The recent topic from Amel: "Is Australia Really a Racist Country" is one in a long line of obsessive interest with Australias' and Australians' attitude to immigrants to our country?

How about a change? What about the people who come here?

How do you find immigrants and their attitudes to Australia?

Are any overtures you make to immigrants successful and welcomed, or do you get looked at as if you are something the cat dragged in?

What do you think about many of the newly arrived cultures herding into "ghettos" because they feel more comfortable with their own kind? Do you think that it is as wrong for them to prefer the company of their own kind in the same way as many people think it is wrong for Australians to feel better in the company of their own kind? Many ethnic groups arriving in the 40's and 50's are still doing it and speaking foreign languages.

Do you think there are double standards in this "debate"?

Do you really give a stuff one way or the other, or do you think it's about time we accepted ourselves the way we are and got on with life?

I would suggest Australians are racist but in comparison with many immigrant groups (white and black) and indigneous groups we are a pretty to;erant lot.

As I've said before, it's pretty obvious to me that there is more variation within any given culture than there is between. Racism exists in every culture, including those that immigrate here. Luckily overtly racist attitudes are almost always in the minority.

Racism (and prejudice in general) is a problem in all of humanity, and not confined to or a defining feature of any group. It's up to individuals to think about and understand their own attitudes, throwing blame onto other groups doesn't help anyone.

When I see white Australians they all speak their own language and want to hang around their own kind.

But none of them know anything about the land or how to take care of the delicate environment we have. The water crisis is a good example of this ignorance. They dig up the land, put animals with cloven feet on it and then spend millions of dollars researching soil erosion.

After more than two hundred years I've to meet one white Australian who can speak Pitjinjarra, Yolgu or Gu gu Yimidirr or any of the 400 different languages that represented the different Aboriginal nations.

Everyone knows how to say Kangaroo, Wallaby, Uluru but no one who's language it comes from or the history behind how it became part of their 'white Australian' vernacular. There favourite song is about a man who loved a sheep!

They are indeed a strange bunch of people. And they are getting upset about other immigrants doing just what they did themselves!

Go figure!

In my experience poms are a pretty racist lot, there are
- the migrants from the Midlands in the 1970s who left the UK because they didn't want Paki neighbours
- the [aged] gilded youth of the empire who look down on all colonials
- Many poms who think that the French are the lowest of the low

Interactions with asian students of Chinese descent leads me to believe they regard Australians as
- lazy
- stupid, check our maths ability against their maths ability
- prejudiced when we pick on their spoken and written English. We go overboard on singular and plural and we are simply not as numerate as them

Many people who have migrated to Australia from Asia have quietly questioned the wisdom of continued mass migration. If we want to make multiculturalism work then we have to spend money providing remedial speech therapists for schools with large Vietnamese populations to ensure that all primary school pupils can ennounciate their vowels and consonants clearly so the who community can understand them. Australians tend to swallow ending consonants and asians take consonant swallowing to new extremes making it really difficult to understand some aussie born kids in the Vietnamese community.

Some time ago, I advised Ranier why I would not respond to his abusive posts against me. Anyone who insists on equality for Australians of aboriginal entity is automatically branded as "racist" by Ranier.

However, he believes that he is making a valid point in his latest post and, on the face of it, he is.

But, we are now talking about a civilized (in the correct sense of the word - no offense intended to the original immigrants) society as opposed to the original colonisation of a country inhabited by some 500 to 600 tribes who were separated from, and warlike to, each other and who had no idea of the country they inhabited in realtion to the rest of the world.

Let's see if he can overcome his "racism" and hatred towards white people come back into the fold as a contributor rather than a knocker.