If all the world turned... Australian

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If all the world turned Australian, there wouldn't be any wars. There would still be intolerance, and gang violence and assaults, but the Aussie thing of a fair go would generally still hold. Much beer would be drunk, and a lot of time standing around talking sh*t. TV would be even crappier than it is already. Leisure time would increase and there would be more public holidays, so not a lot would get done. There wouldn't be any 'boat people' to worry over. Space exploration would plummet. The price of the stuff we used to import would skyrocket, but industries that have folded would start up again. Roo meat would supplement lamb and beef. There would be a pub on every corner, memberships at bowls clubs would rise, and pokies venues would replace corporations. And everyone would be named 'Mate.'

Your turn...

If all the world turned.... {insert nationality}

If all the world turned French; there would be even more American TV series being shown all the time. There would be countless political parties (France has around 20) and the leader of each party would always be in the news for bed hopping. The Amazon rain forest would have to be cut down to provide all the paper necessary to keep all the bureaucrats employed and international production of *everything* would grind to a halt as ever more paperwork had to be completed to do the most trivial thing. Wine production would rocket, but so would the number of Gendarmes doing breath tests all over the country. You would be required to decide what job you wanted before you left school and to stick with that job right up until you retire as changing careers in France is almost unheard of due to the bureaucratic regulations aforementioned. If you were lucky enough to have a job, you would spend half your life struggling to get to work due to the trains being on strike or the roads being blocked by striking farmers, lorry drivers, taxis etc. You would spend the other half of your working life on strike yourself because your union insists all workers should be entitled to a cigarette break every five minutes.

You will have a keen interest in food and wine and required to have a two hour midday lunch break and join the high speed road race at midday to go home for lunch then to drive back to work again by 2PM. Oh and did I mention all the bureaucracy and paperwork in France? You are not permitted to fart without getting consent from a bureaucrat in Paris who will loose your paperwork three times, send it to the wrong department, insist you resend the forms a fifth time countersigned by your pet dog and great great grandfather. You will finally receive a permit to fart but it will be in the wrong name so you will have to send it back again whereupon they will require more copies of your passport or other identity documents and you need to apply for a reapplication form from the French president to ask for the paperwork to be sent to you again via courier who won't find your address because it officially doesn't exist because you haven't sent in the relevant forms.

True story: To terminate any contract such as a telephone line you need to send a registered letter to the head office of the phone company (Orange). The phone company needs to sign for receipt of the letter and you will receive confirmation by return that the phone company did indeed receive the letter. Time will pass and the phone company will still continue to charge you for the unwanted phone line. You will write to your bank and tell them to terminate the direct debit but they will be unable to do so under French law. You will phone the phone company and ask why they are still billing you. They will confirm receiving your letter asking for termination of the contract but they hadn't got around to cancelling it. They promise to do so straight away and to reimburse the money taken. Instead you are billed for another months phone line so you contact their customer services again. They say they accidentally closed someone else's line instead and will refund the money taken in error so far. The following month they bill you yet again. This time you send a letter to both the head office and to the local Orange shop in town declaring that unless the money is reimbursed you are going to hold a demonstration outside their shop and hand out leaflets denouncing them as thieves. Finally the line is disconnected and the money taken is reimbursed but no apology received. That was my story and it is far from unusual.

A cruise liner starts to sink and there are people from all nationalities onboard. When the "abandon ship" order is given everyone heads for the lifeboats except for the French who all gather together and hold a meeting about the sinking. The French people organise a vote to form a committee to arrange for the evacuation of the French people. The committee then gathers all the names of the French people onboard and they need to provide their proof of identity along with their boarding pass. Elections are then held to form sub committees to (a) Determine the location and usage of the lifeboats and (b) To ensure the French passengers are all trained in how to leave a ship via lifeboats and how to wear a lifejacket. It is now midday, so the committees break for a two hour lunch and reconvene later after copious quantities of food and wine. The lifeboat committee returns and raises two points (1) the colour of the lifeboats is disagreeable and they propose a well known French designer is employed to paint them a colour that is more in keeping with this season's taste. (2) It turns out there is nobody left on board who knows how to lower the remaining lifeboats into the water, so volunteers are sought to undergo training in lifeboat usage. A satellite link is used to arrange for three of the young French people to be flown by helicopter to a naval training academy where they will undergo a rigorous three week course in lifeboat usage and be flown back to the sinking ship to lead the French evacuation. They will be required to hold a diploma in lifeboat usage before being allowed to lead the evacuation. Upon return, the lifeboat evacuation experts arrange for the production of some glossy brochures regarding "How to evacuate a sinking ship" and after several weeks, the brochures arrive onboard and are handed out to the French passengers. Everyone is now ready to leave the ship, however, the remaining lifeboats have been barricaded off by a group of French protesters saying the people organising the evacuation don't belong to the French maritime union. A sit in is quickly organised and all the French people sit around doing nothing and burning old car tyres on the deck of the ship in protest. The local strike is picked up nationally and all French ports are closed and air traffic contol comes out on a strike in sympathy too, grounding all flights to and from France. The ship finally sinks, with the loss of all the French people onboard. The French president announces that a committee will be set up to investigate the circumstances of the tragedy. The said committee of 100 bureaucrats then spends two years designing an 80 page long form; copies of which are mailed out and to be completed in triplicate by the deceased French passengers.

^^^
I know the term "kafkaesque" is overused but French bureaucracy sounds like the plot to The Castle.


If all the world turned American there would be Starbucks and McDonalds everywhere on the planet and TV stations around the world would show American TV shows. Mission accomplished

OP sorry to burst your bubble, but this country is a racist and bigoted place, which not only had a whites only immigration policy but helped south africa formulate apartheid.

We go to war at the drop a hat.

Turn asylum seekers back out to sea in leaky boats or lock them up in indefinite detention, the lucky ones get a temporary protection visa which means they can never settle as they WILL be sent back HOME when the gov decides they are now safe, this could be 6 months 6 years or 6 decades, there is no statute of limitations.

The so called Labor party which is supposed to be left wing, now regularly attacks the traditional right wing party from the right. So if you want a little america the follow us, if you do not please find a far more enlightened country as your example.

If you must pick an antipodean country New Zealand whilst steadily lurching towards the Right, would be a much better pick.

Edited for reason of humourlessness.

Last edited by Stannis on 12 Sep 2014, 8:52 pm, edited 3 times in total.

Bring back Super Ruddy!! !

lol.. got me curious... damn

I won't quote it all, but wow.. you could write a book. lol

I spent 3 days in Paris back in 2003, would love to have seen more, and spent time in rural France. Even in that short stay, I noticed some of the parochial issues there, but only a little of the bureaucratic issues you mention. But your descriptions are... wow. How the hell does anyone get anything done? I've been told that rural France is a far easier life than in the cities.

So... If the world turned French... God help us all.

But if the world turned Australian, there would no longer be asylum seekers. The Aussie life would be world wide. Our bigotry, of course, would still be towards those Aussies of a different skin or culture (we'd still be a multicultural Australia - it would be very boring if we weren't).

As for our partisan politics, yes that wouldn't be much fun if the world became Aussie. Just imagine the Greens party on a world-wide scale.

If the world turned Australian we would have to get rid of the left wing loony socialists formally called the greens.

Even the French hate all the mind destroying bureaucracy, but they keep creating more and more of it. It is a regular occurrence on the news to highlight the latest absurdity. Here are some recent ones:

1. A inspector who looks for illegal employment has levied a heavy fine on a restaurant because one of its customers took his own glass back and put it on the counter on his way out. It was argued that this was illegal employment and that the owner of the restaurant needs to pay the state a sizeable amount of employment tax and a fine because of this incident. On the subject of taxes, in the UK there are 3 different taxes that employers have to pay. In France there are over 400 different taxes and the paperwork surrounding all these taxes is unbelievably complex.

2. Car number plate cloning is rife in France. Farmers often receive fines for driving their tractor at 120 MPH on the motorway. The thing is, despite the tractor's top speed being 30 MPH and the farmer protesting it wasn't him or his tractor, he still has to pay the speeding fine. The problem is hitting lots of people. The law requires the innocent to pay the parking and speeding fines of those who have cloned their number plates; failure to pay results in more fines and the debt collectors coming and taking your possessions or the seizing of funds directly from your bank account. Unfortunately, these are never one-off fines as the offenders continue to drive using the copied plates and rack up fines running into many thousands of euros for the innocent - who are forced to pay. This has driven some people to despair and even suicide.

3. A French bureaucrat recently sent a letter to a Frenchman fining him because he hadn't sent in his annual tax return form. However, the man had died, hence his reason for not sending in the form. Undeterred the French bureaucrats sent a letter demanding payment of the fine, addressed to him at his grave in the cemetery in which he was buried!

Probably the only reason why Australia hasn't been many wars is because of its location.

However in fact it has joined NATO, in many wars. It was also in Vietnam, and UK and most of NATO wasn't. Only the US. America still has a hard time admitting it was a completely pointless.

I tend to think we give far too much credit to our economic ideas, and political system, democracy not withstanding.

The reality is resources and population, are the primary factors in the success of a nation, and of course politics after that. Disastrous politics such as the infighting in Libya mean they never really get to use that to their advantage.

Lucky for Australia is it has a relative small populations, to a massive land mass, and s**t loads of natural resources. Once it really start to cash in, it will be rich indeed. I'd move there but people are far to too friendly for my liking.

If I were more like Austrians, then I would turn up announced at my cousins in Australia, and crash for a couple of months, work in a few bars to make money for 6 month of "finding myself" trekking somewhere else in the world. Rinse-repeat...all the way into my 40s.

Sorry I'm taking the piss, just in case you can't tell

Last edited by 0_equals_true on 13 Sep 2014, 6:57 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'm not a fan of the "multiculturalism" we have in Oz.

It promotes separation rather than inclusion, and we all know how separation goes.

Anyway, Oz is just a mishmash of the old country and the US. Cities being closer to the UK, with the rural areas being closer to the US; suburbs being a mix.

To the OP: You would have to kill off 95 percent of the human race in order for the rest of the world to have the low population density that Australia has- in order for the rest of the world to have the laidback outback type lifestyle Aussies have.

To Tallyman: Thats all hilarious about France. Here in the States the trend among retailers is to get us customers to do more and more of the work that employees used to do. Grocery stores and the big drugstore chains all have self-checkout lines in which you scan the merchandise and pay and tender your own cash. We are all WAY beyond that drinking glass "incident"!

SO...I say...all Americans who have ever used a self checkout machine...DEMAND social security, and unemployement compensation, from Giant, and from Wahlgreens, NOW! They use you as their employees- so why not?

I did have a seemingly "French beauracratic" moment with the Maryland state MVA once. I got charged for parking tickets for infractions made by another driver who happened to a drive a car that (a) had the same license number but from a different state -- and (b) was the same make, but a different model as a car that I (c) USED to drive years ago, but had been junked years ago, and was for me about "three cars ago".

No deliberate plate counterfieting. It was just that the state could'nt distinquish between a "living" Toyota corolla sedan from NC, and a "dead" Toyota Tercel wagon from Maryland.They were both Toyotas, and they both have same sequence numbers and letters on the plates. So theyre the same car! But once I got to the MVA office and spoke to a live person she atleast straightened it out without further hassle.

That is kind of a systems failure rather than a bureaucratic one.

There are enough characters and possible combinations on a number plate for everyone in the US to have a unique one, just like Zip code.

The emu would be the dominant species on this planet if we were all Aussies