chainsmoker said: "Nobody has suggested we should be part of Asia for more than a decade now..."

At the risk of digressing from the main topic at hand...

"...A combination of Mandarin and Cantonese is now the most, if you can combine them, is now the most widely spoken foreign language in Australia. And that's a little fact, a little vignette that's probably known to a lot of you, but when you tell that to an Asian leader or even more so, to a European leader, they're perfectly astonished. And it's just an illustration of the way in which we are naturally and comfortably and permanently part of this region and see our future in it." - John Winston Howard, 2006

http://www.abc.net.au/am/content/2006/s1793482.htm

Not as overt as Bob Hawke's proclamatiom that "demography is working as inexorably as economics to make Australia's future be part of Asia", but an extraordinary comment nonetheless.

Not to mention Kevin Rudd wanting to make Mandarin compulsory in all schools. Why? Because he can speak it, so should the rest of us. Maybe he is right.

Commonwealth countries like Australia, Canada and NZ don't by nature tend to be patriotic. We have never been entirely satisfied as we can always do things better. This is also Buddhist philosophy.

On-the-other hand, you could have a point about Australia.

Metaphor time.

In a way, the film: "Muriel's Wedding" captures an Australian trait: the rejected child.

The formation of the European Union was just like Muriel's friends who rejected Australia and the daggy colonies when they all started "marrying" each other. They distanced themselves from the trashy "convicts".

Australia was the embarrassment that wouldn't go away.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDuHvifF0mk

So Australia: Muriel, had to reinvent herself into something more savvy than we really are: as the movie so astutely shows, Muriel in all her fantasies, self hate and fraud ends up being just like her father. The mother, in this dysfunctional family suicides almost unnoticed. Rather than deny the truth of mundane life, she "drowned" in it.

If our father's have run away with "aunty Germany" (what a coincidence!), our mother is all but dead from depression, and no one wants the family to work as its too boring, why would we want to know who we are?

The problem is fraud and denial are but destructive resorts?

If Australia is the abandoned child that has to turn to fraud or pretence, will we ever have the courage to have a serious chat to "the family"?

You know this country as a commonwealth is not nearly as boring as people would have you believe.

How are these so called self-loathing, anti-Western academic elites responsible for the number of Mandarin and Cantonese speakers in Australia?

They don't set immigration rates. Language departments in our universities are closing down all over the place, so you can't blame them for teaching these languages. It wasn't the elites' idea to turn us into China's quarry.

OK, so you clearly don't want to be part of Asia. Great. Whatever. I fail to see what the kind of elites you're talking about have to do with it. The elites responsible are more likely government ones, and business and mining elites who are making money out of it

I respond upon the article, Can Australia Survive the 21st Century? BY By Hugh M Morgan AC AT http://www.henrythornton.com/article.asp?article_id=4028 which indicates to me that the writer may have had considerable education but lacks any comprehension as to what the Commonwealth of Australia is about. His comments about dual citizens, and “Australia citizenship” are in my view, as a “CONSTITUTIONALIST” and Author of one of my books published on 30 September 2003,
INSPECTOR-RIKATI® on CITIZENSHIP
A book on CD about Australians unduly harmed.
(ISBN 0-9580569-6-X prior to 1-1-2007) ISBN 978-0-9580569-6-0
uter and sheer nonsensce.

See also my extensive set out on my blog at http://au.360.yahoo.com/profile-ijpxwMQ4dbXm0BMADq1lv8AYHknTV_QH and my website http://www.schorel-hlavka.com
The writer should be aware that laws that are unconstitutionally are no laws at all and Australian citizenship is not a nationality but a political status and the Commonwealth of Australia is not a country but a “political union". If he doesn’t even understand this then I view he rather undermines the good work of the Framers of the Constitution!