Yeah fair call and I was a bit loose about that. I can say from a Kiwi perspective Julia Gillard gained enormous respect in New Zealand and when she was dumped, John Key our (conservative) Prime Minister invited her to stay with his family for a break. Good people all round.
Yeah, I’m normally a Labour voter but they just didn’t have their shit together. It was embarrassing. I didn’t like what they did to Rudd and I didn’t like what they did to Gillard. Just choose a fucking leader and stick with them, for better or worse, for at least one term of government. Labour had something worse than a bad leader, they had no leader. Sorry, “Labor”.
I can’t think of a formal term, but some European commentators made clear that they distinguished between “ranging over” the land and “inhabiting” the land. True ownership, they believed, required settled farming and the (European) markers of property ownership, such as fences or hedges or boundaries.
The English cleric Samuel Purchas, writing about the Native Americans in Virginia during the period of the Jamestown settlement, wrote that the region was an “unmanned wild Countrey, which they [the Indians] range rather than inhabit.” This sort of language was used to justify conquest, because the argument was then made that the first people to occupy the land “properly” were the ones who could claim ownership.
You can see echoes of this, too, in Thomas Jefferson’s secret message to Congress on Indian relations, from 1803. Jefferson doesn’t explicitly say that the way the Indians use land disqualifies them from claiming ownership, but he does note that Indians need to be persuaded away from hunting and encouraged to “apply to the raising stock, to agriculture and domestic manufacture.” Jefferson is, at least, honest enough to admit his self-interested motives here, arguing that such a change in lifestyle will lead Indians to require less land, and will make them more likely to agree to treaties giving up that land to the United States.
I question the premise that having no leader is worse than having a bad one.
Also, isn’t it bad form to refer to Australia’s origins (i.e., the penal colony bit)?
I tend to agree, in principle, especially in a Westminster system where the Prime Minister doesn’t have separate authority from the parliament itself in the way that a President does. Indeed, the vast majority of the population never gets to vote for the PM directly; only the people in his or her electorate get to do that. The leader of the party is determined by Party insiders, not by the people more generally.
Still, even within this system, most voters understand, when they cast their votes in their local electorates, that they are also effectively voting for one or other of the party leaders. The leaders of each party might function in some ways as a sort of first among equals, but they also have clear authority within their party to steer the ship of policy. For better or worse, perception of the leader is an important part of the process, and not having one seems like a failure to many voters.
Not at all. That’s an old stereotype.
A half-century or so ago, there were Australians who preferred to avoid any mention of the country’s penal origins, and who did everything possible to hide any hint of convict background in their own families, but that has changed radically over the past few decades. Since the rise of new social history in the 1960s, and the growing emphasis on history as the story not just of business and political leaders, but of common people, the convicts have undergone a sort of rehabilitation in Australia’s national consciousness. This has coincided with Australia’s growing cosmopolitanism, so that fewer and fewer people feel any particular loyalty to England, or any shame about the convict origins of the original English colonies.
Now, it’s a point of pride for many Aussies to trace their family back to the convict days. In the mid-1990s, i was seeing a woman whose father, as one of his retirement projects, was researching the family genealogy, and they were all incredibly happy when he was able to trace one branch of the family all the way back to the First Fleet. I think Robert Hughes’ fabulous book, The Fatal Shore (1986), also contributed to the cultural shift in attitudes to the convict past.
No flag no country. 
I love Eddie Izzard.
It’s not, as explained above, but I wasn’t referring to the penal colony thing anyway, just the odd fact that the Labor party uses the American spelling rather than Australian.
An Abbott Pile-On. Here I come!!
I hated that douche long before he ever came to power, and his continual blunders, and idiotic stances just increase my hatred for him. Even with a deeply divided Labor party at the last election, I still voted for them, because I couldn’t stand the thought of Abbott running the country.
I need to correct this. There was hundreds of distinct Aboriginal nations in Australia pre-colonisation each with their own language and culture. There was also established trade networks and diplomatic relationships between nations, including trade across the Torres straight with Papua New Guinea and Indonesia. Some of the nations practised Aquaculture and they cultivated the land using fire to clear areas to make them better for hunting. “Nothing but bush” is incredibly ignorant and it puts back attempts at aboriginal conciliation by 50 years.
Here is a map of the various aboriginal nations:
http://www.abc.net.au/indigenous/map/
This seems as good a place as any to ask: when the Liberals unveiled their “Fuck You All For The Good Of The Country” budget, I’m not the only one who felt in their gut that it was a con, right? That the alleged disaster that necessitated all this belt-tightening was nothing more than a fabrication?
Not just in my gut. This budget and continuous rhetoric about belt tightening is of chicken little proportions. I just read another news story a few minutes ago, where the ‘budget crisis’ has again been trotted out. Fact is Australia’s economy remains one of the best in the world in terms of growth, debt to GDP, and a whole range of other factors.
Given the slowdown in the mining industry, and the fact that business and consumer confidence both remain very low, I’m actually quite fearful that the Liberal’s fearmongering and policy direction will result in a recession. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for moving the economy back into a surplus, but given the economic conditions it should be done very carefully, not by a slash and burn approach and by screaming to all and sundry that we have a crisis.
I thought Ed Miliband doing this was fucking weird and cringey until I saw Tony Abbot doing this. Why is he shaking and bobbing his head like he’s rain man?
Obviously he was stuck buffering.
I’m no expert on the Australian economy but I do know that both NZ and Australia had a soft landing during the GFC. Australia was insulated by mineral resource revenue and NZ had low debt.
Which suggests that our respective governments are correct in restraining spending and being austere.
To be honest Australia looks like a phenomenally wealthy nation compared with even the USA, so complaints about a tough budget are almost a fantasy when viewed from outside. You indeed do live in the Lucky Country. We Kiwis live in God’s Own Country. We are fortunate people.
Thats an insult to Autistic people to be compared to this fuckwit.
Sorry, I was referring to Abbott’s reference to it rather than yours. mhendo explained it all rather nicely though.
Why can’t the Liberals take a page out of the Labor book and come down with their own case of chronic backstabbing disorder for a change?
What a clusterfuck of a Government.
No way mate, we often say that our convict past helped shape who we are today and are very proud of it.
Abbot is an old fashioned conservative PM much like John Howard, Johnny got away with it because people for whatever reason liked him. I personally think JH was a worse PM than people think.
Why did Abbot get in? Australia tends to have conservative federal governments and labor state governments. So no big surprise and lets not fool ourselves but Labor had lost the plot at the time.
Oh how I wish we had labor people in the Bob Hawke and Paul Keating molds, these guys transformed Australia into a world class economy whilst still looking after the so called battlers.