People
Issue No. 32 - December/January
How do you value your own conduct?
by Colin Pearce
The second half of 2006 kicked off an interesting time. After the footy finals wound up, we had Bathurst, Phillip Island, the start of the Ashes Tour, the Barmy Army arrived, and the Spring Racing Carnival came and went.
We had a state funeral for a bloke who won car races, a memorial for a guy who loved crocodiles watched by 300,000,000 people on TV, and a few people getting on their soapbox about some pretty hot topics.
We had the PM talking about values tests for immigrants and funding for chaplains to fill the spiritual vacuum in schools. Then we had a mullah who can’t speak English claiming to support Australia going off about women without scarves deliberately attracting rapists.
That lot certainly filled the newspapers. The letters to the editors and the talkback radio callers were cackling for statues to be erected, heads to roll, people to be deported and for Australians to stand up for the Australian way of life.
Like most people I was entertained by some of those events and emotionally and intellectually brutalised by others! I also had a wry smile to myself about a lot of it.
We’re a funny lot, we Aussies. We get all puffed up and self-righteous about our Australian way of life and our way of doing things, yet we really haven’t got a clue about much of it. Someone once called us the people who look down on the rest of the world from the kerb.
We have been asked by the pollsters to name our values. They asked how bonded we were to mateship, a fair go, respect for the rule of law, siding with the battler.
I would have asked if we weren’t also bonded to getting pi_ _ ed over Easter weekend, shopping, dodging work, and buying stuff for the car and the house.
My reading is that most of us have no idea what our values are and I suspect if we found out we’d all be horrified to learn how vulgar, trite and inconsistent we can be.
Here’s a list I’ve overheard from 5...
