Aliens
We get it good. Up north where there's more oriental flavours than you can poke a stick at, your run of the mill Asiatic has their back to the wall. There's hunger and hardship like you wouldn't believe. But here, just a few ks south of where all that soy sauce and chili is swishing about, Mr or Ms Average can knock off at the end of a work week with a pay packet of $737.70.
And it's official. The Reserve Bank says so. Not bad, eh? You can buy a lot of meat and potatoes with $737.70. Whether you would want to is another thing. But then, it's probably unlikely that, at these prices, you're average.
Perhaps what you take home is a long way short of that figure. You needn't mind too much -- some boss or other has simply taken from Peter to pay Paul. It's not the personal detail but the grand scheme of things in these matters that counts. You're (please excuse the expression) just a statistic.
So your average Australian worker is better off than their average counterpart in centres to the north -- better, I'd say, by a very large margin indeed. Why this should be the case is an interesting question. Rather than go into a long and complicated explanation, trust me when I say that their poverty has something to do with our wealth. It's another one of those Peter and Paul principles that crops up all too frequently under the aegis of capitalism. But hey! it works doesn't it? At least for some.
Of course, those who are a bit put out by it, look at our meat and two veg cuisine, our schools, our welfare net and they say to themselves, “Gee, I'd like a bit of that!”.
It's all very well for the neighbours to get envious. There we are strutting our stuff in the South Pacific and telling everyone we're a lucky bunch of so-and-sos, when the sea around us is turning green with envy. So what does this lucky bastard of a country do? It closes its doors on the rest of the world and only lets in a trickle.
But this, we're told, is not racist. Sure. It's not racist but it sure looks like it.
To make certain that all immigration decisions are final and no correspondence will be entered into, we learn that “a blitz on foreigners working illegally on the eastern seaboard of Australia uncovered 1000 illegal aliens in the past month”. Why the dirty so-and-sos, sneaking into our country and taking our jobs! And what's more, there's supposed to be 50,000 of them out there!
Aliens! And they've arrived! And there's no way of telling them from the locals.
So what's so foreign about that?
By Dave Riley
