The very day of our posting about Andrew McGahan's book Underground (admittedly several months late), John Howard took an idea from its pages. Or was McGahan merely being obviously prescient?

Here is a paragraph from page 89:

He was in a suit, not a uniform, and his two colleagues were the same. Of course, under current law, no official is required to identify himself, so it was impossible to know which body these men represented precisely. But they had the look of Department of Citzenship to me -- and that was scary. The AFP might spy on our every move, and the military might have taken over our streets, but Citizenship (or Immigration, as they used to be called) are the ones who, ever since September 11 and its aftermath, have been making people disappear.

In his bid to drape every Australian in a nationalist-cum-racist flag by dropping the idea of multiculturalism -- the natural state for people from other countries who choose to live in a second country -- for the unnatural state of assimlationist homogeneity, John Howard has renamed the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA) the Department of Immigration and Citzenship (DIC).

How long before "Immigration" is dropped?

-- Benoît Balz