Stop arguing! You're wrong!

by Sylvano Lucchetti

Nigel Freitas is a Young Liberal and the director of the Make Education Fair Campaign. That's a straight cut & paste^TM of the byline from the Sydney Morning Herald article that he wrote and I read.

Mr. Freitas explains in the article, Academic freedom: exit, far left, that the right is suffering a "scarcity of conservative intellectuals" and it is this scarcity which is the explanation for the left's successful attack on the previous government! What!? Because the conservatives are such losers, the left are such winners!! Deep.

Don't get me wrong, when I was at university I had the odd period where I would wear a "Socialist's Suck!" badge if only to seek respite at lunch. Between them on the one side telling me how to use the tools of capitalism to overthrow it and on the other side the Christians saving my soul - again - was li'le ol' me trying to eat my friggen lunch... in peace... before having to listen to a monotone mathematician drone on about partial differential equations for one and a half hours.

The Young Liberals were much easier. You told them to nick off. And they did. That's kind of positive.

But it's also their big negative, because the existence of the Young Liberals and the broader Liberal movement alike is predicated upon being the anti Labor party. And apart from the achievement of nothing much better than hung parliaments in recent elections in Western Australia and the ACT, they basically have no pulse in this country.

One former trainee teacher, Beccy Merzi, told the inquiry: "I became so fed up and disgusted by the continual barrage of criticism of mainstream values, the lack of focus on practical ways of teaching, and the continual focus on minority groups, post-modernism, gender, queer and other studies that I abandoned my teaching degree." - SMH

Oh, so when I thought it was a good thing that a university questions the status quo, I was mistaken, it's actually a bad thing that universities engage in the "criticism of mainstream values."

And does Beccy's comment apply to every academic? Every academic in every university? Surely there's a post-neanderthal demi-god of liberal conservative perspectives somewhere. Apparently not. Anyone found expressing an anti left view has clearly been dismissed and told to start a scouts group.

It is a little concerning that Nigel Freitas attempts to carry off an argument as the inherent bias in our tertiary system in the absence of any "recent research ... into the ideological leanings of Australian educators," Even more concerning, is that he seems to characterise the situation in Australia by referring to a US study from 1999 (yep... there really haven't been any recent studies) and drawing upon selective submissions to a Senate inquiry that is not due to report until later this year.

You can't legislate to promote ignorance in a society where fifteen year olds can read any number of alternative views on a topic via their smart phones. You've got to have a clue and you've got win the argument.

Those radicals of yesteryear that Nigel describe as "today's establishment [and] ... will tolerate no dissent." They had the nous to argue their case - direct and hard - to win their case. Whereas the conservatives of today seek protection from their attackers by mimicking the strategies of a typical leftist minority group: make it illegal to offend me, too.

Talk about projection...