It was bound to happen. Australia's time-honoured rituals of public indecency and intoxication have run head-on into the delicately poised geopolitics of Malaysia, with predictably disastrous results.Nine Aussie Formula One fans were arrested and imprisoned earlier this week after celebrating the win of Australian F1 driver, Daniel Ricciardo, at the Malaysia Grand Prix by stripping to their special edition Malaysian flag 'budgie smugglers' and drinking beer out of their shoes trackside.
Advertisement
This pretty typical demonstration of Australian national pride was inadvertently spurred on by Ricciardo, who accepted his first place trophy on the dais and, as has become his custom, celebrated by drinking champagne out of his shoe (even managing to get his competitors to do it).Shame on those Aussies by doing this. So inappropriate — Nik Asyraaf (@nikasyraaf)October 2, 2016
The gag, known as 'The Shoey,' has become a favourite of Ricciardo's after he picked it up from Australian MotoGP wild man, Jack 'Jackass' Miller, who celebrated his breakthrough Dutch Grand Prix win by skolling from his boot. Miller had in turn observed the practice among the proud Gold Coast surf-bogan crew, the Mad Huey's, who've been drinking piss out of shoes for over a decade.In the conservative Islamist nation of Malaysia, however, getting wasted and stripping to your underpants in public is a big no-no. Especially when the country's Prime Minister is wrapped in a funds-embezzlement scandal, which he is attempting to weather by appealing to the country's Malay-Muslim heartland. The fear is that that the nine arrested Australians, one of whom, Jack Walker, is reportedly a staffer for Liberal frontbencher, Christopher Pyne, will be used as a political football by the besieged Prime Minister Najib Razak as he attempts to garner support by stoking nationalist and conservative Islamist sentiments. The charge of disrespecting Malaysia's flag can carry serious jail time if local authorities choose to make an example of the Australians.You'd think being a policy adviser to Pyne, who is the Federal Minister for the Defence Industry, might have created a certain awareness of the delicately poised geopolitical situation in Malaysia. And maybe it did, which only goes to show you can take the boy out of Australia, but you can't the pisshead out of the boy.