Some days Australians have reason to be proud and pleased, others ashamed.

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ost days, the world’s got many reasons to be thankful to Australia.

Australia has given the world Kylie
Minogue (pictured), Tim Tams, Nick Cave
and now an "absolutely" inadequate INDC.

There’s the fact that the nation’s given us Nick Cave, Tim Tams, the only pro sports league that makes the NFL look positively gentle, and both Kylie Minogue and Kylie 2.0.

Then there’s the roll call of apparently every male heartthrob currently onscreen not named Ryan or Bradley, seemingly making an Australian passport the new Scientology in Hollywood.

And then there’s Aussie slang. Maybe it’s our buttoned-up New England pilgrim heritage holding us back, but somehow here in the US, we’ve never managed to approach the everyday poetry of a culture where grownups call children “ankle biters” and describe someone less than aesthetically gifted as “having a face like a dropped pie” – all with a straight face (and these are just the SFW examples).

So given Australia’s natural genius for wordplay, when we saw its intended nationally determined contribution (INDC) detailing the country’s commitments for the UN climate talks in Paris later this year, we thought there’d been a mistake. Maybe something was lost in translation. Was Prime Minister Tony Abbott having a laugh? Or – as it seemed from such weak commitments – just telling the rest of the world to rack off?

Read The Climate Reality Project story - “At a loss for words: why Australia’s INDC is rubbish”.