ONE of the nation’s most senior educators has warned that traditional Australia will be lost if conservatives continue to flee from the culture debate.
Australian Catholic University Senior Research Fellow Dr Kevin Donnelly said the culture war was real, that the Left’s take-over of institutions was happening and that very little was being done to prevent it.
- Conservatives are frightened to fight for their beliefs and values.
- The Left is using every nasty trick in their book to silence those who hold traditional values.
- While conservatism is not yet lost, it may well soon be.
“My concern, and I’ve been writing about this since the mid-90s, is that unless conservatives enter the public debate – and get involved in what John Howard called the battle of ideas – then we’ve already lost,” Dr Donnelly told Sky News’ Outsiders this week.
He agreed that current conservative governments appeared to be dodging the culture wars.
“John Howard and Tony Abbott were very much aware of what was happening. They didn’t always get into the battle but they were there staking the territory to a degree,” Dr Donnelly said.
REVOLUTION
“If Marxists can infiltrate and take control of trade unions, of universities, of education, of the media, then they’re able to win the cultural debate.
“Marxist academics realised in the 1920s that the revolution would never occur in the West – as it did in Russia – so they began to get involved in what they called the “culture wars”.
Dr Donnelly said the response to COVID-19 was the latest example of this war.
“I write regularly for The Conservative Woman in London and there was a great deal of reaction against what [Prime Minister] Boris Johnson was doing there,” he said.
“People were afraid of losing their freedoms and of losing what was taken for granted in terms of liberty to live your own life, to take responsibility and not to have governments impose.
“As Tony Abbott says, conservatives have given way, conservative governments in particular, and they’ve allowed fear to take control.
“And as we know, fear is one way that the Left always tries to manipulate people.”
BATTLE
Dr Donnelly has recently released a new book called Cancel Culture and the Left’s Long March, which exposes the battle being fought by the Left.
The book is a collection of essays by prominent conservatives including former PM Tony Abbott, Ian Plimer, Jennifer Oriel, Patrick Byrne and Gary Marks to name a few.
“The chapter that Tony Abbott has written is a very worthwhile one,” Dr Donnelly said.
“It’s a warning to conservatives that the minute you allow government to step over the line, the minute you allow government to take control, it’s very rare that they will ever stand back.
“And the liberties and freedoms we take for granted, whether it’s freedom of expression, freedom of movement or freedom simply to take responsibility, all of that is being weakened, especially in Victoria unfortunately.”
Dr Donnelly said one saving grace for conservatism was that the Left was beginning to turn on each other.
“I’ve been looking at this for the past 30 to 40 years, as others have, and I think there are positive signs that the tide might be turning,” he said.
“If you look at the Communist Party, especially in Russia, the Left tend to eat their own if they can’t get their own way – and they often resort to violence to do that.
“Even President Obama came out, I think last year, saying that cancel culture, identity politics and victimhood are going too far.”
Dr Donnelly said that although the extreme Left had turned hostile towards the moderate Left, there was no time for conservatives to continue their complacency.PC
The latest changes to our school curriculum are a grotesque national disgrace; being changes tendered as ‘progressive education’ by a rabid bunch of woke, far-left activists.
James Morrow in the Telegraph and the valiant, acutely observant ‘Outsiders’ on Sky outlined just a few of the nauseous changes proposed. There is no room for desperately needed, in-depth English and language study, nor for the study of World History or Western Civilisation; the over-riding, ramped up content being Indigenous and Torres Islander content.
According to these overtly woke socialists, so obviously haters of Australia, colonisation by the British invaders denied the First Nation People true occupation and connection to Country or Place! —— So this woke garbage goes – on and on, ensuring that Australia will become a Nation of morons, unable to write or express themselves sensibly or cogently and disrespected by the intelligent citizens of the World.
This shockingly dangerous syllabus MUST BE ABSOLUTELY REJECTED BY SCOTT MORRISON AND EDUCATION MINISTER ALAN TUDGE and a sane, widely-reaching, age-appropriate, academic curriculum formed with no whiff of the gross, underlying political, sexual and racial agenda that permeates the present monstrosity!
Liberal Party Leaders and ministers, please take notice. Read the books Cancel Culture and Dictionary of Political Correctness. In both, there are far too many trends and facts to ignore.
The fundamental problem is the preferential voting system which acts to recycle the primary votes of quiet conservatives back to the Liberal Party. The result? Few post-Abbott Liberal pre-selection candidates are prepared to actively campaign on conservative causes because, channeling Mark Textor, they assume they have conservative voter preferences in the bag. As conservative-minded Liberals abandon the party – or at least fall silent – the preference-effect asserts itself in the pre-selection cycle and is resulting in shiny woke-green Liberal candidates emerging everywhere. You could describe it as white-anting, but that would be too kind.
My problem with the so-called conservative Morrison Government is that every time there’s a crisis, the PM instinctively dives left for cover.
I’m still not sure where he stands, though deep down I’m sure he’s a Matt Kean socialist.
‘“As Tony Abbott says, conservatives have given way, conservative governments in particular, and they’ve allowed fear to take control.’
Talk is cheaper these days than it ever has been in the past. What did Tony Abbott ever do about section 18C of the anti-discrimination act, a disgraceful law that allows vexatious litigants to pursue – on the entirely subjective basis of allegedly hurt feelings – those who have exercised their God-given right to speak their minds freely?
My antecedents fought and died in two World Wars to make this country great and keep it free, and now we have the likes of Tony giving lip service to that freedom – and this from a man who as PM looked like nothing less than a rabbit in the spotlight’s glare as he studiously turned a blind eye to the most insulting and egregious offences against our basic freedoms. I’m thoroughly sick and tired of these merchants of “woulda, coulda, shoulda”; these spineless purveyors of spin, who, having done nothing with the ball on the field, are suddenly full of all sorts of advice once they are safely ensconced on the sideline. Those who have had their chance and flubbed it should pay heed to that most apposite axiom: “Put up or shut up”.