There are countless examples of how successful the cultural Left, cultural Marxism, has been in infiltrating and taking the long march through the institutions. 

I co-chaired the review of the national curriculum in 2014 for then Prime Minister Tony Abbott. There are many, many examples in the national curriculum. It presents a black armband view of Australian history. Many of you would have been aware of this during the debates about the Voice to Parliament. Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and others bemoaned the fact that instead of the First Fleet being celebrated and acknowledged, it was described as an “invasion” leading to “genocide”.

I write at times for the Daily Telegraph in Sydney, and during that debate, I made the point that in fact, thank God, it was the British, because a week or two later, it could have been the French who colonised Australia. The French actually arrived in Botany  Bay just after Captain Phillip had departed for Sydney Cove. The reason why Captain Philip raised the flag in Sydney Cove and celebrated health to the King was to prove to the French that we were here first; and I’m happy to say we. The national curriculum presents a black armband view, and it goes to such an extent that in algebra and science, schools are asked to teach “aboriginal algebra” and “indigenous science”. When I went to school many years ago, we studied those old, dead, white males; “DWEMs”, as they call them: dead, white, European males – like Pythagoras, and then Galileo and Newton. But the whole idea that rationality, reason, mathematics and science can somehow be divorced from Western culture and Western civilisation just doesn’t make sense.

The worst example of how schools have been infected, and many of you would know of it, is the Safe Schools program, which is all about gender fluidity. Roz Ward, who helped design it, admitted at a Marxist seminar it has nothing to do with bullying. It has nothing to do with changing the climate in schools so that LGBTQI+ students are not discriminated against or made to feel uncomfortable. At least Roz had the strength of her conviction to say what the real intent was. She basically argued it was to bring about the Marxist revolution in gender studies and sexuality. So instead of gender and sexuality being God-given or biologically determined, she argues it’s a social construct enforced by a binary, heteronormative, cisgendered, patriarchal, white society. It was quite a revolutionary doctrine. But the reality is it was supported by Liberal and Labor governments, state and federal, around Australia. I taught English for many years, and some of you might teach in schools, teach English, teach literature, and also know of gender ideology permeating the curriculum. Works like Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Romeo and Juliet are alleged to be guilty of being “heteronormative” or “cisgendered”, for example.

Romeo and Juliet obviously celebrates, even though tragically, the love between a boy and a girl. Now, that reinforces the “wrong” message for young children who must be taught that they can self-identify anywhere on the LGBTQI+ spectrum. And that’s what’s happening in kindergarten. It’s happening in primary school and secondary school. This radical ideology is not only happening in schools but also universities: we now have diversity guides, safe spaces, and trigger warnings. 

To Kill a Mockingbird, which I used to love teaching for many years at year 11 and 12 is condemned, along with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck Finn is cancelled because of the word “nigger”. There have been American academics who’ve nearly lost their jobs because they’ve taught the book as it’s written – as Mark Twain intended – rather than erasing his word and trying to change it to a word that is less offensive.

Science is not immune. In the United Kingdom there are universities now that teach that enlightenment science is inherently “white”: guilty of “European imperialism, colonialism and racism.” So you can forget everything that we have learned from Galileo, Newton and Pasteur. All that enlightenment science, whether it’s medicine or technology, is said to be guilty of imperialism, colonialism, and racism. Thank God, as I say to people when I fly, the plane was built by engineers and mechanics who knew something about geometry and weight bearing and how to keep planes up in the air (except if you fly Qantas – sorry)!

My background is education. I taught for 18 years and then I went back and did a doctorate in curriculum many years ago. At the time I became aware of this “battle of ideas”, as John Howard calls it. When I grew up in Broadmeadows in Melbourne, Dad was a communist and he worked at the Newport Rail Stations, the workshops in Melbourne, which was a communist cell back in the day. So Dad was a good communist (if they exist), and I was a member of the Eureka Youth Movement: the Young Communist Party. Thank goodness, mum was a good Catholic, and had a kind of Irish sort of working class blood that the original Donnellys and Wellingtons who came out generations ago had. So obviously I’d been baptised and my childhood included communion and confirmation and learning the Bible. I want to dig a bit more deeply into why this is happening. 

Karl Marx talked about religion being the “opium of the masses”. Since that time, there’s been a concerted campaign to destroy religion. It is obvious to anybody who knows history or who can see what is happening around the world or in society more generally, whether it’s New Zealand or Australia. If you look globally, Christians are the most victimised, oppressed religion or faith in the world. Now, whether it’s the Egyptian Copts who have their churches burnt or they are killed; whether it’s Christians in the Middle East being beheaded, the reality is Christianity is the target. You might have heard of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Communist during the Second World War, who wrote the Prison Notebooks. This is why the previous chapter was 100% correct. Gramsci, during the 1930s, defined “Socialism as a religion is destined to kill Christianity.” Gramsci was a leading Marxist, academic intellectual in Europe during the 30s, and that is what he believed, and it became part of the Marxist doctrine (ideology if you wish). Across the Western world (and Archbishop Fisher in Sydney talks about this) there’s now an absolutist, secular ideology which is destroying religious freedom and freedom of conscience, and where Christians are being banished from the public square or losing their jobs. That’s happening more broadly, but it’s also happening in the curriculum, which I became more aware of when I reviewed the national curriculum. What those who are in control of education want to do is to cancel Christianity and impose this absolutist, secular ideology which can be traced back to Gramsci and the Frankfurt School in Germany.

The Australian Education Union and many left-leaning academics argue against school choice. There were quite a few submissions to the Gonski review of school funding arguing that religious or faith-based schools have no right to be funded. Those who keep up with politics may understand that Jason Clare, the current Education Minister, late last year (2023) received a report that he’d commissioned. He acknowledged that report by arguing that religious or faith-based schools, Catholic and independent schools are only for the privileged, the wealthy, and that they’re too elitist and too exclusive; and it’s the poor, disadvantaged students in government schools who deserve the funding. That echoed the Gonski review of school funding which Gillard set up, where the basic premise was to take money away from the non-government schools and give it to the government schools. Some readers may be aware of what happened in Brisbane with Citipointe Christian School. The school leadership attempted to introduce, as a condition of enrolment, an agreement with parents that students would uphold (or at least not openly defy) the school’s values and beliefs. It ended in the principal apologising and resigning, and the government threatening to withdraw all funding. It’s not only a battle in terms of curriculum (what’s being taught in the classroom), and in terms of funding, but also a battle of control over enrolment and staffing. This will be a significant battle with the Albanese government, centering around the report that’s been commissioned into religious freedom but hasn’t been released (at the time of writing). But this will be a significant issue for many people around Australia and hundreds of parents who are setting up their own schools or have already established schools.

Being an English teacher for 18 years, I always like to look at language. One of the books I loved teaching was Orwell’s 1984. Orwell argued, and you see it in 1984 again and again, “Freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength and war is peace.” How can that be? The technical term is cognitive dissonance: that you can hold two opposing ideas, not realising they are fundamentally contradictory. What the cultural Left does, what cultural Marxism does, is to use [weapnonise] language. There’s a lovely quote from Orwell, who fought in the Spanish Civil War and said in his biography [paraphrased], “Forget the bombs, forget people shooting at me. As an author, a writer, I’m more worried and more concerned about language being weaponised as a tool to destroy common sense, rationality and reason.” That is something we see every day, certainly in the way the curriculum is taught in schools and universities.

Michael Gove, who was the UK Secretary of State for education, wrote a very good book where he describes cultural Marxism as a revised form of classical Marxism, where the focus is on, not the economy or the modes and means of production, but the focus is on a society’s institutions. It was the German radical student, Rudi Dutschke, who introduced the expression, “der lange Marsch durch die Institutionen” – the long march through the institutions – which goes back to Gramsci (even though he never used that exact expression). He talked about cultural hegemony. Without getting too academic, if you know the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, what he talks about are the ideological state apparatus (institutions). What cultural Marxists believe is that if Western, capitalist society – underpinned by Christianity and institutions like the Church and the family – is to be overthrown, then the revolutionaries are never going to win at the barricades. They are never going to win by force by what Althusser called the coercive state apparatus (police, military). The way to take control and to bring about the “glorious people’s revolution” is to take control of the ideological state apparatus: schools, churches, universities, and families. We can see how successful that has been. The barbarians are no longer at the gate. I’m sorry to say the barbarians are actually in the citadel. They have taken control.

What’s to be done?

Schools and universities must rediscover the central importance of a liberal education. T. S. Eliot, the poet, talks about education being about wisdom, beauty and truth. Michael Oakeshott, an English philosopher, talks about education being a conversation. It was a privilege for me to teach. It was a great honour because I was actually introducing students to a conversation; a dialogue between them and me that goes back hundreds and hundreds of years. When I taught Greek tragedy, whether it was Oedipus or Medea, that was something that is part of our patrimony, that is a critical part of our Western cultural heritage, which is being canceled. The process of education involves initiating children into a conversation, which is Michael Oakeshott’s point. Schools have gone in the opposite direction for 20-30 years, where teachers are just “facilitators” or “guides” by the side, and students are “digital natives” – it’s all about self-agency.

My daughter (who gave up teaching in the end because she didn’t want to get jabbed) had a desk at the front of the room with the students sitting facing her. She was told by the principal to get rid of the desk, “Take away the desk. You are not the authority figure. It’s all about self-agency and empowering young children.” That was year two, by the way. Another part of that story is that in the common room, teachers would come up and whisper, “Amelia, why is your class so silent? Why are all the kids working?” Amelia would answer, “Well, they know I’m in charge.” We must get back to the idea of a liberal education. I must admit, it’s starting to happen in some states. Phonics (phonemic awareness) is coming back. The New South Wales authorities recently talked about having a focus on “essential knowledge” in the curriculum, what Jerome Bruner called, “the structure of the discipline,” rather than process, inquiry based… blah, blah, blah, blah.

But more importantly for me, and I think all of you, a liberal education is underpinned and informed by Christianity. There are absolute truths. There is such a thing as wisdom and truth. And with God’s grace, that’s something that, as an educator, I insist we need to pass on to our children. As well as the catechism, I argue it has to also be in subjects like history, music, art, and literature. Peter Craven wrote a very good chapter in the book I edited, Christianity Matters. 

“When we stare at the Sistine Chapel ceiling or listen to Mozart’s Requiem or his Coronation Mass, we are not experiencing the rhetoric of a religious vision, but the essence. The essence where beauty and truth are at one.”

That is something that is there for all of us, and it’s something that we have to imbue or introduce to our children. It is about human flourishing. It is about a commitment to the common good. Everybody talks about values – even Qantas and Westpac and the National Bank. What I’ve always argued is we need Christian virtues, which go back to obviously Aquinas, and before him the Greek philosophers like Aristotle, Plato: temperateness, courage, good sense and justice. And I always add love. Not love for anything. Love has to be discriminatory. I have always argued that discrimination is a very good thing, especially in whiskey. The latest ABS figures last year showed that the number one medical complaint wasn’t asthma or migraine, but anxiety and depression. We have some of the highest rates of youth suicide. Nobody ever worries about boys. It is always about how we’ are a “patriarchal, misogynist” society. Boys are destined to grow up like their fathers, as in “toxic masculinity”. Now, I argue we should teach virtuous masculinity, and that’s what a good Christian education provides. You need God’s Word to be morally grounded, and emotionally and spiritually enriched. That is something as a society we’re losing track of. 

I’ll leave you with this very good thought:

In the darkness there is light.

I’ll be personal for a moment. Our son, God bless him, James, was killed in a hit and run accident when he was 20. Julie, my lovely wife of 50 years, introduced me to Julian of Norwich, and it was through that Christian mystic that we found God’s succour and grace and comfort. If you do not have that in this world, what do you turn to? Increasingly we are seeing what people are turning to: violence, anger, deceit and cruelty. There is a lot there to work on, but in the darkness there is light.

Sydney’s Campion College is doing brilliant work and they’ve just spent a lot of money on new buildings because enrollments are growing. Alpha Crucis College does good work in Sydney. Another is the Ramsay Foundation, even though hundreds of academics around Australia signed open letters saying, “Don’t take any money from the Ramsay Foundation,” because they wanted to establish centres for Western civilisation. You can have a Confucius Centre from China, but apparently you can’t have a Western Civilisation Centre. There is also Hartford College in Sydney, which is starting up. St. John Henry Newman College in Brisbane is in the process of being established by good, committed Christians. People are starting their own schools or have already established schools.

Over the last two years, I’ve had two forums in Melbourne and Sydney where I have had over 80 parents and teachers spend a day mapping out what they can do because frankly, I have given up on the elites. I have given up on the bureaucracy. I have given up on the education ministers around Australia. My view is, it is homeschooling, or start your own school.

While the French had the reign of terror and Madame Guillotine, landing at Sydney Cove was the King James Bible and Blackstone’s Laws of England. It is only because of that enlightenment mentality that Governor Philip made the decision: no slavery. When he was speared, he said [paraphrased], “No, it’s my fault. Don’t retaliate.” Our whole political, legal and cultural system – music, literature, art, language – it’s all underpinned by Christianity and by the Westminster form of government and English common law.