> >if you overlook the Aborigines and the folks in the immigrant
> >detention centers.
What a joke. Why should we overlook these folks?! Unless the country is Amurka, which oppresses freely beyond its own borders as well as within, the way you measure a country's oppressiveness, surely? is by the way it treats its most vulnerable elements.
...and Rob,
>'Australia' is very much the oppressor here - and due warning, too, that
>'globalisation' du jour should not too readily be coupled with the notion
>of 'cosmopolitanism'. If anything, a large slab of Australia is less
>cosmopolitan than it was a few years ago. Howard's government - in concert
>with Labor's gutlessness - have succeeded in making xenophobia more
>acceptable. Things are being done in our name in those latter-day
>concentration camps that we would once not have tolerated.
Well, ahem. I find this somewhat disingenuous, too, since the White Australia policy was only recently abolished. Woomera is very much in keeping with that ethic, no?
cheers, Joanna