My Macquarie Uni talk shows why universities can't win

Bettina Arndt

Well, I have just completed the final talk in my Fake Rape Campus tour for this year– at Macquarie University in Sydney. Macquarie is a pretty snoozy place, a far less political campus than Sydney university and it is currently exam time so the event was much quieter than previous ones. It went pretty well, with about 60 people showing up and no protesters.

For the previous few weeks feminists had been very actively pull down posters promoting the event but the Liberal Club students hosting my talk did a great job getting more posters out there. That’s the main point of the whole exercise – not simply persuading people to show up for the event but getting the message out to ordinary students the universities are misleading them about the safety of their campuses – and demonising young men in the process.   

The student newspaper put the usual feminist spin on what I am doing, claiming the Human Rights Commission figures understate the problem because rape victims won’t come forward. That’s an argument that surely doesn’t hold up when it comes to a totally confidential, anonymous survey. But at Macquarie the activists had the bright idea of holding an event supporting rape survivors at the same time as my talk – and a far more peaceful time was had by all.

I’m posting just a small segment of the Q&A, where I was questioned by a rape victim. It’s only a few minutes long but I think you will find it illuminating. 



We are not allowing comments to be posted about this video because I don’t want my questionner to receive personal attacks. However I thought this was a very interesting exchange, illustrating very clearly that the whole campus rape narrative is being driven by people, some with very sad histories, who have no interest in evidence or facts but are determined to promote their ideological position that our campuses are crawling with rapists. They are now actively seeking to drum up new data which supports their position, conveniently dismissing the Human Rights’ Commission survey which failed to produce evidence of a rape crisis. It shows so clearly that despite the strenuous efforts of our universities to appease these people, there is no way they are ever going to be satisfied.  

It is quite frightening that the whole higher education sector appears to believe they can enhance their public reputation by kowtowing to this dangerous minority group – selling out young men in the process. It makes me all the more determined to push ahead with my campus tour next year. I now have student groups across the country keen on hosting more talks – which will roll out from the start of first semester next year. We are looking at ways of circulating proper information about the campus rape issue, organising meetings with university administrators, talking to staff and alumni groups as well as students.

Senator Amanda Stoker

Then there’s action following Senator Amanda Stoker’s excellent efforts to raise questions about the violent Sydney University protest in Senate Estimates.  We’ve organised for TEQSA, the body responsible for monitoring universities’ compliance with regulations, to be given all the evidence for Sydney University’s failure to protect student safety and control unruly students. It will be nice to see this arrogant institution facing some tough questions and we have other plans if the current approach fails to achieve any results. 

Gunning for me

Some of you may remember a video interview I posted last year with Nico Bester, a teacher who served time in prison for having a sexual relationship with one of his older students. He rightly paid the price for doing something very wrong. I interviewed him because I object to the fact that having served prison time for his offence he has now become the poster boy for the #MeToo activists who are conducting a ferocious campaign to try to stop him finishing his PhD at Tasmania University.

This week the activists have launched  the latest stage in their campaign, arguing in numerous newspaper articles that his victim should be allowed to “fight back,” by openly telling her story. At present Tasmanian laws prohibit the media from naming her. The irony is we recently removed Bester’s video after discovering the material we presented included a tiny image of her face, taken from her Facebook page, which apparently was most distressing for the victim.

It seems rather odd that she is now demanding Tasmania changes its laws so her identity can be publicly revealed. Sixty Minutes is currently promoting a teaser for this week’s programme which includes a highly selective segment from my video interview with Bester. Rest assured they’ll be doing their best to discredit me in every way possible. My campus tour is making me a very big target!

Via email






Latest Melbourne terrorist attack: Scott Morrison slammed for Islam remarks by an Australian Leftist politician of Egyptian origin

Says we should not worry about Jihadi attacks because there are other bigger sources of violence -- a classical fallacy

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has been slammed for his remarks singling out radical Islam in the wake of the Bourke Street terror attack.

Labor MP and counter-terrorism expert Anne Aly said the PM’s response to the events in Melbourne was ignorant and “politically desperate”, after he called Islamic extremism the greatest threat to Australia’s national security.

“There is no country that is immune to the threat of terrorism,” Dr Aly told Sky News. [So?]

“I don’t care how politically desperate you are, now is not the right time to divide the community.”

At a press conference yesterday, Mr Morrison said he could not speak of Friday’s attack in Melbourne, which left an innocent man dead, two others stabbed and a car bomb driven into the CBD, without naming the threat of “radical, violent, extremist Islam” behind it.

Somalian-born terrorist Khalif Shire Ali, 30, had links to Islamic State and had been radicalised, according to police.

“Here in Australia, we would be kidding ourselves if we did not call out the fact that the greatest threat of religious extremism in this country is the radical and dangerous ideology of extremist Islam,” Mr Morrision said.

But Dr Aly, a Professorial Fellow and former Associate Professor at Curtin University, said Mr Morrison needed to do “a little bit of terrorism 101 … and know what he’s talking about before he starts dividing communities and pointing fingers at radical Islam.”

“Yes, violent jihadism has been the predominant aspect of the religious wave of terrorism (of) the last 40 years or so (but) is it the biggest threat here in Australia in terms of violence and victims of violence? The biggest victims of violence in Australia aren’t victims of violent terrorism, they are victims of domestic violence. [So?]

“When we look at all forms of violence, violence perpetrated by violent jihadists — or radical Islam as the Prime Minister wants to put it — pales in comparison to the number of women who are being killed every week in domestic and partner violence.”

Dr Aly said Mr Morrison had also missed an important distinction between cognitive extremism and behavioural extremism.

“Now every researcher, every academic, every practitioner and every person in law enforcement knows that being extreme doesn’t always necessarily lead to violence,” she said.

“In fact we have many case of people have become violent but have not shown a process of extremism or radicalisation. We also have examples of people who are extreme, who we may consider holding extreme beliefs, extreme world views who have never become violent.”

Mr Morrison yesterday told Australians to “keep being yourselves, keep being Australians,” while urging Islamic religious leaders to protect their communities to ensure “dangerous teachings and ideologies” didn’t spread in Australia.

“They must be proactive, they must be alert and they must call this out in their communities,” he said, adding the government and wider community needed to work respectfully with them.

But Dr Aly said singling out Muslim leaders to do more was a cheap political shot.

Australian Federal Police yesterday revealed Shire Ali was known to authorities for his extremist views, and had had his passport cancelled in 2015 following an attempt to travel to Syria. But he was not considered a national security threat went unmonitored after that time.

AFP national manager of counter-terrorism Ian McCartney admitted the Bourke Street attack had come as a wake-up call to authorities.

“The event yesterday for us is a reality check, even with the fall of the Caliphate … the threat continues to be real,” he said.

Beloved restranteur Sisto Malaspina, co-owner of Melbourne’s iconic Pellegrino’s espresso bar, stabbed to death just a few hundred metres from the premises after trying to assist Shire Ali when he stepped out of a burning car on Bourke Street on Friday afternoon.

Two others were also stabbed before Shire Ali was filmed lunging wildly at police with a knife. He was shot by a junior officer and later died in hospital.

SOURCE 





Australian curriculum reform must be based on evidence, not fads

The NSW school curriculum review is no trivial matter, and will have serious consequences for the state’s students. The importance of the curriculum – what students are expected to know and be able to do at each stage of school – by far outweighs jousting over funding, although it gets far less public attention.

Curriculum development is a balancing act and involves compromises and trade-offs. Children spend a limited number of hours in class each year, and there are many competing demands for this time: from foundational skills in literacy and numeracy, to general knowledge of the world and its history, health and physical activity, using technology, and now so-called general capabilities such as collaboration and creativity.

This balancing act is growing more fraught. There is strong advocacy to add to an already crowded curriculum in significant ways. Decisions have to be made about what to keep and what to jettison. These decisions must made with advice from subject matter experts, without recourse to superficial and dangerous propositions such as that from “21st-Century skills pioneer” Charles Fadel, who recently suggested trigonometry should be out and mindfulness should be in.

Care must be taken that curriculum does not implicitly or explicitly prescribe teaching methods. In theory, curriculum is agnostic about teaching. It specifies the content students should learn and the skills they should master, but does not state how these things should be taught.

The Australian curriculum says children should learn to calculate percentages by the end of Year 4, but has nothing to say about whether this should be learned sitting at a desk or playing in a sandpit. Schools make judgments about which teaching strategies are most likely to be effective.

However, in reality a curriculum can and often does encourage certain teaching practices. An example is the recommendation in the second ‘Gonski’ report to “strengthen the development of the general capabilities, and raise their status within curriculum delivery, by using learning progressions to support clear and structured approaches to their teaching, assessment, reporting and integration with learning areas”.

Creating a set of learning progressions is not a straightforward exercise. It heightens the influence of curriculum on teaching methods, and drives a particular approach to assessment. The Gonski report proposes “developing the general capabilities into learning progressions that will provide a detailed picture of students’ increasing proficiency.”

There are two risks in this. One is that it will authorise and promulgate the misguided notion that general capabilities are independent of knowledge of facts and concepts – including the fallacy that “learning how to learn” is the ultimate goal of school education.

The other is that the proposed policies and practices overshoot the existing evidence base, and therefore risk wasting valuable time and resources – not least the time of teachers who generally
already have a heavy administrative workload, and that of students whose education is at stake.

The general capabilities listed in the Australian curriculum – digital capability, critical and creative thinking, personal and social capability, intercultural understanding, and ethical understanding – are inarguably valuable for the world of work and for life more broadly. The crucial questions are whether they are really generic skills that can be conceptually sequenced on developmental progressions, and if they can be taught and assessed separate from content knowledge. The evidence at the moment suggests the answer to both questions is no.

SOURCE 






Australia's little socialist republic in Canberra goes rogue on religion

This week the ACT has proved yet again that Canberrans are living in a world of their own.

Our little socialist republic has gone ahead and passed a bill aimed at eliminating the legal exemptions to the anti-discrimination laws pertaining to freedom of religion aimed at schools and other religious institutions.

The exemptions have been branded by the Barr government as “loopholes” although they were deliberately included in the original anti-discrimination legislation to give religious institutions freedom to run the institutions on religious principles. What is more, the ACT has gone its own way, despite the commonwealth government having yet to respond to the Ruddock review, pre-­empting any changes the commonwealth may make.

It has always been the stated aim of the Greens and the left of Labor to get rid of the exemptions to anti-discrimination law. The last thing Mark Dreyfus did as­ ­attorney-general was to eliminate the never-used exemptions in religious aged care. That was a warning for Labor’s future conduct.

The timely leaking of parts of the Ruddock review and the “who knew?” outrage that accompanied the leak were deliberately engineered and have given the green-Left the impetus it was seeking to eliminate the exemptions.

In Canberra, where 40 per cent of children are in independent schools, it will have the effect of restricting the freedom of parents in the choice of school, accomplished under the mantle of eliminating “discrimination” and encouraging “diversity”. It limits parents’ right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief, all of which are part of the international covenants to which Australia is a signatory.

This was blatantly admitted in an accompanying speech by Shane Rattenbury, who sponsored the bill: “The amendments will engage and limit the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion and belief. They engage and potentially limit the right of parents to ensure the religious and moral education of a child in conformity with their convictions. However, in the context of the scheme of the Discrimination Act as a whole, these limitations are reasonable and proportionate in accordance with s28 of the Human Rights Act.”

This is Rattenbury’s interpretation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

No one should forget what happened to Archbishop of Hobart Julian Porteous, who was hauled up to a human rights board for disseminating Catholic doctrine on marriage. The archbishop was a victim of the human rights apparatus that has redefined and limited our rights. Advocates of human rights, and especially advocates on human rights commissions, are very keen to talk about “balance”.

However, the real problem is that the human rights apparatus, encompassing all the various commissions and boards, has been allowed to override fundamental human rights in favour of the rights of special interest groups. The Porteous case was the most blatant example of this.

All rights are important — religion, speech and right of minorities not to suffer discrimination — but the legal structure is skewed in favour of rights that appeal to identified groups (24 in fact), not the broader community. We have given priority to a handful of rights while ignoring the impact on rights that are just as important. Hence, the fundamental right of parents to educate their children in accordance with their moral and religious views is potentially compromised by the palaver about “balance” in the ACT legislation.

Freedom of religion is one of our foundation constitutional principles. Despite talk of the “private” practice of religion and those whingers of the freedom-from-­religion camp, the manifest practice of religion cannot be separated from freedom to “private” practice of religion. One must accept religion is not something separate from daily life. Belief must be manifest in thought, in conscience, which guides morality, and in speech.

Silencing religion in the public square is not just about silencing bishops; it is about silencing lay men and women. Governments have already begun to interfere in individual conscience in ways acceptable only in the worst totalitarian regimes. Victoria has overridden the right to freedom of conscience by requiring doctors to refer patients for abortion.

Religious bodies should not be subject to legislation that affects their foundation principles but, then, religious bodies should not have to rely on exemptions. The anti-religion activists have been allowed to set the terms of the debate by accepting the outrageous assertion that manifestations of religious freedom are, at law, mere incidents of discrimination that are permissible only because of exemptions in the law. Once they fell into that error, a bad outcome for religious freedom was assured.

The starting point for the debate must be that religious freedom is a fundamental human right — the position in international law. If this right is given only lukewarm recognition, the inroads on religious freedom will get only worse. Using the interpretative clauses in anti-discrimination laws to refer to the importance of religion is much weaker than a stand-alone act that asserts that everyone has the right to privateand public manifestations of religious belief.

This would change the debate as manifestations of religion would no longer be an exemption from laws against discrimination but a manifestation of a right accepted by federal law. Schools would no longer be allowed to “discriminate” but would be allowed to exercise a right to religious freedom.

The leaking of the Ruddock review was part of a campaign to scare the government in advance of the report’s full release. There seems little appetite to declare freedom of religion as a full right. However, those who fear such a law as the harbinger of a bill of rights should think again. There is a greater fear we will have a half-hearted ­response to the issue and lose a vital part of our freedom.

SOURCE 

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here