Having someone head the Australian Olympic Committee for longer than an African tyrant is emphatically an Australian value.  It symbolises our distaste for busy bodies that get on the gravy train.  The AOC has shown itself to be incurably corrupt.  In the name of God, they want another Olympic Games here.  How corrupt do you have to get?  John Coates now ranks with Kevin Gosper in the unpopularity stakes.

But the loathsome Abbott, the prince of snipers, has trumped them all, and is now more loathed than Kevin Rudd.  The poor man sees ‘cultural cowardice’.  Presumably this means that some people are afraid to speak for fear of offending others.  He said that our leaders had failed to promote the ‘virtues and benefits’ of western civilisation.  It was this kind of parochial bullshit that led us to put Confucius at the end of these posts.  (We will shortly revert to the poet of the month.)  Those ‘virtues and benefits’ include ‘Gospel values and free speech.’  What if you don’t subscribe to the Gospels?  How many Australians do?  What if you are a Muslem, a Jew, a Hindu, a Buddhist, or a card-carrying atheist?  And we now know that free speech stops at offending Australian values.  The hypocrisy of the free speech crowd is as nauseating as it is preposterous.

Here is the sniper.

Whether it’s official persecution of Queensland students for a bit of justified sarcasm, state governments promoting gender fluidity programs in schools, or a federal-government approved activist being disrespectful of Anzac Day, there’s this pervasive ambivalence verging on hostility to our country and its values from people who should know better.  Overwhelmingly our people believe in our country – but it’s hard for them to have faith in politicians when the politicians and those they promote don’t believe in the things they do.  If you are an Australian, you have to believe in Australia.  This is what most of us believe.  But only some of those in authority believe it; and those that do, don’t state it nearly often enough.

Well, there is the political love child of John Howard and Bronwyn Bishop groping his way back to 1984.  What is more worrying – its inanity or its sickness?  It has all the coherence of a dictatorial rant.

And as for not respecting Anzac Day, some of us remember the appalling way that we treated our soldiers returning from one of our failed wars.  (Abbott voted for another one.)  One Vietnam veteran got spat on in St Kilda Road – twice.  He was in a wheel chair because of war wounds.  And who led this revolting unkindness?  The RSL.  Most RSL branches refused or discouraged admission and membership to Vietnam veterans.  ‘Yours wasn’t a war, mate!  You didn’t fight in the trenches.  You were on a twelve-month holiday.’   It took about a generation for these men to march on Anzac Day and when they did, many grown men wept compulsively.  Our conduct to these men was a crime against humanity, and the worst culprits were our self-appointed heroes.  When did we abandon these Australian values?  Let us bury that term forever.

As for faith in politicians, we might recover some when we forget that we were led into the failed wars in Vietnam and Iraq by their lies.

Confucius says

The Master said ‘Make it your guiding principle to do your best for others and to be trustworthy in what you say…..When you make a mistake, do not be afraid of mending your ways’

Analects 9.25.