Saturday, November 29, 2003

Breaking news! 

I actually have something to blog about apart from my colourful underwear and puter-rage ordeals. Believe it or not.

Today, ladies and gentlemen and otherwise, I went to a demonstration. Yes, even though my middle name is "apathetic". It was held in Federation Square, the site of one of SBS' offices. We were protesting against SBS broadcasting "Thoi Su", the Vietnamese-language news from Viet Nam. Well, they call it news, but as the media is government-controlled there, it's basically communist propaganda. (So I'm told. Sif I'm going to get up at 6.50am to watch the news). The problem is that the vast majority of Vietnamese in Australia are refugees, who left the country to escape this kind of thing.

I turned up with my grandma at around 11, when the sun was already frying the 3000-odd black-haired heads. We immediately sought shade, although I walked around a bit to look for anything interesting. Nope, no burning effigies of Nigel Milan, even. Just lots of balloons and South Vietnamese flags and a few Australian flags. There were people constantly making speeches but a) I wasn't that interested b) they were mostly speaking in Vietnamese (grown-up Vietnamese, as opposed to the rudimentary "pass the soy-sauce" Vietnamese I know) and c) the speakers were annoyingly fuzzy, so I was a bit bored and not a little grumpy because of my hayfever and the whole "my head is boiling" thing. There was also a lot of shouting of the "What do we want?" "NO VTV4!" "When do we want it?" "NOW!" type. I was too self-conscious to shout (as were the majority of the people in the square metre of shade around me) so I just waved my little flag. I'm such a rebel.

I'm not that into the issue actually, I'm ashamed to say. I mean, I'm more Australian than I'm Vietnamese. I understand about one out of five words on the Viet radio, and they're mostly "the", "and", etc. And "Communist" is pretty much a word to me, I've only read about the war in books. There's also my affection for SBS. It's the funky wacky station on TV that you can always count on for something interesting to watch when all the other stations are showing cricket or some crap like that. Come on, they show Eurovision! How can you not love them? I do think they're in the wrong in this situation, but more because they're wasting taxpayer money on something that's not really serving its purpose ie. providing information for the Vietnamese community.

Really I just went along to support my papa* (who SO owes me now. I'm going to make him sit through ALL OF SPEECH NIGHT!). Oh well. I'll file it under An Experience.


Other sources: ABC, Yahoo, The Age, Herald Sun.

*Full disclosure: my father is a senior office-holder for the Vietnamese Community in Australia organisation.

# posted at 6:31 pm

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