As news of the election of Tony Abbott spread around the world, many could not hold back their glee at being able to berate Australia.
British comedian Bill Bailey was quick to jump on the bandwagon, tweeting "Abbott as PM, it MUST be TV reality show 'Faking It' where a hapless twonk passes himself off as a politician. Can't be real." Many others bandied around reworkings of the joke “And we thought America was stupid for electing George W Bush ... Australia was just 10 years behind as usual."
Such jibes are not new to me. The world thinks I'm an idiot.
I was just another 21 year old in a London pub when the general unease about how I and my fellow Aussies are perceived on the world stage became an acute realisation. I was simply exuding our national character without thinking about it (brash, loud and painfully cheerful), when I noticed one of the English boys sneering.
"Do you even know where meat pies come from?" he said.
"Sure I do," I told him. "Wales. It started out as the Cornish pastie, and the original filling was venison." (Thank you Neil Gaiman for working it into The Sandman!)
He looked visibly startled.
"Well, most of you ... think you, you know, invented it. You lot don’t usually know much."
This is Australia’s lot: to be patronised by those who obviously know better. Part of the problem is the fact that we are such a young country, and a lot of our culinary and sporting culture involves co-opting that of others and making it our own. Meat pie – Wales. Pavlova – New Zealand. Even Aussie Rules developed as an off-season training regime to that most English of world sports, cricket.
And so Australia as the bumbling, sexist, racist and stupid country continues to be the easy go-to joke for both overseas news outlets and your average traveler. It’s a lazy caricature, but how many people want to bother with thinking before they speak?
Even when the world is applauding former prime minister Julia Gillard for a blistering feminist speech on misogyny, her attack is also being used insidiously to reinforce that tired stereotype – we are a bunch of hicks. The New Yorker went as far as calling her speech “weirdly substantial news” coming of this English colony. Likewise, Ashton Kutcher thinks a good way to promote his movie is to ask whether Australians even know who Steve Jobs was. Elsewhere, our now prime minister Tony Abbott was introduced to the world stage only when he accidentally used the word "suppository" instead of "repository".
As far as patronising goes, the worst offenders are usually American or English. It has got so bad that Aussies have started to buy into the clichés. After moving to London and New York, it usually takes all of three days before they post links on Facebook to whatever outrageous thing has been said that day, righteously telling those of us who have stayed “see? This is why I left Australia”.
Really? Are you enjoying observing the dismantling of England’s welfare system up close, not to mention a prime minister whose extraordinarily privileged background seems to be one of his main qualifications for the job? As for America, give me a break – at least England has a welfare system to dismantle in the first place.
Australian TV presenter Eddie McGuire makes a racist joke, and I hear a cavalcade of “that would never happen where I live” from my visiting foreign friends. A restaurant makes a wretched menu referring to our then-prime minister’s thighs and breasts and again, I’m inundated with social media posts about where it would never happen – yep, that’s right, back home.
Even putting aside for a moment the treatment endured by – to name a few – Irish, Indian and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people at the hands of the empire, Brits still do not get to lecture anyone on racism. Please don't act like you live in some colourblind utopia when mosques are being targeted with explosive devices three times within a month in your own country.
I don’t hear as much tsking from Americans on racism grounds – mainly just comments about knifey-spoony and Australia’s supposed lack of intellect. Which is funny, because we are the ones who invented the cervical cancer vaccine (well, professor Ian Frazer did, but we can claim it as my country’s achievement) and we did not try to stop teenage girls from being vaccinated because we're embroiled in moral hysteria.
Don't get me wrong – that UK and US citizens behave badly does not dilute or excuse some of the atrocious behaviour perpetuated by Australians. It does not take away from our lack of self-awareness, from the baffling but quietly constant rage many seem to carry against any woman in a position of authority, or from the dismissiveness that surfaces when dealing with anyone who does not look like “us”. But just like the US and the UK have many flaws, we do have our redeeming qualities. We are just asking to be given the third dimension so many others take for granted.
So stop patronising us.