I wonder sometimes what country I'm living in. I've always liked being Australian. I've been happy knowing that the evil bastards who sent my family here in chains miscalculated - we didn't die, we survived and thrived , and our children ran barefoot in the sun.

So I've been jumping up and down and screaming WARNING - shouting from the rooftops and equating John W. Howard, the evil little runt, with the totalitarian regime of Hitler.

But Howard and A/G Ruddock sound increasingly like South African prime ministers from the 1960s. The inward looking, xenophobic cowardice of Howard's Australia is a copy of the South African experience.

And why not? The South Africans learnt apartheid from us in the first place - they merely borrowed the Queensland rulings on Kanakas. Remember Kanakas? We shanghaied them, we abducted them, kidnapped them, dragged them away against their will from Kanaky. We took them in chains to Queensland and forced them to work on the cane fields.