The Lincoln Plawg - the blog with footnotes

The Lincoln Plawg - the blog with footnotes

Politics and law from a British perspective (hence Politics LAW BloG): ''People who like this sort of thing...'' as the Great Man said

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Wednesday, March 31, 2004

Absurdities I might be following, but aren't

From what used to be called the Dominions [1], a couple of perversions of grievance politics.

From Canada, language fascism: via Damian Penny, the tale of the language Gauleiter (aka Commissioner of Official Languages) Dyane Adam who is complaining that the government's French language quota is not being met because francophone civil servants insist on speaking English to one another!

Why the anglophone majority still do kow-tow to this system beats me: last I heard, the prospect of French Quebeckers even attempting to secede had diminished to near zero. The fact of the national Liberal one-party state has something to do with it, I suspect.

And, via Tim Dunlop, I learn that the opposition Labor [2] party (ALP) is proposing to scrap ATSIC, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. Apparently, known amongst abo activists as Aborigines Talking Shit In Canberra.

Way back just after the blog started, I seem to remember looking at the land question, in particular the case of WA v Ward [3] - the name has stuck for being a tiny name for such an monumentally long case! It's a fascinating topic: one white man's snafu after another, carelessly giving away too much after decades of giving nothing at all, and having to take a whole lot back again.

But, I reckon - if it was too complicated for the professionals...

The parts of the British Empire which were settled by Europeans, and where the existing population was neutralised. Plus the Union of South Africa, whose wannabe European population was too small, relative to the whole, to achieve the necessary neutralisation. (India and Pakistan may well have become Dominions on achieving independence in August 1947 - for another time.)
Why is the Labor in Australian Labor Party is spelt that way, and not Labour, the British spelling generally used in Australia? From the horse's mouth:
During the early years of the ALP, the Party was referred to by various titles differing from colony to colony. It was at the 1908 Interstate (federal) Conference that the name "Australian Labour Party" was adopted. In its shortened form the Party was frequently referred to as both 'Labor' and 'Labour', however the former spelling was adopted from 1912 onwards, due to the influence of the American labor movement.
Western Australia, that is.

posted by John at 1:57 am

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