With the best will in the world it can sometimes be very difficult to take regional (or national) politics in Australia seriously. A case in point is a ludicrous recent diktat handed down in the Northern Territory, which seeks to reclassify soy sauce as an alcoholic beverage. As a fermented condiment, soy sauce does indeed have a vanishingly small alcohol content, although I suspect you’d be long dead from salt poisoning before you managed to get drunk on it. The problem in Australia is that alcohol is sold in separate outlets from supermarkets. With soy sauce now classified as a kind of piss-weak, super salty Asian vodka, it has to be cleared from the supermarket shelves and retailed through suitably licenced outlets.
‘No wonder no one takes this fucking country seriously’, noted one disgruntled commenter on social media, which is perhaps a bit strong but one can sympathise with the frustration. For a people known for their easy going nature, the Australians have long suffered under nanny-ish governments, peopled by time-servers, pen pushers and tinpot bureaucratic fascists. Anyway spare a thought for the exasperated citizens of the remote Northern Territory, who now have to traipse to the bottle shop if they want to enjoy their sushi.
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