Australian notes

Wednesday, 3rd March 2010

The White Paper on terrorism is right not to recommend yet another domestic counter-radicalisation programme targeting Islamicists.

The White Paper on terrorism is right not to recommend yet another domestic counter-radicalisation programme targeting Islamicists. Until there are enough Australian Muslims willing, openly and publicly, to combat what the White Paper calls ‘the terrorist narrative’ (including Osama bin Laden), such programs will fail. There is little sign of such a constituency in Australia yet. For the time being, surveillance and policing will have to remain our best defences against terrorists.

The worst thing about the new national curriculum is that it is national. When the cheering dies down, we may well end up subjecting all Australian children to postmodernism in English, black armband history, global warming in science, or any of the many fads, from ‘whole word’ reading to the new maths, that have hobbled schooling in recent decades. It may be only a matter of time before those who are now rejoicing will be calling for the restoration of the states’ control of curricula as the best way of ensuring that sensible alternative curricula are available. Then it will be too late. The states have only themselves to blame.

Helen Hughes, formerly of the World Bank, was forthright. She wished there had been more ‘Stolen Children’. Each of us, she said, should go out and ‘steal’ at least one Aboriginal child. She meant rescue them from abuse, disease and malnutrition in the Lands of Shame — her name for remote Aboriginal homelands and the title of one of her books. She had ‘stolen’ two girls from East Arnhem Land, she told us, and billeted them at her home in Sydney, to their great benefit and their mother’s enormous relief. She was speaking at the launch last week of Keith Windschuttle’s The Stolen Generations 1881-2008, volume three of his The Fabrication of Aboriginal History. She was only one of many of the stakeholders in this controversy who were present at the launch. Others included Dr John Herron, Judith Drake-Brockman and Andrew Bolt, not to mention John Howard. Herron was minister for Aboriginal affairs when the shocking report of the Human Rights Commission Bringing Them Home was published in 1997. It went far beyond using ‘Stolen Children’ as a metaphor for neglect. It accused Australians of genocide. Herron challenged the report in detail, only to be vilified as a racist. Judith Drake-Brockman’s book Wongi Wongi demolished the claims of Professor Sally Morgan, whose My Place tells a bogus story of Stolen Generations and a lurid tale of brutality, slavery, miscegenation and incest, all supposedly committed by Judith Drake-Brockman’s father on his Aboriginal servants. (My Place has sold 600,000 copies and been a compulsory text in schools for 20 years.)

1 | 2 | 3 Next page