After a week in Melbourne, a week in Sydney and a week with Terry O'Neil and Linley in the Blue Hills of New South Wales, there's to new things I know about Australia: one, people here are the most polite in the world.

Twice I get lost and ask for directions – once in a rural area and I don’t know the name or direction of the place I’m staying at – and the person I ask says, “Here, my car’s across the road, jump in and we’ll find it.” And eventually they do.
Kids of 10 or 11 who bump into you in the street stop to apologise. Assistants in shops actually take the time to assist you.
Two, this is the most racist society I have ever encountered. Folk, naturally as it were, speak with contemptuous hostility about the Aboriginal people their ancestors stole the country from. The “fucking Abos.” “Lazy bastard parasites.”
Eventually you realise that these two categories of Australians overlap so broadly they are essentially the same people. Shouldn’t be surprised, maybe, when the first Australian mega-hit, back in the early 60s, was Rolf Harris’s ‘Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport’, number three in the States, topped the charts in Britain. Tells the story of a bush-ranger’s last request as he lies dying : “Let me Abos go loose, Bruce/ Let me Abos go loose/ They’re of no further use, Bruce/ Let me Abos go loose.” You wouldn’t have gotten away with the likes of that in apartheid South Africa.
Harris is now a reviled figure. But back then, he was not only a hugely successful singer, but a much-loved children’s entertainer.
Of course, the sentiment didn’t prevent the song selling by the shed- load in every major market. But I suspect it’s only in Australia that it might pass without comment today.
Against that, it doesn’t seem unusual here to encounter Aboriginals strolling hand-in-hand with whites. Weird or what?
The Blue Hills are vast in scale and beauty. I have never previously been left literally breathless by the grandeur of a landscape, shimmering in the day, glowing red and yellow as dusk gathers.
And incidentally, that jet-lag business – nowhere near as debilitating as everybody made out.

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As the repellent Hillary Clinton and the Republican Party’s choice from the gallery of wackos seeking the presidential nomination for November next year gear up to debate which is the tougher on terrorism, my attention is drawn to a relevant statistic.
The last major terrorist incident in the US was the Boston Marathon atrocity, which killed three people in 2013. In the first half of the same year, 11 Americans were killed by small children pulling the trigger of a parent’s gun.
Clearly, toddlers are more dangerous than terrorists.
I leave it to Clinton and the other crazy to draw the obvious conclusion.

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When the Islamic State gang horribly burned a Jordanian hostage and videoed his pitiful death, every media commentator, East and West, expressed horror. Governments issued righteous statements to the effect that this barbarism must be met by determined military action to extirpate the perpetrators.
What are we to make, then, of the fact that that the largest number of innocent people burned to death in war since the Middle Ages were Vietnamese and Cambodians roasted by petroleum jelly, dropped in sheets of flame from US aircraft in the 1960s and ‘70s? Estimates vary from 150,000 to a quarter of a million.
Ok, doesn’t excuse IS for a moment. But surely worth mentioning as a precedent in coverage of the IS killing? Yet I didn’t noticed a single reference.
They do it, our minds are numbed. We do it, what the fuck?
Beheadings. Here’s Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman just before the recent election: “Those against us, it cannot be helped, we must lift up and axe and behead them. Otherwise we will not survive here.”
Only democracy in the Middle East, every right to defend itself etc? Load of hypocritical baloney from a blood- lusting racist.
But here’s something hopeful to end on.
The killer Obama is finding it difficult to recruit operators for his drone programme.
Brandon Bryant, 26, has resigned from the programme, saying that he felt “disturbed and ashamed” by his role. “I felt that I was haunted by the legion of the dead. My physical health was gone, my mental health crumbled.”
Ex-drone pilot Heather Linebaugh says that politicians who talk of the success of the strategy should ask themselves: “How many women and children have you seen incinerated by a Hellfire missile? How many men have you seen crawl across a field, trying to make it to the nearest compound for help, while bleeding out from severed legs?”
We should never forget that, if political leaders like Obama, Cameron, Putin and their ilk casually emulate Islamic State, there are, in every instance, some among those they send to commit crimes against humanity whose decency overrides the damnable sadism of their commanders.