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Old 09-25-2009, 04:18 AM
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StainlessSteelCynic StainlessSteelCynic is offline
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Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Western Australia
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Targan left out that we Australians can be lazy, slow witted at times, too fanatical about sport, too quick to tear down people who are high achievers (i.e. tall poppy syndrome), too parochial and far too quick to get drunk or to bet on anything at all (e.g. betting on two flies walking up a wall, deciding to have a few drinks because... well we Australians don't actually care too much about reasons for drinking, we just do it - although not as much as many Eastern European countries).
We're very isolated and thus protected from the rest of the world due to our island continent status, this tends to make us willfully ignorant of anything outside our own realm simply because "it can't really affect us". This then tends to make us too full of our own security and self importance.
We also take far too much pride in the notion that our ancestors were convicts.
We have some very good scientists but we never encourage them (the government controlled & funded CSIRO is woefully underfunded) and we steadfastly refuse to invest in our own scientific discoveries.
Our trade unions can be as militant, lazy, deceitful, law-breaking and troublesome as any British trade union.
And lastly, we have a very bad tendency to encourage free speech except when you criticize something Australian (then you are evil, unAustralian or a bloody foreign troublemaker).

However, don't attack our friends/allies because we are usually very quick to jump into the fight (although that can be both good and bad).
Don't ever think that just because our military is small we won't fight hard or put up with hardship.
We make sparkling wine that is so good it annoys the French vintners!
Don't underestimate our ability to do hard work because we seem lazy or spend too much time at the beach. We would usually like to work at full throttle to get something finished so that we can then spend the maximum time relaxing after the job is done. If that means a lot of grimy or hard work or finishing the job at 3AM to make sure it is done, then so be it.
And finally, just because the British colonized this country do not ever think that we simply follow everything the British do and we model ourselves after them, we take great pride in reminding the British that we are not British!

Besides, we have the best beaches in the world, why wouldn't we want to be lazy beachbums? Except in Sydney, the beaches in Sydney are crap
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