But it also brings up another question. Here in America there's a big "politically correct" movement, and it seems a lot of people feel like they have to tip-toe around what they say lest they inadvertently offend someone. I assume that hasn't leaked into Australia yet? (Please tell me no... that would be depressing)
PC is here, but it's pretty toothless.
Australia has a cynical, ironic culture, and I think that language control is pretty useless on us. We find ironic ways of saying whatever we mean anyway. We pay far more attention to how someone behaves than what they actually
say. Only politicians, public servants and lobby groups take PC very seriously; the rest of us snicker behind our hands. It's hard to treat PC seriously in a culture where friends insult each other all the time anyway. We're far better at being Politically Incorrect than correct, I believe -- everyone gets a serve.
A key difference in Australia is that while we have our share of bigotry, the word 'race' just doesn't appear here much. We generally pay more attention to culture than skin-colour. In other words, we generally don't think much about 'black, white, yellow and brown' people. We think more about your tribe - Thai, Cambodian, Croatian, Chinese, Macedonian, Maltese, Brit, Irish, Ukranian etc... It's in how you talk, how you act, how you dress, what foods you eat. We can be just as bigoted as anyone else, but we tend to be quite specific about it.
We enjoy trading friendly insults, and we'll unashamedly use gender or ethnic insults to do it. We feel bound by our sense of Australianness to be on the same level - so poking at people's differences is often seen as fun rather than denigration. With strangers we're generally more careful about ethnic insults because we don't always know how they'll react. A great ice-breaker in Australian society is to make jokes at the expense of your ethnic origins. Mrs Draba, whose father is Chinese, often jokes 'Police never give me tickets. I'm an Asian woman. They know I can't drive.' (She drives perfectly well). A colleague of mine who's Sri Lankan and has chocolate-coloured skin all year round, would often tell me 'Just going out for a walk, to work on my tan'. My ancestry includes gypsies, and I'll often make jokes about stealing things. If you have English ancestry, Australians often make jokes about you not knowing what soap is. If you're from New Zealand, we'll often make jokes about attraction for sheep.
Everyone gets a serve -- unless you're in dire circumstances. We don't like kicking a man when he's down, but we'll happily kick the sh*t out of him while he's standing up.
Australians do religious jokes but I don't see many religious insults. On the whole I think we're quite shy on matters of religious faith - not because it's sacred, but because it's intimate and emotional.
