The Null Device

Australian Territories of the U.S.

A US-born Australian academic has told the Fulbright Symposium that there's a 20% chance of Australia joining the U.S. in the next 50 years; if al-Qaeda attack Australia or Indonesia becomes an Islamic fundamentalist state, this increases.

Dr Mosler told the 2003 Fulbright Symposium at Griffith University yesterday that he decided Australia was "an unreformable society" after the loss of the 1999 republic referendum. Australians, he said, had no flag of their own; a weak sense of nationhood; no prime minister in the Lodge, with John Howard living in Sydney; no national bushfire or water plans, even with the worst drought in history; and no "broad knowledge of nation in public discourse or popular culture". Australians had replaced "Empire with Yanks" after 1942, and the country retained a "quasi-colonial status".

Does this mean we all get guns and oversized SUVs and legislated morality (oops, we've already got that) and Clear Channel radio stations in every city? I wonder if we'll get a Bill of Rights (rather than it being conveniently harmonised out of the equation, much in the way that Jefferson's fair-use copyright provisions don't apply to digital media). Though would the Yanks have us?

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