One of the inevitable consequences of the placement of a bogus article in the January-February edition of Quadrant by a team associated with the online publication Crikey and its writer Margaret Simons is that, in future, we will scrutinise more closely the personal credentials of authors who submit freelance contributions to the journal. Indeed, as […]

Read More

An author calling herself ‘Sharon Gould’ has tricked Quadrant into publishing in its January-February edition an article about popular scares on biotechnology issues. ‘Gould’ now claims her article is a hoax. However, there is something funny going on here which readers should be aware of. A genuine hoax, like that of Alan Sokal and Ern […]

Read More

Senate hearing opening remarks
…the underlying agenda of the academic field of “genocide studies” is not the study of genocide, let alone its analysis or prevention. It is to argue that our own society and those like it, that is, Britain and the United States, are every bit as bad as Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Maoist China. The old moral equivalence argument from the Cold War is alive and well in genocide studies. Let me quote from the 2001 edition of the academic journal Aboriginal History, whose editors, Ann Curthoys and John Docker of the Australian National University wrote:

Curthoys and Docker are here quoting a claim by former Professor Ward Churchill of the University of Colorado …
See also: Aboriginal History ‘a live political issue’

Read More

At the last federal election, Kevin Rudd promised an “education revolution”. However, the appointment last month of Stuart Macintyre to draft the national history syllabus for Australian high schools is anything but revolutionary. It is a return to the past with a vengeance. It is guaranteed to entrench within the teaching of history all the […]

Read More

This political caricature of the Australian experience is the curriculum we can expect Macintyre to deliver to the Rudd government. It is no wonder that schoolchildren who have tasted earlier offerings from the same left-wing menu regard Australian history as dreary and uninspiring.

Read More

Academics in the field of terrorism studies at two Australian universities have responded to a critique of their work by Dr Mervyn Bendle in Quadrant’s September edition by trying to close down debate and punish its author. They have approached Bendle’s employers at James Cook University in Townsville to recommend he be investigated for academic misconduct and suitability for academic employment.
Within a week of the publication of Bendle’s article, the left-wing academics he criticised approached the JCU Vice-Chancellor, Professor Sandra Harding, to take action against him and suggested his head of department, Professor Richard Lansdown, re-think Bendle’s fitness as a university-employed scholar. At the same they also demanded the September edition of Quadrant be recalled and pulped, and that Quadrant Online remove the article in question from the internet.
These actions represent disturbing developments not only for academic freedom but also national security.

Read More

In the ancient fable, Chicken Little thought one acorn dropping on her head meant the entire sky was falling. Today’s Chicken Littles show similar insight.

Read More

IN THE BUILD-UP to the last election campaign, a small news item got largely lost in the melee. Since the Rudd victory, however, the reported topic has assumed a new importance in the Australian political agenda. On September 13, 2007, the United Nations’ General Assembly adopted its Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The […]

Read More

In 2005 Robert Manne edited a collection of his political essays entitled Left Right Left. It is a large book of thirty-eight works, ranging from those published as long ago as 1977 to as recently as 2005. The turning point within them, Manne says, is the year 1995, roughly the time when he switched his […]

Read More

In this article, I want to show how the two postmodernist tactics of language games and character assassination have been deployed in this debate.

Read More