The Guardian Of Outdated Australian Stereotypes

I haven't blogged for about a week, but today I saw something in the Guardian.co.uk online news section for Australia where I was forced to comment via my corner of the web.

First some context, the Australia section of The Guardian's online newspaper site was recently opened up to provide more credible journalism than the mainstream news sources Australia has which have gone to the dogs, but articles like this just fill me with dread as to the accuracy of the picture this well meaning newspaper section is painting about my country.

Some of the commentary is dead on, a lot of racism and sexism is still around, the Aborigines are treated even worse, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. At least it seems that way. To say Australians don't like change is somewhat misleading. They don't like bad change, is a more apt description of what we like or don't like about this country. Change is slow down here, but it's happening more rapidly than most people who don't have the internet probably realise. We live in an age where the average twenty something in Australia knows more about the internet than the government figures supposedly meant to represent them and govern how everything is to be run.

This is notable in that a recent case where customs confiscated manga that a local Australian collector imported ended with the customs agency forced to return the manga/smut/erotica/art (which warms my heart, don't get me wrong, I relish every second of embarrassment the moral guardians in this country have dished out to them) to the person who ordered this stuff online. Oh, we have culture, we might have to import it sometimes but it's there.

We also have a culture, a time honoured tradition, of bringing embarrassment to politicians and moral guardians who question our way of life, for good or ill. Sure, we get situations where hate speech is played on the radio, but we also get situations where the attempts for a national internet filter were so poorly put together by overly nanny state-ish OFLC and telecommunications boards that it was defeated with much applause from the nerds of this country, whose tireless efforts to keep the Prime Minister's mitts out of our personal lives is in need of some kind of medal, considering how many flame wars our local internet has had to go through to remain uncensored like a lot of our movies and video games have been in the past fifty years.

Because of the incompetent attempts to nanny state the people too young to care about what the old stick in the muds of censorship have to say about us, and too old to be bothered fighting these annoyances directly rather than just ordering things online from overseas when nobody's looking, that right there is the Australian character, writ large.

We do have a culture, it's not built in stone or cement as much as it's built upon years of fighting in silence until now against irrelevant cultural dinosaurs that need to go extinct. There are people who are changing things in this country, they're just not as loud as the rugby and soccer fans drunk on Victoria Bitter about it.