Open Letter to the English

Pauline takes the piss

Dear people of England, on behalf of all Australians, I know our relationship hasn’t been so great for some time now. You send thousands of crap BBC documentaries, we send you Neighbours. You send us Prince Charles, we send you The Vines, you send the detritus of your twentysomethings in the form of drunken backpackers, we send you ours.

If anything, the basis of our cultural exchange over the past few decades has been a prolific exercise in trans-hemispheric mutual toxic waste dumping. We take a couple of pasty chavs for a few months, you take a few “oy oy oy” chanting bogans, everyone goes home slightly miffed and resentful.

But this time, I’m sorry to say, we have gone too far. It transpires that, after many years of trying to keep our most humiliating cultural creation out of the international gaze, we have failed miserably. Australia’s resident Xenophobe Laureate, Pauline Hanson, is leaving our sunny shores bound for merry England, and there’s nothing we can do about it!

That’s right, Pauline Hanson, the self proclaimed Mother Of Australia, the embodiment of all the most vile and deranged tendencies within Australian self-identity, has decided to take her own extensive anti-immigration advice and get the hell out of Australia, and she’s heading your way.

So on behalf of all Australians, I will utter a phrase reviled by all racists from our Indian Ocean coast to the Pacific: Sorry! We genuinely are sorry. No one deserves this. (Except for Queensland, maybe, but they started it).

I know you sent us your thugs and thieves and murderers as convicts back in the day, but you also sent us your Chartists, Trade Unionists, Freedom Fighters and some bitchin’ political prisoners. I know we sent you Germaine Greer and Peter Andre but, on the plus side, look how much fun you’ve had with them!

I’m just trying to say… No hard feelings. If you want, you can send us a racist of equivalent value. Not a Nick Griffin standard creepy influential racist, just a kind of C-Grade racist buffoon of some sort. Maybe some bloke you find espousing his opinions at a bus stop somewhere? But could he please have red hair? We liked that about her.

I digress. Dear England, apologies for the unintended gift. I wont pretend we aren’t glad to be rid of her, but that doesn’t mean we like inflicting her on you. Just keep her well fed and watered, and keep her away from your burgeoning multicultural society. Sorry