In a story reminiscent of the recent fiasco in New York where the examination Board of Regents tried to ensure that content unacceptable to hard right wing Christians did not appear in examinations, the Sydney Morning Herald reports that a top-scoring student was threatened with failure of his English examination because, in a creative piece on the subject of revenge, he wrote about a refugee, held in Australia's unprincipled and inhumane detention centres fantasized about killing the Prime Minister.

The examination board in a fit of political correctness bordering on paranoia, told 17 year old James Guigni that his work was offensive and "non-serious", the latter term entitling the board to discard his paper. The fact that the student had personally attended the Villawood detention centre in Sydney, and therefore had first hand knowledge of the situation, far more incidentally than our PM who has assiduously avoided finding out about the real effects of most of his decisions, doesn't seem to have occurred to the timorous weak-kneed cowards at the exam board.

Fortunately the student's father and teacher stood up for him and managed to remind the examination board that its job was to evaluate the work, not adopt Stalinist reviews of its content.

P.S. A friend who works in the Australian Government was startled recently to find that an e-mail from a friend was blocked by the ever vigilant Australian Government e-mail censors because it contained a potentially offensive word. The word was "invasion". You figure it out.