White people demand Quadrant on Australia Day

For many years people have wondered what Australia Day is all about. Now the journal Quadrant has sorted this out for us. Australia Day is about things that the Left hates, which are:

Australia Day, Anzac Day, people who live in the suburbs, people who live in the country, farmers, fishermen, dams, Quadrant, Australian history, the flag, the constitution, Andrew Bolt’s readers, The Australian, Liberal voters, National Party voters, Family First voters, One Nation supporters, the RSL, McDonald’s, McMansions, plasma TVs, Australian Idol, big business, small business, monolingualists, Christians, our last prime minister, liberal democracy, capitalism, lamingtons, Australians, the national coat of arms, the Samuel Griffith Society, soldiers, conservatives, musicals not about Australian Left politicians, commercial television, non-indigenous trees, dog owners, cats, non-Left talk back radio hosts, timber workers, plastic bags, Howard’s battlers, climate change sceptics, white people, commercial radio, America (pre-Obama), sovereignty (ours), realistic paintings (especially by Albert Namatjira), the Big Banana and other Big Things, cultural dissidents, men, sprinklers, green lawns, cars (other peoples), wood fires, rednecks, Sir John Kerr.

Erm, cats??? Sir John Kerr? The Samuel Griffith Society (says what's that, sotto voce)? White people? Cultural dissidents? Australian Idol? Is this what the Right thinks that the Left thinks about?

In a possibly unrelated incident, there were riots in the Manly Corso on Australia Day as white people demanded that the local newsagent stock more copies of Quadrant.

"We're sick of having to read Dissent or The Monthly", said group spokesman Ned "Spanner" Kelly. "We urgently need to know about the formation of an Australian intelligentsia during the adversarial culture of the 1960s", he said, before pulling at the turban of a Sikh taxi driver.

A scuffle subsequently ensued with the owners of the 24-hour kebab shop, as they refused to take the Euro-trash techno off their CD player and put on "Cold Chisel's Last Stand".

Tony Burke and the Quadrant/Oz smear

I was surprised on Saturday to find my old friend and pool game opponent from UTS days Tony Burke on the front page of The Australian. In two articles (Sat and Mon) referring to the Culture Wars and 'Terror Academics' , it discussed claims made in the most recent edition of Quadrant by James Cook University academic Mervyn Bendle that Tony Burke was 'pro-terrorist', and should not hold a position at the Australian Defence Force Academy.

I'll leave it to others to judge on Tony's work (sample here) and the Bendle critique noted above. Some of the things that are notable about this are:

1. The extent to which The Australian has established itself as an amplification point for any criticism of academics that is made in Quadrant. We have had a recent instance of this in relation to the historian Stuart Macintyre, and now another with Tony Burke;
2. The resulting influence this gives to a small number of writers associated with Quadrant, such as Bendle, editor Keith Windschuttle, and educationalist Kevin Donnelly;
3. How this dovetails into the campaign of the Young Liberals, which is supported by Donnelly and Windschuttle, to 'out' alleged leftists in Australian universities.

Whether a new McCarthyism is too strong a word for this is a moot point. What is apparent is that The Australian has taken on a extraordinarily partisan position in relation to scholarly disagreements, and is looking like a sounding-board for Quadrant and the Young Liberals. Bendle, Donnelly and Windschuttle have received a lot of space in its opinion pages, in what looks like an orchestrated campaign to use the paper to politically shape university teaching n directions that would be at odds with assumption about academic freedom.