a language difficulty Joey and I would turn to Robbie and shout “MAYONNAISE!” at him, causing him to turn red and get all sheepish at the embarrassment of his moment of stupidity. Even later when I was travelling with McBec or other people I would suddenly exclaim “MAYONNAISE!” at the top of my voice for what seemed to them to be no apparent reason.

I encourage you to do the same when you’re next overseas. Do it for Robbie.

And as a gift from me to you, GrodsReader, I will leave this photo for you to mercilessly caption while I’m away. I shudder to think what will await me on Monday.

UPDATE: Nevernude Surname has set up an official caption competition post for your amusing caption entries.

The Rudd government, through education minister Julia Gillard, has flagged a strong policy focus on LOTE (Languages Other Than English) in primary and secondary schools.

THE Federal Government is moving to significantly increase the number of students graduating with foreign language skills by pushing the states towards a nationally consistent language curriculum.

New government research to be released tomorrow has found that students are being turned off languages because they believe the subject will affect their university entry scores or because they are told by parents and career teachers that language skills are not relevant to their future.

Gillard says that Australian students need second language skills to remain internationally competitive — and this is true — but there are other major advantages to learning foreign languages in school.

1) Learning another language improves one’s English skills.
Getting your head around the grammar, sentence structure, spelling, punctuation and formatting rules (and contradictions!) of a foreign language makes you pay attention — perhaps for the first time — to the same rules that you use intuitively in the English language. However, to use a language well you’ve got to do more than just use it intuitively. A lot of people can write and speak seemingly sophisticated sentences in English with fancy words and complicated structures, but are relying on reciting them from memory without a basic understanding of the underlying rules that govern the language they’ve just used. Learning another language from scratch helps you learn how to better use the building blocks of your native language that allow you to “play” with words, get creative, and better communicate in a range of genres and situations.

2) Learning another language improves one’s thinking.
More to the point, it improves your metacognition — thinking about thinking. The process of forming connections between foreign and native vocab gives you an amazing insight into the way your brain ticks. People who understand the way that they think, and can manipulate their thinking and actions while engineering situations to best match their thinking styles, are better overall learners than people who have poor metacognition.

3) Learning another language improves one’s cultural understanding and relations.
Pretty obvious this one but very important. Language is a window through which you can understand a culture and its history. Everyone’s heard the story about how Eskimos have forty words for snow or something like that, but there are less obvious ways to read history through words. The literal English translation of a foreign word may reveal a between the lines truth about the way other people think. Also, what are the first words you learn in another language? Foods and other interesting cultural tidbits.

When we travel overseas we expect practically everyone to speak English and, lucky for us, they usually speak enough for us to communicate. Just because English is basically the universal language of travel isn’t an excuse to get lazy and refuse to learn anything else. Making an effort to learn another person’s language shows respect — even if your efforts to hold a conversation fail and you both need to default to English.

4) Learning another language increases one’s sense of the world and decreases one’s insularity.
This is especially crucial for Australia. We’re a young country and rather isolated and insular in our corner of the world. With our close cultural ties to other English speaking countries, and English one of the “global” languages, it’s easy to forget that it’s not the mother tongue for the majority of Earth’s citizens. By failing to force students to learn another language at school, combined with the fact that we can generally get by with English alone when travelling, we reinforce the false primacy of English and a lack of need for other language skills.

Overall, it’s hard to justify the current attitude to LOTE in schools. We should really be requiring primary and secondary school students to study at least one language up to grade ten. Western European languages are most commonly taught at schools but the focus in future should be on south-east Asian languages as they will become increasingly relevant to our lives. Oh, and there are dozens of live Aboriginal languages that exist within our very own country. What about some of them?

Kevin Andrews on why gang-forming types shouldn’t be allowed into Australia:

Under pressure to explain his latest reasons for closing the door to new African refugee applicants until next year, Mr Andrews yesterday blamed gang-based violence…

(source)

Some recent gang violence:

[P]olice in the western suburbs [of Melbourne] yesterday appealed for witnesses to the bashing in Melton on Tuesday of 17-year-old Ajang Gor.

The Sudanese-born high school student was riding his bike home from his job at a fast-food restaurant with his brother at 4pm when he was set on by four men, who shouted racial slurs, then punched and kicked him and hit him with a bottle.

The attackers stole his wallet and phone, then sent racist text messages and made abusive phone calls to Ajang’s brother, cousins and friends.

(source)

Kevin Andrews talking about the importance of English proficiency for life in Australia:

“[T]he bottom line is if you wish to achieve your aspirations in Australia then it is quite crucial that you can speak English… the language of this country is English and we encourage people to actually be able to competently speak English.”

(source)

The English spoken by the (presumably white) Australian gang members who attacked Sudanese migrant Ajang Gor:

Wats up u black dogs ya mate jst got knocked da fuk out we jst jackd him welcome 2 australia u jigaboo fuks melton blood gang we from melton u pieces of shit

Well, not really. I’m going there for a ten day snowboarding jaunt in a few weeks but not actually moving there. But listening to NZ PM Helen Clark on the 7.30 Report last night I’m thinking about it.

Seriously, don’t you wish our prime minister cut the bullshit, sanitised diplomatic language and spoke like this?

That’s what leads us to the conclusion that this is simply taking a flick at New Zealand.

Frankly, the Fiji interim government didn’t appear to give a toss about that…

Can you ever see John Howard or Kevin Rudd using that sort of language when discussing Australia’s foreign relations?

It’s Tuesday and the latest episode of Lachlan Connor, Independent is nowhere to be seen. In fact, I’ve been largely absent from this website recently with almost zero posts or comments in my name over the last week. But, Jesus, it’s been busy at work. I’m afraid that report writing will cause Lachlan to be a few more days yet; perhaps next week due to Jacob Billybob’s wedding on Friday. But in the meantime I urge you to go read the transcript of a great Radio National Perspective in the context of those bloggers who try to excuse their poor English by crapping on about the language being a “living, evolving creature.”

The English language is a living, breathing, constantly evolving beast. As exciting as this is for many of us, we must recognise the difference between new words, expressions and ways of communicating, and incorrect grammar bred from laziness, ignorance and stupidity.

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).

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.