I love Redneck's logic in the way that it apparently makes myself, and presumeably, himself, so close to people like the lovely Martin Byrant, and Ivan Milat, and those Snowtown picklers.

People can be good, bad, evil, angelic, arrogant, deluded, brilliant, sweet, kind or stupid NO MATTER their colour of skin, country of origin, or type of faith.

Woah!
This thread, apart from some honourable exceptions, really is enough to make me wish I wasn't Australian, if these sentiments are meant to be those of your average Aussie!
Some of them are reminiscent of the views of your average German about Jews in the 1930s.
Oh, and Redneck (brilliant alias, by the way) you argue that having money and being the member of a certain class indicates intelligence and then you brow beat Meg and Bronwyn for having an easy life (maybe money) and being members of a certain class, an assumption you make based purely on their opinions. Do you see a contradiction here? Maybe white immigrants with money from a certain class are the last people you'd really want coming here, because they might, indeed, be intelligent (well, maybe some of them) and so reject narrow, racist opinions for what they are; stupid.

The sneekster is emboldened by some of the stuuf he reads from time to time;

I visited the blog site of Con George -Kabatzis yesterday - I recommend it; he is really keen on putting to the terrorists.

Meredith; It is still easy to go on about the looney right banging on about terrorist cells in the west - in spite of London - because some from the right are so jolly shrill about these things - no one said they werent likely to be there. In fact I am surprised that some people were so shocked at the prospect of home grown terror.

No amount of preventative measures would have stopped action like that - and England has been geared up for this sort of thing since the seventies.

And Meredith in a comment to Bronwyn; you make reference to Australian opinion - my cry for a definition of this goes unheeded; what is an Australian opinion? - and you can add to that a defintion of "our way of life" and "our values" - it would seem I have been living a lie all this time as I am soooo out of step with those who make constant reference to these things of "ours".

And As for Islam colonising Europe - the heavy influx of Islamists and North Africans into France is a direct result of the progressive program of decolonisation of those areas from the sixites and seventies - up until then the French "owned these people" and their land and tried to imbue them with all manner of french stuff - they were part of France - they even moved to France - but as economic times changed they have clearly passed their use-by-date - and are now no longer all that welcome.

What happens today had its roots in yesterday and as today is tomrrows yesterday we'd better get it right - but I fear the damage is done.

Signing off:- Sneekeepete in a pensive and pithy mood

If you stood “shoulder to shoulder” with the working and disadvantaged Australian class you would consider the harm that multicultural immigration is doing to them and understand the anger that people from these two classes feel towards people like you.

The Australian Labor Party was once a working and disadvantaged person’s party but o0ver the years it has been hijacked by trendy lefties such as yourself who want to instigate Internationalist ideologies as party policy. That these policies are firmly opposed by the very electorate that Labor claims to represent is the real reason why John Howard keeps winning elections.

It is not in the interests of the disadvantaged class for impoverished and crime prone immigrants to rape their daughters or loot the social welfare system that many disadvantaged people consider their own means of survival. When you are down and out you get very interested in how much the social welfare cake is being divided up. Disadvantaged people are forced to live with the more undesirable ethnic groups and they feel antagonistic towards people like you for forsaking them. People like you live behind economic fences higher than the Berlin Wall. The best way to stop this lamenting about “refugees” by inner city trendies is for the government to put Muslims, Vietnamese, Lebanese and negroes into leafy suburbs like Balmain and Cremorne and watch the fun.

Working class people are incensed that immigrants are being used by the rich to undercut their pay rates. I am in the building industry myself, and I know that there are now building sites with every member of the work force of one particular ethnicity or another, where nobody speaks English and nobody knows who is being paid what. My own union newspaper has recounted stories about injured Chinese workers being denounced by their Chinese employers as illegal immigrants to get rid of them and to cover the fact that the workers were not even insured. Indian workers on a temple site at Parramatta were being paid $14 a week and they lived in shipping containers.

Pete,

Many people have repeatedly answered, “What is an Australian?”. I’ve seen many answers based on 200 years of Aussie history, traditions and culture all on this forum.

My opinion (actually answered earlier in this thread) an Australian is an actual Australian, not a New Zealander or muslim or anything else. Meaning, unless your loyalties are to Australia over anything else (religion, other nationalities and/or their political agendas), I’d say you weren’t one.

Most people don’t acknowledge mulitculturism as true Australian Identity, seeing it as a social fad or experiment, maybe in response to the new global awareness of the world’s suffering. Its sincerity isn’t questioned. We’ve had to come to terms with the fact it doesn’t work. Europe, has embraced Multi-cult for 40 odd years. It’s not just the French. What ever the reasons, look at the results. Idealism and reality don’t often go hand in hand.

Taking in foreigners is not a problem, countries need new people for labour. PC pandering to cultural differences of minorities that are un-Australian is the problem. The PC suppression of peoples judgements and freedom to say “no” to minorities just breeds resentment. Surely debate is better than censorship. Anything that needs legal protection from debate and a democratic vote can’t expect to be free from critics and agendas against it. This is the nature of Australia and most western democracies.

SneekyPete…
An more valid question is, What do we do when cultures refuse to integrate into Australian society?

"What is an Australian?"

well from what I have been told by a large number of people that if you have Italian parents you Italian, don't matter if you were born here... people I worked with in Melbourne would all claim to be Italian, not Australian if they were in that situation... same went for Lebanese, Greek, etc... most nationalities it seemed...

generally to me it seemed people claimed the nationality of the parents first, then Australian second...

nearly all of these people would also clam that there parents nation was better that our nation, this was always a common frame of mind...

I experienced excessive racism against white Anglo Saxon Australia's that spoke with a solid Australian accent... this was so common I was dumbfounded really...

I live in Tasmania, and I would have to say... this is the lest racist, most tolerant place I have live in Australia... with ease...
(This includes Tas, Vic, NSW, WA)