Poor old Greg is off the planet!I was fortunate to have managed a cotton farm in Queensland many years ago, and I found most of the staff who were of ethnic origin to be good workers and got on exceptionally well with the members of the staff who were Australian.The only problem I found was I had to cater the working conditions along cultural lines.

For example the Negroid types had a tendancy to want to fornicate in the open fields whilst picking cotton, so I had to build little sheds every few hundred metres so they could hide away so to speak.

The Indians and Pakistanis were a little better once we took away there little bells and bongo drums they fitted in very well.

Of course our biggest problems were with the English workers not only did they want breaks,they wanted money for luxuries like food and clothes.The ungrateful dolts also wanted to orginise into unions.

Oh yes Gregy was right on,and the right wing cracker jacks that post on this forum all must go round with there heads shoved up there arses.I know I can't spell and my grammer is up the sh@# but I do know where my local library is.Racism is alive and well in Australia and has been since 1788

Col, I honestly didn't expect you to understand, but I thought it might be worth a shot.

>>So you would rather waste your time and posting allocation defending the asinine and puerile writings of a scumbag like Greg Barnes and ignore the fair challenge to comment on how Australia rates in comparative racist scales to other nations<<

It clearly escaped your notice - probably because you were having trouble with the red mists at the time - that I didn't actually comment on Greg's piece at all, only on the responses to it. It is a far too subtle distinction for you to comprehend, I know, but you really ought to try a little harder occasionally.

My observations were twofold. (That is, there were two of them Col). First, that it is eminently possible to love a person, country or thing and at the same time to criticize it. Many of the posts assume that if you dislike some aspect of Australia, you should by definition choose to live somewhere else. I think this is a pathetic cop-out.

The second observation was that the vast majority of posters decided that in lieu of disagreeing with the sentiment of the piece, they would bucket the author, and that in my experience this was a symptom of knee-jerk emotion rather than sober and constructive thought.

You seem to think that these observations of mine deserve the same treatment, which is your right.

But you then ask me instead to address "the fair challenge to comment on how Australia rates in comparative racist scales to other nations"

You yourself rated Australia as being perhaps just the teensiest bit racist. In doing so, you find yourself in some level of agreement with Greg. Only the quantity - and it is, as you admit, a personal assessment - differs.

As the old story has it, "we both agree what you are, now we are simply discussing the price."

your absolutely right philb, australia is a racist country full of redneck racists.

pound for pound the biggest racists are those pesky aboriginals.......they hate us white folk with a passion......the ingrates, after all we done for them.

apparently those lebs run a close second and they keep attacking white people without provocation.

and i haven't even mentioned the whole serbs V croats thing and dont get me started on that greeks V macedonian hoohaa.

I have shared a mug of home made wine after loading tobbaco near Bundaberg with people who came from Italy.
Have cousins by marridge from Germany Malta France and Isreal, have worked with people from all over this world.
Raceist backwater? no fools like this bloke are not worth the read.
But is it ok to say just what most Australians think?
Is it ok to fear SOME Lebanese Muslims act like raceists towards us?
Or must we not tell the truth? can the word asimilation be a bad one?

Pericles - Indeed I did rate aspects of Australian society as having racist tendencies, to a far less extent than any other society.

That is absolutely true.

Yet Barnes lathers and spits about how terrible we are and how we should all wear sack cloth and my view is - since in my model of the world I am an individual and not responsible for the actions of morons, I am not responsible for racists thugs any more than I am responsible for supercilious ponces who assume the air of the knowall socialist elite.

As for

""we both agree what you are, now we are simply discussing the price."

Oh you obviously do not know who I am - however the analogy is useful - you being so accustomed to having to "pay" for what I have only received in the spirit of love and respect.

I have often wondered who is more diminished by such an exchange - those desperate for money or those so desperate for human contact they have to "buy" it - or maybe just paying for it imparts some sense of "control" - its "pathetic" either way.

Love Greg Barnes - or hate him,we must concede the man has GUTS !That he be so bold to call a spade for what it is, has exploded the myth we are a generation of partriots - quote 'pigs'.How many of us have the fortitude to articulate our soul's ?

We live in 'fairy-land 'mannipulated by our erstwhile Political masters, who GB has painfully sought to appropriate squarely and fairly..the blame - for all the malaise, divisiveness, racial-inequality, xenophobia,'hansonism' etc that is strangling the life out of this wonderful Nation, we call home.

Young Greg has a cv that would shame some of his outraged detractors. He has walked the corridors of Power; witnessed what most of us dream about. He is no slough among the ' movers-and-shakers ' of our elite Government. Simply put he has "been-there-and-done-that".

Some of his denigrators shouln't be offended nor 'maintain their rage'. It is not the first time he has 'taken the mickey' at his readers. His chutpah and seemingly bold rhetoric is lampooning our sense of identity. Taken with a grain of prozac, manages to convey their misplaced idealism, inferiority complex, cultural-cringe, and ersatz jingoism ! By draping oneself in the National flag, doesn't automatically make one a 'true-blue' ozzie battler ?

Basically,in one critical barb, he has apportioned the entire fiasco of our day of infamY " CRONULLA.DEC 11/05 " where it rightfully belong - at our pollies. We can skirt the facts willy-nilly, and blame the 'gullible pawns, religion, multiculturalism, migration, whatever - as the 'shock-jocks', and Prof Blainey have so eloquently inflamed. Truth is, none of us had any say in the mechanisation of Government. We apathetically chose to ELECT THE PRETENDERS to the Lodge.

As GB points out successive PM's, Gough Whitlam, Hawke, Keating, Fraser and JH have all in one way or another, imposed their collective 'enlightenment' on the electorate with such cataclysmic results.

They never imagined their enshrined policies would implode in the suburbs; that ghetto's, gang-warfare, yobboism, and a multitude of social, economic and pyschological dilemma's would one day surface to haunt them.

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