It all looked pretty clear and straightforward - on Friday The Hun and NEWS.com.au published:
An exclusive insight into the likely content of a new ‘Aussie values’ test for potential Australian citizens which will come into effect later this year.
Sample questions devised by the Federal Government…
(my emphasis)
That attracted a lot of comment from bloggers, here at LP and elsewhere, with Irfan Yusuf generally credited with picking the holes in some of the questions. It also attracted a lot of negative comment from News Limited’s readership.
Update: well now we know for sure, thanks to Andrew Bartlett.
Then yesterday, in a comment at Club Troppo, Geoff Honnor linked to this report in the Brisbane Times where the Prime Minister explicitly disowned the sample questions:
Mr Andrews and Prime Minister John Howard dismissed a newspaper report which listed 20 questions which could be in the quiz.
“We’re going to have a booklet which will talk about the history of Australia and our structure of government and the importance of sport in the national life, and canvass some of Australia’s great sporting heroes and all of that sort of thing,” Mr Howard told reporters in Townsville.
“But those questions in the paper this morning are not ours.”
So it looks like a lot of people around the blogosphere were sucked in by an exercise in trolling - Jacques Chester (again at Club Troppo) fingers News Limited as the trolls. But were they?
As yet, the transcript of that Townsville radio interview hasn’t appeared at the Prime Minister’s Official Web Site but it might be worth keeping an eye open for it, just in case the PM went on to say just whose sample questions they actually were.
And with Parliament sitting again, I suppose there’s also a slim chance that Kevin Andrews and John Howard might be challenged to repeat their denials in the House. Or will that fall to Chris Ellison in the Senate?
Everybody lies.
It’s interesting that Tim “Inside The Tent” Dunlop was also quite comprehensively fooled.
I picked up the story from ABC online but it seems the page no longer exists.
gandhi: “I picked up the story from ABC online but it seems the page no longer exists.”
Naughty ABC, rewriting the past.
But the Hun’s page is still up. Download it while you can.
The transcript is up now: http://www.pm.gov.au/media/Interview/2007/Interview24329.cfm
Why is there this assumption that sport plays such an important part in the formation of the national psyche? After all, more people go to art galleries than to sports events?
Surely to be well-balanced we need questions on such subjects as the whereabouts of Australia’s oldest rock art, and how much of it will be left after the mining companies go through the area?
Oh, sorry, the PM didn’t mean *that* sort of history?
A good point Lesley. I was born here but would most likely find it difficult to answer questions about Australian sport. Why is it considered more important than Australian literature or art?
A Reuters journo in Canberra posted this story at 2:14 am Friday (Canberra time?):
So James Grubel actually bothered to ring the source and verify the facts for himself! A lesson there for all of us, I think.
How come nobody told Piers?
Lesley and Cass - re the sport thing:
My totally unsubstantiated hypothesis runs a bit like this:
the Great Australian Sport Thing dates from back when Australia was a very rural Sunny Southern Shire of England, spiritually somewhere between the Isle of Wight and Jersey. It was a great place to send political prisoners, high-spirited troopers, wannabe squattocrats, spare sons of nobility, and all sorts of other pioneering types. But it was important to make sure that they never developed a nation to compete with Mother England. So they were conditioned to enjoy the outdoor life, and hard physical yakka, and dig stuff up and shear stuff off, and grow tall and fit, and worship running and jumping and swimming and throwing things. But woe betide them if they wanted to make complicated precision bits and pieces, or think hard about anything. That was Advanced Stuff, which was only to be done in The Hub Of Empire, not at the Arse End Of The Universe. And as Blighty’s Rule atrophied, and Australia federated, the outgoing Powers made sure that a ruling class was left in place who retained the deep conviction that running such an undeveloped sunny rural paradise only entailed being a colonial governor for a Greater Power - it was easy: any inbred Downer or Beazley could do it!
So to this day, we have a federal government that will spend however many millions it takes to get us the Olympic Golds of a Sporting Superpower, but allows our irreplaceable resources to be plundered by foreign-owned companies and shipped out unprocessed by Australian workers, and which regards running-down of manufacturing industries, universities, science, and failure to support new high-tech industry, as acceptable, since we are after all only a far-flung peripheral colony of happy-natured bumpkins, digging, shearing, running, jumping, throwing and swimming in the sunshine. We have too few people to be able to do anything more complicated. We are too short on skills. We haven’t got the local market. We are too far from Where It All Happens. We can’t afford it.
And other pathetic, lying excuses.
The sport-pushing stuff is just another example of Ratty trying to reinforce and propagate this idiotic conditioning.
Not sure where it’s going as yet, Gummo, but there’s definitely a story in this. Looks like the blogosphere is doing its bit when it comes to digging it up, too.
Yes, the hardcore blogosphere, left, right or out there, jus’ lives for such nitpicking exercises.
Sooner or later, we’ll get to the bottom of and expose this military/industrial/media/academia/vast right wing conspiracy/treasonous left octopus that seems to have washed, rinised and blow dried every mind but ours.
Methinks the smell of rat is so all-pervasive these days it’s interfering with me bull-shit detector, SL.
Just to put the issue of whether the questions came from the government as close to beyond doubt as is possible, I asked as clear-cut a question as possible of the head of the Immigration Department and the Minister representing the government at the Senate Estimates Committee hearing an hour or so ago.
The response was a flat denial that the questions came from the government and a clear statement that the original media outlet was false in stating that the questions “were devised by the federal government”.
Indeed, the Department head said that no questions had been drafted as yet. Obviously somebody is fibbing, but I would have to assume the government is telling the truth on this one. If they aren’t, I’m sure we’ll hear about it very quickly from News Ltd, as they’ve basically been labelled by the Department and government as liars.
I still think the citizenship test is unnecessary and a waste of $123 million, but it appears that one can’t criticise the government on this occasion about the content and intent behind the questions, seeing they didn’t devise them.
Trolled by News Ltd, then. Thanks for that Andrew; I really hope someone goes after the Hun’s arse on this.
Trolled by News Ltd, then.
Thanks for the update, Andrew.
Does All this talk about Citizenship Tests remind you of this Simpsoins Episode ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Apu_About_Nothing
There is something WRONG with a citizenship test?
If a country is good enough for people to quit their heritage for, then it is good enough for them to show some respect for it.