STEPHEN FRY

I shall be celebrating that too, Tango; I have to write an essay for my French coursework on the "Front National" - the ridiculously popular French fascist party. They make me really angry!!!!!

We had to fight something like the BNP and FN here in Australia 11 years ago, called the One Nation Party. It was founded by a spectacularly ignorant woman, who particularly objected to Asians, but also disliked Aborigines. She became the MP for MY area..... I was horrified that 1 in 2 of my neighbours must have voted for her!

Then she made her maiden speech - it was disgusting, but I knew I'd read something like it before. Eventually I remembered - years earlier I'd lived in Vienna for a while and had encountered some residual anti-semitism. In an attempt to understand how Nazism came about, I'd read Hitler's Mein Kampf. Such a load of badly written unmitigated Dreck was almost impossible to read, and certainly didn't help me understand anything, except that racism is impossible to justify, but that will never bother racists.

Anyway, I found 10 things in her maiden speech that matched Hitler's utterences!! I sent my findings to the Australia-Israel review, and our State daily newspaper, and they both published it. Not long afterwards my letter box was set fire to - I felt quite relieved really: two other prominent anti Hanson campaigners had their house set alight, one burnt to the ground.

It's all fizzled now - three attempts to get back into parliament have failed, and the woman is selling Real Estate these days. The anti-racism committee we formed to fight her did the job.

And, for the icing on the cake, we have new government, and a multilingual PM who loathes racism.

In 1998 we had 11 State MPs from One Nation Party. They proved themselves to be a complete waste of space. One of them physically attacked a lovely kind MP of Greek origin, outside parliament!.

There are none now - all that's left is the memory of a bad smell.

Well, if you want to fight them, what we found with ONP was that there was far more that they DIDN'T do that you could attack them on.

Politicians at all levels are supposed to be there for their electorate, and sort out problems placed with them by consituents. For this they need knowledge, competance, a sense of responsibily, good staff, and contacts. They had none of this, though almost all other MPs, whatever we might think of their parliamentary performance, handle the nitty gritty quite well..

For instance, while Hanson was our Fed MP, if we had a problem with, say, social security which we'd normally take to our MP, we couldn't, because there was simply no-one in her electoral office competant to handle it . We had to go to our Senator instead - a bit like taking it to your rep in the House of Lords.


Of course, the Labour party used this to attack Hanson, quite rightly so.

The problem with racists is that they really dont seem to believe we are all the same species!!

I've encountered 'anti-Pom' in both NZ and here in Australia: it just means I found out who the rubbish people are sooner rather than later, because there is no such thing as a nice racist.

I was once refused a job in Auckland because, quote "You are English and won't be able to pronounce the Maori names" I pointed out I was tri-lingual and that Maori was a phonetically logical language which I had started to learn, but that just made her angry!!

it must be awful for Asians and others who are identified by skin colour too - at least with me I have to open my mouth before they know I'm not quite acceptable!!

We just have to refuse to accept racism, and fight back at racist organisatiions, but without beeing too sensitive - sometimes people take offence when none is meant.

Yeah we have to fight it. But the problem is when they see opposition as proof that they are speaking an unwanted truth, if you get what I mean. Like the Westboro Baptist Church. There's no real way to convince the completely pig headed racists that they're wrong. And what's more stupid is that they often get more airtime and make better news stories.

I'm glad that we don't have such extremist racist politicians (or at least none that I've encountered yet) although there was one incident last year when there were all these stupid leaflets that someone put in letterboxes around the city rambling on about "Arise White New Zealand" and with a swastika on the front. But I think it was just some pathetic high school students who thought it would be funny, rather than a serious racist politician.

The problem with racists is that they really dont seem to believe we are all the same species!!

I've encountered 'anti-Pom' in both NZ and here in Australia: it just means I found out who the rubbish people are sooner rather than later, because there is no such thing as a nice racist.

I was once refused a job in Auckland because, quote "You are English and won't be able to pronounce the Maori names" I pointed out I was tri-lingual and that Maori was a phonetically logical language which I had started to learn, but that just made her angry!!

it must be awful for Asians and others who are identified by skin colour too - at least with me I have to open my mouth before they know I'm not quite acceptable!!

We just have to refuse to accept racism, and fight back at racist organisatiions, but without beeing too sensitive - sometimes people take offence when none is meant.

I am really surprised to hear that you were refused a job because they didn't think you would be able to pronounce the Maori names. Most Pakeha (including my parents) mis-pronounce Maori names so I don't get why they would be able to ever use that as a reason to deny you work.

I've never really seen any real prejudice against the English personally, and my the English immigrants I know have never complained about prejudice. Well, except for one, but it was her fault. She came here at the start of last year and went to my school. Yet she always complained about how stupid New Zealand was, and how England was so much better than this place. And that living here was like "living in Planet of the Apes". So as you can imagine, she made no friends, a few people (including myself) tried being nice to her, and at least always remaining polite but even I lost my temper when she started ranting about how New Zealanders are all arrogant, lazy and stupid.

But of course I have never used this as a basis to judge other English people. Since the only thing that makes us Kiwi, Aussie, English, Chinese etc. is which lump of dirt we were born over. So how can anyone ever claim that someone is better than another nationality just because they were born on some dirt which they deem more important than the dirt of the other person. I'm proud to be a New Zealander but that doesn't mean I consider myself better than anyone else, even if the Australians claim they invented pavlova

Sorry for the long rant, being 17 means I can't really do anything about racism no matter how much I want to.

Sorry for the long rant, being 17 means I can't really do anything about racism no matter how much I want to.

Nothing in this world will change unless the first step is made... if you personally live by your anti-racisit beliefs then you will make a difference. even if its just to one person.... because to you its one person but to them its hope that the world is a just place. all it takes is one person to be racist to you for you to be affected. all it takes is one person to stand up to it for you to feel accepted as the true person you are.

Thanks, those are wise words. And yes I do live by my beliefs, I find the huge diversity of the world a great thing. I love learning little bits of different languages from foreigners and finding out about their countries. I hope to travel the globe visiting everywhere from France to Mongolia to Tunisia to Argentina to Nepal (especially Nepal thanks to Sir Ed (May he rest in peace :'()) etc.

I'd go anywhere no matter how remote or poor it may be. Because there's great peoples and cultures everywhere (completely unrelated but I feel I should say that I'm against religious missionary charities who use their aid to convert the local people to their religion, I believe foreign aid should be secular rather than used as an incentive to convince native peoples to change their beliefs, sorry for any offense caused but I think that if everyone in the world were to be "converted" into westerners it wouldn't be a good thing). I've been thinking that maybe I'll sign up for Volunteer Service Abroad after I get back from Europe.

Sorry for dragging this discussion way off topic.