[lfjokes] Article in 'The Times' -Australia

[simondo]

Pretty hard call on Aussie...

 THE TIMES SUNDAY JANUARY 13 2002 Jeremy Clarkson:
 Be careful of the  Lucky  Country, it has teeth. Surely, after 20 days of
 trial by fire, the Australians must now realise that God never really
 intended this enormous tinderbox to be used for human habitation.
 Plainly it was created as a giant dustbin, a place far from civilisation
 where all His failed experiments could be left to their own terrifying
 devices. "Oh no," said God on the fourth day, "I've gone and made a spider
 which can kill a man just by looking at him. I need somewhere to put it."
 So on the fifth day He created Australia.
 This then became home for all the horrid snakes and the bitey crocodiles and
 the baby-eating dingoes. And to make sure that man stayed away, He made the
 land itself completely infertile and filled the sea around its shores with
 deadly sharks and killer jellyfish. He even built an enormous barrier reef.
 Frankly, He did everything possible to ensure that humans never went there,
 short of putting up a sign saying "Trespassers will be eaten".
 Nobody knows what drew the Aborigines but we do know that the first white
 man to sail this way was the world's most useless explorer, a Dutchman
 called Abel Tasman. In a three-year voyage he found Fiji, New Zealand and
 Tasmania, but in one of the most inept pieces of navigation ever he
 completely missed the big bit in the middle. That was discovered by Captain
 James Cook who stepped off his ship, sniffed the air and declared, "Yes.
 This would make a fantastic prison."
 He was right, of course. For millions of years Australia had harboured all
 the world's dangerous animals so why not use it as a waste disposal unit for
 dangerous people? And even when the transportation of convicts stopped, it
 was still a good place for people who couldn't get on anywhere else.
 Think about it. Nobody ever went to live in Australia because of the success
 they'd made of things at home. "I have thousands of friends, endless party
 invitations, a wonderful, happy family, a great job and even better
 prospects. So I'm off." All Australians are descended from Billy No Mates.
 You'd expect them to have some sympathy with the refugees from central Asia.
 But no. They've turned their former prison into a fortress and the doors are
 now firmly closed.
 Australians stand on their porches with flames licking at their back door,
 telling us that life over there is peachy. "It's always warm enough for a
 barbecue," they say. Never mind that the most recent barbie was so enormous
 and so hot that it had to be extinguished by a fleet of helicopters.
 They're even using the wildlife as a scare campaign, telling the world what
 we already know: that the 10 most deadly snakes found anywhere in the world
 are all Australian. They run PR campaigns throughout Asia, showing pictures
 of boats used by refugees marooned on beaches with big fat crocodiles
 lolling nearby.
 However, the reception from the indigenous wildlife is as nothing compared
 to the reception you'll get from the locals.
 It's bad enough for a British person who's only there on holiday.  Every
 time you walk into a pub, you get the same reaction. "Backs to the wall
 everyone.  There's a Pom in the bar," followed by: "Hide your wallet under
 the soap.  He won't find it there."
 Not desperately imaginative but then what do you expect from a people who
 named a blue spotted ray that lives in lagoons "the blue spotted lagoon
 ray", or a range of mountains with snow on them "the Snowy Mountains".
 And that's before we get to "the Great Barrier Reef".
 Anyway, if we have a hard time, imagine what it's like for Abdul. In a
 recent poll, 96% of Australians said they wanted the refugees out, dead,
 buried, eaten, anything. Last summer an advertisement appeared in one of the
 newspapers there asking people with a military background to join
 vigilante-style patrols.
 Refugees who get caught by the proper authorities are sent to a
 fantastically remote detention centre near Woomera, where the British did
 their atomic tests in the 1950s. They can get out easily but it's an 18-day
 walk to the nearest telephone box and that's doubly hard when you've grown
 two heads.
 So what sort of volume are we talking about here? Well, last year the number
 of people who arrived in Australia illegally from the usual refugee hot
 spots was 4,500. That works out at one for every 666 square miles. You could
 put the downtrodden masses from all over the world in the Northern
 Territories and not even know they were there.
 Australia says that it took in thousands of Vietnamese and Cambodian boat
 people in the 1970s and 1980s, along with most of Britain's displaced trade
 union leaders who were no longer welcome at No 10 for tea and buns. It won't
 now fulfil the legal and moral obligations of other nations.
 Well, Europe has a falling birthrate and can take a few refugees. The
 Americans are dropping food parcels on their heads. Africa is hopeless and
 Asia is the problem, which leaves either Antarctica, which seems a bit
 antisocial, or the very place that was specifically designed to be home for
 misfits: Australia.