Godbotherers
Ah yes, Australia has comprehensively announced on Saturday that it likes the status quo. Australian voters have stood up and said: "We like who we are". Which, as Martin Amis pointed out way back when in 1987, and in regards to a completely different religious-nut backwater in Texas, usually pans out in a certain way:
And believe it or not, Australians have handed a significant amount of power to a party which believes that Australia is not religious and right-wing enough! The mind truly boggles.
Have a look at the latest addition to the pantheon of Australian political backwardness: Family First. Basically the political arm in Australia of the Assemblies of God Church in Australia, they are, as The Australian quite rightly (though inadvertently) pointed out yesterday, "a lunatic offshoot of the muscular Christian Right in the US". At the time of writing, this amazing collective of reactionary, hard-core right-wing Christians looks like holding the balance of power in the Australian Senate. This means that they can and will get at least some aspects of their proto-fascist agenda seriously considered in the political process. This mob would like nothing better than to install their very own Australian Inquisition - if they had but the intellectual rigour.
Don't read all of their platforms at once or your brain will implode. Fittingly, in the current Australian context, their policy on international treaties is exactly four paragraphs long - why waste more of their already limited cerebral capacity on them pesky foreigners and the communist UN.
Here's another couple of choice morsels. Some of Family First's claque think that lesbians are witches and should be burned at the stake, that Satan lives in brothels, mosques (!), Freemason temples and bottle shops, and that a vote for Labor is a vote for Satan.
Maybe we could have an update of Hoag's hoary old Tourism Australia ad from the 80s: Come to Australia! I'll throw another witch on the barbie for you!
'AMARILLO' says the sign on the way into town: 'WE LIKE WHO WE ARE'. One suspects that people who like who they are, and like saying that they like who they are, are soon going to be saying that they don't like who you are.
And believe it or not, Australians have handed a significant amount of power to a party which believes that Australia is not religious and right-wing enough! The mind truly boggles.
Have a look at the latest addition to the pantheon of Australian political backwardness: Family First. Basically the political arm in Australia of the Assemblies of God Church in Australia, they are, as The Australian quite rightly (though inadvertently) pointed out yesterday, "a lunatic offshoot of the muscular Christian Right in the US". At the time of writing, this amazing collective of reactionary, hard-core right-wing Christians looks like holding the balance of power in the Australian Senate. This means that they can and will get at least some aspects of their proto-fascist agenda seriously considered in the political process. This mob would like nothing better than to install their very own Australian Inquisition - if they had but the intellectual rigour.
Don't read all of their platforms at once or your brain will implode. Fittingly, in the current Australian context, their policy on international treaties is exactly four paragraphs long - why waste more of their already limited cerebral capacity on them pesky foreigners and the communist UN.
Here's another couple of choice morsels. Some of Family First's claque think that lesbians are witches and should be burned at the stake, that Satan lives in brothels, mosques (!), Freemason temples and bottle shops, and that a vote for Labor is a vote for Satan.
Maybe we could have an update of Hoag's hoary old Tourism Australia ad from the 80s: Come to Australia! I'll throw another witch on the barbie for you!
posted by sydneysnider at 09:38 |
<< Home