HiddenPaw

Wholeheartedly agree, ABC. The same goes for the UK.

I can't relate to much of what people complain about regarding life in the UK - maybe because I live in a reasonably quiet village in the north west, where traffic, pollution and crime are low and the sun shines a fair bit!! Altho of course we get the mums in 4WD round these parts too....they were called Toorak Tractors in Melbourne...not sure if we have a name for them up in these parts...!!

Megalania

Blyth Scythes.

ABCDiamond

If only everyone could understand that both countries have different parts to them.

The previous posters comment about "overt racism" in Australia, could easily make me reply that there is more racism in the UK.
However I understand that certain parts of the UK, like certain parts of Australia, and most other countries, will have similar levels of racism, some high some low. Comparing our last area in the UK to our current area in Australia, the racism was 10 times as noticable in the UK.
What gets me is how some people want to try to point out the Australian racism in every posting, by including it in their location: Location: Oz - a short way to spell boring, parochial and racist
The problem is that it only serves to remind me how bad the UK is for racism, and how little we see of it here.

Megalania

Poor MikeStanton, buggered for life.

MikeStanton

Or, rather, how little you choose to see.

But then again, I presume that you are a WASP (or a suntanned WASP). UK definitely has pockets of racism. However, in general, Aussies are far more racist - and openly so. The Oz mentality - especially Q'land and WA - reminds me much more of that in the southern states of the USA (eg Texas).

Aren't you the same ABCDiamond that regarded the Oz One Nation party as not racist? Of course it isn't racist, just like the BNP...

Megalania

Are You a Bloodied Jew?

WBB

i thought buggery was something mike stanton does in his spare time.

MikeStanton

Buggery? Talk of the devil, it's WBB - the thinking man's coma.

How's your girlfriend today - it must be close to shearing time?

WBB

you used to be quite witty, i suppose we all lose it eventually.

pack up your computer mike, your a spent force.

MikeStanton

Even an Aussie admits that Oz is a generation behind UK in terms of dealing with racism.

Have a read of this (edited for key points):

"Wake up Australia, racism is a problem

Malcolm Knox on the home truths revealed by the Lehmann episode

Monday January 20, 2003
The Guardian

The Darren Lehmann case has exposed a double standard in the Australian cricket community. Normally, moments of the highest pressure in sport are held to reveal character. ..We beat the drum of our own supremacy because we're tough when it really matters.

Yet for Lehmann, the logic has been reversed. His defenders cannot reconcile his outburst against his Sri Lankan opponents with his reputation as a "good bloke". Team-mates and associates have described Lehmann's slur as an "out of character" act, committed "in the heat of the moment" by someone who is "universally regarded as a nice guy". Instead it is the Sri Lankans who are rendered villains, oversensitive and unmanly to complain.

How is it that for Lehmann the rule is waived? How is it that in the heat of the moment, he did something supposedly out of character?

Lehmann's misfortune is that he is the man who got caught revealing the unwitting racism that infuses not only Australian cricketing culture but mainstream Australia.

Lehmann's supporters cannot understand the difference between calling someone a "******" and a "black ******". Nor, presumably, can they understand that it is offensive for our media commentators to speak of the Sri Lankans as "babbling" in the field, as "leaping about with great big smiles" or as "little guys". Monkeys babble. Little black sambos have great big smiles.

We're not yet at a stage of cultural maturity where we even know what racism is.

Racism in Australia is insidious, unadmitted. We have few proud racists. There is no open Klan or National Front here. Our white supremacist fringe - the 10% of voters represented in the late 1990s by Pauline Hanson but who, in the 2001 election, swung back into step with Howard's dance of Arab-phobia - do not admit to racism.

Hanson's platform of cutting non-white immigration and government assistance to Aborigines was coded as a call for "fairness" (no pun intended) from "mainstream Australia". .. All ills can be cured if everybody just stops whingeing and swallows the (white, male, resolutely middle-class and anti-intellectual) panacea of 'mateship'.

By raising this, one risks being labelled politically-correct and a troublemaker. Three years ago, when India toured Australia, I interviewed Indian-Australians who were supporting India. I found two reasons.

One was that it is natural not to let go of one's birthplace. Presumably those Australians who impose cultural-assimilation policies upon new arrivals are not the ones who slag Greg Norman for his American accent; presumably those who say Muslims should renounce their language and religion once they become Australians are not the ones who accuse Clive James and Germaine Greer of "selling out" their Australian-ness to Britain.

Yet a more pungent reason for those Indian flags at the Sydney Cricket Ground was that fathers resented the exclusion of their sons from local and school teams. Every family I interviewed had a story of a boy who had been shut out of the "in" group because of his race, or his teetotalism, or some other cultural difference.

Lest this be taken as paranoia, one need only look at the make-up of Australian cricket teams at senior levels. The most common name in the Sydney phone book is Lee - and they're not relatives of Brett - yet all our teams can boast is the occasional Kasprowicz or Di Venuto. If you want a cultural snapshot of Australia in the 1950s, look no further than our cricket.

Rather than shame, our cricket community tends to feel pride in this ethnic wholeness. Yet the Lehmann case has shown that an excess of our greatest strengths - unity, certainty, simplicity - has become our greatest weakness.

Australian triumphalism masks the fact that we lag a generation behind England in resolving the race debate. While English sporting clubs struggle to harmonise different cultures, Australian clubs fix the problem by leaving non-whites out."

Simone

But Mike, that doesn't make all towns, all people in Australia racist!!!!

It's actually very insulting to some. I have friends in Oz, and I know for a fact they're not racist.

I'm fine with you discussing how racist Oz is, but the 'Oz- the short way to spell....' is just very annoying.
And doesn't that make you a racist? Calling all Australians(and Germans..) racist???????
You're lumping together whole races, so, I believe that's called racism???

Megalania

Malcolm Knox - Author of "Summerland"

MikeStanton

Simone, obviously it is a generalisation. Of course there are exceptions - but they only serve to emphasise the general situation.

young_lad

You're making lots of sense Simone.

Mike:
You just come across as bitter, twisted and *still* angry. You may have some good points to make about the downsides to life in Australia, but it's all lost.

(And please resist the temptation to label me someone who only wants to hear sweetness and light, because you couldn't be further from the truth.)

Simone

Yes, well I dislike generalisations, always have.

And I believe I don't generalise much myself, and if I do, it's as a joke. But I wonder if I even do that very often...?

I know there aren't just a few exeptions. There's many.
So, no, I don't believe the general situation is racism.