Not to harp on too much about animals, but I now know that for the last few days I have been bearing an insect-related badge of honor. I believe it even made me throw up violently, since when I’ve been feeling a little headachy, but otherwise better than I usually do. This afternoon I visited Australia’s foremost snake man, who took one look into my eyes, which are heavily bloodshot, and diagnosed the sting of the “blister beetle,” a microscopic animal on the Top End (Northern Australia) wetlands that occasionally appears to get into human eyes and onto their faces at night. It causes blotchy red marks around the temples, which sometimes turn into small, pus-filled blisters. In my case, that didn’t happen, thank the Crocodile deity. But my whites of my eyes look like I’ve been in a major altercation in a Kings Cross pub with a visiting South African rugby fan.

By the way, the Australians now call South Africans not Springboks, as used to be their nickname, but Yorpies – I believe that that is officially the term for Boers, specifically, so perhaps it’s not used for the English and Jewish South Africans who have been coming in quite large numbers to Australia for 15 years or so. The Boers are too militant and stubborn to leave South Africa, of course, because they still insist it’s theirs to rule and divide. I wrote an article about the phenomenon several years ago that ran in In These Times. Then, I noted that there were virtually no black South Africans being allowed into Australia, and in fact I could have added that next to no black Africans of any kind were being admitted, other than Eritreans. That must have happened under Labor, because the period I wrote about came at the end of an extended period of new Liberal Party (i.e. conservative) rule. Well, now there are finally some black Africans in Australia, from various parts of the continent. Not too many, but at least the changes are coming. By contrast, the number of Asians is huge – a relief for me, as I’ve been saying since 1972 that the country’s only hope was Asian immigration. Most of it isn’t that well integrated, but that’s as much due to Australian incuriosity as Asian reservations about mixing in. So, if, like my friend Andrew whom I visited in Brisbane this weekend, who has spent quite a bit of time in India, you’re inclined to get out and mix in Asian communities, you’re well taken care of, now, by groceries and restaurants. In general, a good proportion of Australians have become far more adventurous in that respect than Americans. But that’s in part because Australians are so vastly more demanding than Americans when it comes to eating decent food. They even take it for granted – egad! – that the people who cook in restaurants will have been trained to cook. Imagine that!

Tonight I’m off to see a Rugby World Cup game, all by myself as Bob and Cyndi haven’t yet arrived from Alaska, as their flight from Seattle to LA was canceled last night due to the fires in LA. It’s Uruguay vs. Georgia. Uruguay’s team has never been the same since their team plane crashed in the Andes and the survivors had to eat the victims. Georgia is a wonderful team – complete tyros whom I saw in the airport in Sydney, several of them posing with a Horny Young Scrubber variety of Australian Sheila, with tattoos all up her legs, visible to the fullest visible extent under her generously revealing miniskirt. She was being embraced in a mock rugby ruck by three of the players, and one would have to say it was a dismal sight.

I’ve been listening on the government radio network this afternoon to a couple of fascinating items. First, a discussion among three academic experts into security issues about how Australian intelligence and police forces are faring when it comes to chasing down terrorism. This is a big issue, the last couple of days, because a leading French operative of El’Qaida was intercepted in Sydney and deported to France to be questioned in a country unfettered by the principle of habeas corpus. According to federal authorities, that has permitted them to break up a cell operating there, that had gathered a large amount of explosives in preparation for who knows what – maybe disrupting the Georgia v Uruguay blockbuster tonight. What was impressive about the discussion was how frank it was, and how enlightened (it took account, for example, of how things might shake out now, compared with the now-clearly demonstrated abuses of the Vietnam era, when federal police fucked with student protesters, etc.). Also impressive was that the discussion was being aired in mid-afternoon on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National network, meaning that it was being heard by everyone from housewives at home in Sydney, to cabbies cruising the streets of Wollongong, to office workers in Perth, to farm-equipment operators in fields in the middle of nowhere in northern South Australia. It occurred to me that the US would be so much better off if it had some similar kind of national forums, but alas, it has only ludicrous shows like 20/20.

I also listened to a debate in Parliament about the big punch-up that occurred when two Green senators from Tasmania interjected during Dubya’s pusillanimous speech to the joint sitting last week. The two Greens were tossed out, and then prevented from entering the house the next day when the President of China visited to address the Parliament, which again is conservative-dominated, and whose members are very eager to kiss arse wherever necessary to line the pockets of the new wealthy class. The Greens, it must be said, need to get only a handful of votes to get into Parliament, because Tasmania has so few people. But they made some good points – why allow such disreputable people to come in and speak with no opportunities for rebuttal, at all. The Chinese Embassy embarked on a vetting procedure, to stop people from entering the public gallery whom they didn’t like, but who had been invited by the Greens and some Labor members. The Greens who had disrupted Bush were physically prevented from entering when the Chinese premier spoke.
Well, today, the Greens argued in Parliament that something needed to be done about a situation where foreign leaders, including a communist dictator, were given such a carte blanche, and were not even asked to hear opposing opinions. Dubya tried to joke the whole thing off by saying something inane about how he was happy to hear dissenting voices, ‘cause that’s what democracy is all about, geyuk, geyuk… Labor members said that they considered the Greens’ interjections to be ill-timed and ill-mannered, which rather dodged the Greens’ points about parliamentary practice. The conservatives, through the voice of a complete pompous wanker from Queensland (the “Deep North”) harangued the Greens as exemplars of a new form of nationalist, nature-worshipping fascism of the kind exemplified by the Nazis as they rose to power. You can get away with that in the Australian parliament due to parliamentary privilege that merely requires that you be careful not to directly impute the reputation of any particular person. It’s quite acceptable to say Bob Brown is a Green; the Greens are all fascists.
The irony of all this is that the Liberals are trying, with some support from the right wing of the Labor Party, to implement changes in Parliament that would greatly weaken the voice of minority parties. They claim, by a form of sophistry that has long been invisibly incorporated into American Congressional normalcy, that it is undemocratic to give voice to those who don’t really represent the People. (A further irony, of course, is that this sophistry is precisely fascist.)