Group Hugs- Australia

Rudd's great leap forward
Article from: Herald Sun
Andrew Bolt
February 13, 2008

ONE election, and we're already back to group-think. Baa baa is the chorus of Chairman Rudd's Australia.

Already commissars are rounding up our children for re-education, so they can chant like little Red Guards the authorised opinions of these new days.

Note, for instance, this email to all schools from Victoria's Education Minister, Bronwyn Pike, a former board member of Greenpeace:

Saying sorry: The full apology

Sorry Day, Wednesday 13 February 2008, will be an historic day and I would strongly encourage all Victorian Schools to recognise and celebrate this significant event in Australia's history.

It is a great opportunity for individual teachers to make sure that your students are aware of the significance of this important day by:

- Listening or watching the Apology live in your classrooms from 8.55am ...

- Reading stories which affirm Aboriginal culture and customs.

At a school level I strongly encourage you to consider the following suggestions:

- Hold a school assembly at 8.55am ... to acknowledge the Apology and listen or watch the Apology live.

- Hold a flag-raising ceremony with the Australian, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags as a sign of acknowledgment of the Apology ...

And so on.

You see it is not enough that students simply know of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's sorry to these "generations" of "stolen" children no one can actually find.

To children we actually saved.

They must also "celebrate" it and "acknowledge" it. For extra measure, they must also "affirm" Aboriginal customs and fly the Aboriginal flag - a flag that divides us by race.

This is not teaching. This is indoctrinating. This is not passing on knowledge, but ramming home opinions of the must dubious kind.

Of course, Victoria is not alone in this extraordinary exercise, now that we enjoy the great efficiency of wall-to-wall Labor governments.

NSW's 2240 state schools have also been ordered to fly the Aboriginal flag - on the very flagpoles that former prime minister John Howard made them put up to fly the Australian one.

And, of course, the students were instructed not only to watch today's "sorry" on TV but yesterday's "welcome to country" at Parliament House - a ceremony by "traditional owners" welcoming our politicians to land that actually belongs to us all.

Were the children dutifully watching this made-up hocus-pocus, with its white feminist touches, told that even the local Aborigines couldn't agree who the rightful "traditional owner" truly was? Were they allowed to notice that the woman who finally did the welcoming, Matilda House-Williams, obviously had as much European ancestry as Aboriginal, making her as much invader as victim?

Don't notice, children! Don't question, or even ask. And especially don't laugh at this farce - or not in front of your teacher, at least.

But what next? Must children march around the school oval waving Labor manifestos and chanting other famous Rudd slogans, such as "New Leadership!", "The buck stops with me!", "Climate change is real!" and "In answer to your question, let me say this, that in terms of what we do from 2009 on, I've got an open mind"?

But as with the children, so with many of their parents, who today will be hauled in for their own celebrations of Rudd's sorry and told to cheer.

Take the staff of Victoria's Department of Human Services, who have already been given free screenings of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's global warming call to faith, to ensure they hold the Left's approved opinion on global warming.

The department's secretary, Fran Thorn, now wants them to have the Left's approved opinion on this "sorry", too, and has emailed them all an "invitation" to a free screening - in work time - of Rudd's "significant" and "momentous" speech.

"This is an opportunity for Department of Human Services staff to come together and promote greater understanding between all Australians," burbled Thorn.

Victoria's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission is even rewarding staff who come to its own screening with tea and biscuits.

No doubt some of HREOC's more censorious thought police, having already made criticism of the Koran all but illegal under our vilification laws, are now dreaming of ways to make questioning of the "stolen generations" a crime, too.

You may say I'm just twitching at Maoist shadows. But as the jubilant intelligentsia gathers for group hugs in this Rudd dawn, let ABC radio host Jon Faine make the censorious mood of the Left's new order clear.

Faine, who today hosts ABC radio's coverage of Rudd's "sorry", last week asked the Herald Sun's editor in chief - on air - why he and The Australian hadn't yet done a "cleansing" of their "notorious" conservative columnists, who mock such things as I mock now.

Writers like me were "out of step with the result of the election", Faine gloated, and the question now was "whether some of the staples of the media in the Howard era (had) worn out their usefulness" as we enter the Rudd era. In short: "You're not going through a cleansing process?"

"Cleansing?" As of dirt, Jon? Or did you mean "fumigating", perhaps?

Let me astonish you, dear reader. Not once in Howard's four terms of Coalition rule did Faine suggest the ABC have a similar "cleansing" of its own great drain-clog of Leftists like himself, given they were "out of step with the results of the election".

But more disturbing than Faine's hypocrisy is his apparent belief that the media should be "in step" with Labor, as so many of our cultural institutions are already, and that dissenters should be "cleansed".

There is a totalitarian glint in young Faine's glasses, I fear. And it's a glint I now see in the eye of so many of our Leftist intelligentsia.

Take, for instance, Professor Robert Manne, voted by his peers as our "most influential public intellectual". Under Howard, Manne and other writers of the Left - David Marr, Clive Hamilton, Guy Rundle - flayed Howard for allegedly crushing dissenters just like . . . er, them?

But the instant Rudd won, Manne called for all conservatives on the ABC board to resign, and said: "With the election of the Rudd Government . . . the culture war will come abruptly to an end." Is that an order, too?

Guy Rundle, an editor of the far-Left Arena magazine, similarly demanded The Australian "clean house" and sack all but one of its conservatives, and everywhere now we hear such cries from the Left for a cleansing.

Hear it from former Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser, now an agony aunt of The Age, who this week called for a cleansing of "a conservative group of ideologues" among the Victorian Liberals who'd taken the state party to the Right.

Pardon? The state Liberals still have conservatives?

In fact, this Opposition has apologised to the "stolen generations", fretted about climate change, voted to turn a dam reservation into a national park, backed vilification laws against free speech, praised multiculturalism and, in almost every ideological battle, chosen the side of the ABC.

Its leader, Ted Baillieu, is so fashionably Left that Fraser praises him as "one good piece of news" - despite his consequently terrible poll ratings.
Yet Fraser still wants any conservatives still loitering in the sad shadows of this limp, lame and listless lump of a me-too party to be hunted down and cleansed.

Oh dear. How intolerant is the new Left of what little debate and dissent remains.

What clean fiends they are, too. See them now getting out their hoses, disinfectant and scrubbing brushes. See them set to work, cleansing bad-thinking adults and washing the brains of our children. For hygiene's sake.

Want to save yourself? Then say after me the great new chorus: Baa baa. And tell your children this morning to watch in sacred silence the sorry on their teacher's TV, and then clap. Very loudly and long.

From:

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----Related:

Strategy for indigenous recruitment
Sean Parnell December 31, 2007

TROOPS have been sent in to Aboriginal townships as part of the Northern Territory intervention, but the defence force now wants those communities to provide the next generation of soldiers.

Defence is pursuing an indigenous recruitment and retention strategy to identify potential soldiers, sailors and air force personnel in remote communities. The number of indigenous members of the Australian Defence Force has risen from 622 out of a total 51,151 last year to 693 of 51,504 this year, with 79 per cent of those coming from northern Australia.

In March last year, the defence committee identified the need for a targeted recruitment and retention strategy. In September that year, Defence sent its top recruitment and human resources officials, and private and business representatives, to a forum in Darwin.

The forum heard from Vietnam veteran and television presenter Les Hiddins and Rio Tinto officials who had sourced mine workers from remote communities. Mr Hiddins told The Australian the forum developed a policy to promote a career in defence for indigenous people.

While Defence documents confirm the indigenous recruitment and retention strategy was meant to have been completed by the end of this year - and an official refused to give reasons for the delay - a Defence spokeswoman insisted the strategy would be released in the coming year.

Defence runs an indigenous participation program and plans to have two new cadet units in remote northern communities by January 2009.

Link: http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/