Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Wake Up Australia Before Its Too Late

Headline in the NZ Herald online this morning:

"Legalising of gay marriage doomed unless Abbott allows conscious vote"

Essentially life is tough for Kiwi consciences. We want to think well of our cousins across the ditch. But so many temptations to think badly of them come our way. I wonder if the Ozzie parliament is comatose, drunk or asleep?

Or maybe our journalists in Auckland just can't spell.

:)

PS For some brilliant writing by one of the world's best journalists, catch up on the folly of European machinations re Greece and the Euro, arguably the one current trouble in the world to overshadow them all ...

"Life seems impossible without [wheelie suitcases], and soon they will no doubt be joined by so many other improvements – acne cures, electric cars, electric suitcases – that we will be strengthened in our superstition that history is a one-way ratchet, an endless click click click forwards to a nirvana of liberal democratic free-market brotherhood of man. Isn’t that what history teaches us, that humanity is engaged in a remorseless ascent?


On the contrary: history teaches us that the tide can suddenly and inexplicably go out, and that things can lurch backwards into darkness and squalor and appalling violence. The Romans gave us roads and aqueducts and glass and sanitation and all the other benefits famously listed by Monty Python; indeed, they were probably on the verge of discovering the wheely-suitcase when they went into decline and fall in the fifth century AD.

Whichever way you look at it, this was a catastrophe for the human race. People in Britain could no longer read or write. Life-expectancy plummeted to about 32, and the population fell. The very cattle shrunk at the withers."

The whole of Boris Johnson's article is here. Boris is also the Mayor of London.

3 comments:

Bryden Black said...

Not sure I agree with his supposed "solution" - even if his diagnosis is fair, as far as it goes. For History also includes that slippery Actor - the God and father of the Lord Jesus Christ ... Well; if Exodus and/or Mark's Gospel are still diagnostic tools!

Andrew Reid said...

And to think that we're outsourcing sub-editor jobs to NZ!
http://au.news.yahoo.com/latest/a/-/latest/13931582/fairfax-to-outsource-regional-jobs-to-nz/

Peter Carrell said...

And we are outsourcing our earthquakes ... to Melbourne!