Whatever happened to the Origami?

Whatever happened to the Origami from Microsoft? I remember a lot of hype from it before it fizzled into the oh-so-dour ‘UMPC’, and as far as I can tell, hasn’t been heard from since.

Citizenship Test

John Howard wants to make a test for English and “Australian history and culture” before you get your citizenship. It’s supposed to be about only making citizens of those people who actually would “fit in”.  It looks more like a White Australia policy by stealth to me.

After World War II, Australia let in migrants from all over Europe, and while they were probably more ‘olive’ than ‘white’, they still fit in the old English sense of ‘white’, i.e. Europeans. It wasn’t until the late 60s and 70s that Asian migration started in any significant numbers. In the early 90s, there was a celebration of multiculturalism and the diversity of the Australian population, something I grew up with and believe in strongly.

If John Howard’s citizenship test is applied, the migration that made Australia one of the most diverse nations in the world will be effectively relegated to second-class members of society, not even citizens. Yes, the ability to speak, or at least understand, English is a reasonable requirement of Australia. But to require it in a formal condition such as a test, and to attach questions of history and culture to it as well, is to make it an overly onerous restriction. Ideally, yes, all citizens would pass such a test, but here’s my bone of contention: chances are more than half of the “born” citizens would also fail the same test. And you’d have to apply it retroactively to be fair.

So what if we apply it retroactively? All those European migrants who came here on a wing and a prayer with barely a broken word of English to their vocabulary would never have made it here. All that post-war prosperity, gone. All those Vietnam war refugees would remain refugees, probably to be bundled up and passed back to Vietnam after an “appropriate” period of time. All that diversity, gone.

Australia would have been a very different nation with Howard’s citizenship test. If he manages to put in something so apparently innocuous, he wins a victory for the ultra conservatives, for the White Australia policy we rejected so long ago. Let diversity and multiculturalism reign, because that is the only antidote to wars and hatred.