Cheers from Cannonfodder
I have nothing to add just testing my account.

Regarding Rudds' Rhetoric,

....That’s why I have a plan to secure Australia’s long-term prosperity."

We have the highest immigration intake in Australia's History, demand for land has forced house prices through the roof.

The government talks about interest rates as if they are to blame, yet interest rates are historically low.

The problem is unsustainable population growth.

I find Rudds' rhetoric, as insulting as Howards, he insults our intelligence, and the intelligence of all Australians.

He is pouring people into our country to drive a short term economy, destroying the environment, and putting inflationary pressure on the economy.
Essentially, diluting the fundamental wealth of all Australians. (Same country, more people).

He is the enemy of Australia.

Leigh: "Thanks, Mercurius, but I do like the place,"

I'm glad to hear it. I'd been starting to wonder because the only thing we ever hear from you Leigh is bilious rants against large sections of the populace of a country that you profess to like.

We never hear anything positive from you about Australia, only bitterness and bile about how this country would be so great if it wasn't for all the, er, people.

Tell me Leigh, if you take the people out of the nation, what's left?

"and I would much prefer that the morons left it."

Goodness Leigh, you're sounding like one those 'elitists' that supposedly sent to hell in a handbasket a country that you loudly claim to like.

"Let me know when you are going, and I’ll be there to wave you off."

3.35pm, Saturday 1 March, Flight QF 73 Sydney to San Francisco, then on to New York City.

Mercurius,

It is possible to like the country of my birth and dislike some of the people, both Australian-born and immigrant. I thought a clever bloke like you would know that. But, according to your version of what you always hear from me, you are a loose cannon who says the first thing that enters your head.

Sorry. I can't make it on the day of your departure. I sincerely hope that are not giving me false hope: that you really are going for good and not returning to Australia at some later date.

Lots of my white blue eyed mates don’t wear a-singlet- or shear sheep, they like a beer (many prefer a scotch or wine) prefer a steak to a prawn on the Barbie, drive a range of car models, have dogs breeds that range between poodle and bull staffie and never if ever wear a hat.

As someone who grew up in the bush, I never once encountered this ‘Jack Thomson’ “Sunday Too Far Away” character. Most of them were just hard workers whose political, cultural and ethnic origins were as diverse as they are in the city.

These men would think people like TLTR are tossers and live in a comic book world of ockerism. According to TLTR’s logic Kath and Kim was a documentary on urban living, Sir Les Patersen is a real international diplomat and that Joh Bjelke Petersen was a Nobel peace prize winning humanitarian.

You kind tell them otherwise because it would explode the mythology NOT about others but about themselves being real Australians.

Insecure in the diversity of the culture (mainstream, ethnic, Indigenous) they cling tightly to these effigies of an Australia that were born on TV and Cinema, not in the daily lives of ordinary Australians.

Hitler’s youth believed similar mythologies about the folk taxonomies of the "Arian race".

Paul Hogan became a millionaire selling this crap back to people who believed it was true.

Throw another tosser like TLTR on the Bar-bee sez me

Mercurius, quite the usual, curious.
For disparrage of Leigh's outrage,
Youse, hate of tall poppies, true blue.
For as black as the boiled kettle's age
A seered pot's posts carry the same hue.

First a drunken claim, refuted by initial name,
Two's a slur, an unintended memorial indeed,
And three's a copy best left to the truely inane.
Nil the jest or joust, for alls spat from the same intolerant seed.

Australian define's Australian by the way of word and deed,
I'd hate to think such is such by examples of thrust and parry
On display for all to see and judge, without a need of reed,
the finest Australian is in the way of high bearing and carry.
:-)