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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Much_Apu_About_Nothing

Thanks for the update, Andrew.

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.

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.

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.

Andrews on Friday said the government had not yet decided the questions to go into the citizenship test…

So James Grubel actually bothered to ring the source and verify the facts for himself! A lesson there for all of us, I think.

JOURNALIST:

We’ve seen some details today of the new citizenship test and I believe you may have had a chance to look at…

PRIME MINISTER:

Well I have seen some questions, but those questions I gather were generated by a newspaper.

JOURNALIST:

Are you confident that most Australians would be able to answer the questions?

PRIME MINISTER:

Well the questions I looked at in the newspaper; but they’re not ours. I am not saying there’s anything wrong with them although I think some of the multiple choices were a little bit cute. Oh I think so, and particularly after people who will sit the test have gone through the resource book about Australia’s Government set up and Australia’s history. 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 Australian national life; and canvass some of Australia’s great sporting heroes and all of that sort of thing. But those questions in the paper this morning are not ours; they’re questions that have been put together. But I think most Australians would be able to answer those questions although in relation to the multiple choice ones, you might get a situation where people would see there are a couple of correct answers.

Naughty ABC, rewriting the past.

But the Hun’s page is still up. Download it while you can.

I picked up the story from ABC online but it seems the page no longer exists.