A few weeks back federal member for Brisbane and citizenship spokeswoman for the coalition, Teresa Gambaro, told The Australia that she believed migrants should be taught about the importance of wearing deodorant and waiting in queues without pushing in. In this rather extraordinary claim Ms Gambaro went on to say she was concerned that new Australians were failing to integrate because they hadn’t been brought up to speed on the cultural issues related to health, hygiene and lifestyle. It seems Ms Gambaro feels we need to Aussie-fy our newcomers to make them more acceptable to the general community.

I’ve never been out sniffing new Australians like Ms Gambaro seems to have been, but I think it’s a little broad and very rude to make the assumption that they’re all on the nose. These are the kind of culturally ignorant people who believe that their cultural values reflect some sort of norm.

The world is a smelly place. Humans are born fresh and wonderful and then they start to compost. I remember the wog kid at school who got tormented for having a salami and eggplant sandwich with a side of garlic bread. He was tormented for having a weird lunch. The smell of his lunch set him apart. He needed to be destroyed by the white-bread-and-Vegemite kids, lest their world of Arnott’s biscuits and bruised bananas (tell me banana in a lunch box isn’t offensive) be turned on its head.

But we evolved. Our stinky migrant brothers and sisters have educated us. Our food has evolved. We now eat Spag Bog and think it’s an Aussie dish. What was once stinky and disgusting is now considered part of our everyday cuisine. What was repulsive to our olfactory senses is now delicious.

Everything smells. The wog kid’s sandwich only smelt bad because we didn’t recognise it. It was just a smell that fell outside of our cultural norms of beer, Pal Meaty Bites and Vegemite. I’ve certainly been in the presence of people who could have done with a little deodorising help. But they weren’t new stinky-Stralians. They were organic-loving chemical-free vegans emerging from a yoga class. And they kind of smelt good, in a thick pheromone-y kind of should-I-breed-with-you kind of way.

Personally I quite like the smell of my own armpit. There’s something quite erogenous about working up a good sweat, and busting out in some of your own personal stench. It’s poor etiquette to get a whiff of your own armpits and be so impressed that you’ll go back for more. But who hasn’t done it? It’s up there with wanking and nose picking as one of the private pleasures of inhabiting this beastly human form.

Why do we assume that chemical inhibitors are better than none? So it’s okay to get a whiff of someone’s antiperspirant, or their perfume, but normal organic human stink is not okay. Our smell is our etheric fingerprint. It’s how we identify each other on a ‘smellular’ level. This whole concept, though, of teaching migrants Australian norms is ridiculous. Instead of housing, or education, do we just offer some Rexona? Perhaps what we need to invent is a roll-on moronic-bigoted-thinking retardant for the general population who think migrants smell, and we could start by dropping a crate at Gambaro’s place.