not the motorcycle diaries

If there’s one thing that irks me in Australian public debate, it’s the use of the term politically correct, inevitably in aid of putting someone down, such as Kevin Rudd on Germaine Greer about Steve Irwin yesterday. Despite the rights or wrongs of Greer’s behaviour, labelling someone as ‘politically correct’ is such a strategy in the Australian media: aimed at reducing someone’s heartfelt - usually counter-cultural - lived values into a mealy-mouthed, anally-retentive pernickety-ness, and to thereby re-confirm mainstream values. In Australia, said values are seemingly embodied in Steve Irwin: the man who called John Howard the greatest leader the country’s ever had and thought Bob Brown ought to be ‘taken out the back and given a belting’ for interjecting during George Bush’s address to Parliament. Now there’s some values. Are they all like that in Queensland? Maybe I should move there.