Nursery teachers must teach toddlers about 'white privilege' so they can learn to 'develop anti-racist views', unions say

LOL. Teaching toddlers this crap will certainly give them exactly the "wrong" message. Being told that they are privileged will make them PROUD of being white and make them look down on non-whites.

The message is an inherently racist one and will simply inculcate racism in a generation of kids

Nursery teachers should be telling toddlers about 'white privilege' so they can learn to 'develop anti-racist views', according to teaching unions.

The new 128-page guidance has been given as an alternative to the Government's statutory guidance and has received criticism from Conservative MPs.

It was issued after an official government report concluded that factors such as family structure and socio-economic background had 'more significant impact on life chances than the existence of racism'.

The guidance adds that 'children's racial prejudice' is at risk of being 'maintained or reinforced' unless teachers received training in 'understanding white privilege' and 'systemic racism', according to The Telegraph.

Conservative MPs argued on Saturday that teaching toddlers about white privilege risked 'becoming some kind of political Soviet indoctrination session'.

The guidance, called Birth to 5 Matters, was developed by a group of 18 including the National Education Union, the National Day Nurseries Association and the Association for Professional Development in Early Years.

While the Government's guidance states that five-year-old children should 'know some similarities and differences between different religious and cultural communities in this country', Birth to 5 Matters advises staff 'talking about race is a first step to countering racism'.

The advice, seen by The Telegraph, continues: 'It is a mistaken assumption that treating all people in the same way and ignoring differences in race is a sufficient response to racism.

'This approach simply allows the continuation of bias in society which disadvantages people from black and minoritised groups.

'Practitioner training is an important step toward opening dialogue and developing understanding about white privilege, systemic racism, and how racism affects children and families in early years settings.

'It is also time to challenge the widespread notion that 'children do not see race' and are colour blind to difference.

'When adults are silent about race, children's racial prejudice and misconceptions can be maintained or reinforced.'

The chairman of the House of Education select committee called the advice 'unacceptable' and said it 'insults white working class people from disadvantaged backgrounds'.

He said: 'The whole purpose of children learning is to learn, not for some kind of political Soviet indoctrination session.'

Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch has previously said that teachers who tell their pupils that white privilege is a fact are breaking the law.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9434515/Nursery-teachers-teach-toddlers-white-privilege-unions-say.html

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Job vacancies are surging, and employers say it's hard to find suitable labour

You can't say how quickly it will take for Australia's economy to recover. But with job vacancies rising, it means there's growing demand for labour and positions aren't being filled, which is a positive sign.

And job vacancies are surging at the moment. In February, there were 289,000 vacancies, up 13 per cent in the last three months. The vast bulk of them were in the private sector (260,300) compared to the public sector (28,400).

Ben Udy, an economist from Capital Economics, says his "composite" measure of vacancies, where he combines the number of job vacancies and skilled vacancies with ANZ's job ads survey, is sitting at its highest level since the mining boom in 2011.

"Taken at face value, that implies the unemployment rate could dip below 5 per cent by the middle of the year," he wrote in a note to clients last week.

If the unemployment rate fell below 5 per cent in the next few months it would be a remarkable outcome.

They say one piece of evidence is the surge in job vacancies in recent months.

The ABS says there are clear labour shortages in some industries.

There are thousands of vacancies in industries such as accommodation and food services, retail trade, construction, health care and social assistance, according to the ABS.

If you look at construction, there were 16,600 job vacancies in the construction industry in February 2020, before the pandemic hit, but that number halved to 8,300 in May 2020 when the lockdowns were put in place.

However, the industry has bounced back and there are now 26,700 job vacancies there.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-05/labour-shortages-hint-at-a-faster-economic-recovery/100047576

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Militant culture warriors make all men the bad guys

The principal of a Victorian school now concedes it was “inappropriate” to shame her male pupils into standing before the women and girls to atone for the sins of their gender.

One might have wished for a little more contrition from the head of Warrnambool’s Brauer College but, since responsibility is collective rather than personal these days, inappropriate is probably the best we can expect. As Thomas Sowell writes: “We seem to be getting closer and closer to a situation where nobody is responsible for what they did but we are all responsible for what somebody else did.” The delusion that the culture war is being fought in a far-off land is shattered by events at Brauer College and countless other incursions into our everyday lives.

Political correctness has hardened into a ground war headed by an activist vanguard enjoined by teachers, journalists, bureaucrats and other professionals who lack the courage to resist. Their crusade is informed by critical theory, a virus that escaped from the lab of French philosophy, germinated in universities andrunning rampant though our society.

Those in public life ignore it at their peril. Its fundamental assumption, that society is divided into oppressors and oppressed, and that all human interaction is a struggle between these two groups, is disrupting civic life, undermining liberal democracy, and dividing the nation into tribes.

The casual abandonment of the presumption of innocence by the ABC’s Four Corners in its unsupported allegations against a senior cabinet minister is more than a dereliction of professional duty. In critical theory, guilt is determined not by wrongdoing but by membership of the wrong class. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained this system of justice in The Gulag Archipelago, quoting from the Russian revolutionary newspaper, Red Terror.

“The first question you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused.”

The new radical feminism in which leading politicians are now entangled is very different from the liberal feminism that greatly advanced the position of women in the 20th century. Liberal feminism’s champions included men as well as women, driven by the egalitarian principle that every citizen, regardless of biology, should enjoy the blessings of liberal democracy, starting with access to education and employment. Their reforms have ensured that differences in outcomes, in most walks of life, are not the result of discrimination but the exercise of free choice.

In the past decade, however, feminism has taken a harder form, turning men and women into class enemies. Women, along with gays, are the victims of “toxic masculinity”, a term coined by psychiatrist Terry Kupers in 2005 to describe “the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia and wanton violence”.

Toxic, or hegemonic, masculinity has become the dominant frame of reference in Australian popular feminism. Male violence — physical, sexual and verbal — is no longer merely socially unacceptable or criminal behaviour for which individuals are responsible. It is a trait common to all men that serves to reinforce the patriarchy, denying women their just position in society.

This poisonous opinion is no longer confined to the radical corners of the academy. It is the unchallengeable assumption of most graduates entering the workplace, reinforced by HR departments and government bureaucracies that take the theory as read. Fair-minded Australians are entitled to feel dismayed. Aggressive behaviour towards women by men has never been acceptable or even excusable in our liberal democracy. Until recently, swearing in the presence of women was considered an offence in middle-class Australia. The most obvious determinants of physical violence in crime statistics are not gender, but employment status and socio-economic disadvantage.

Hard evidence, however, is not enough to overturn postmodern theory. Gender studies, like post-colonial theory, queer theory, disability and fat studies, has become hostage to standpoint theory, the argument that only those who are members of an oppressed group possess the insight that allows them to contribute to the debate. The Prime Minister could give a thousand press conferences, all word-perfect, and still not assuage his critics, simply because he is male. This divisive narrative has infused almost all media commentary, right down to the questioning of the PM by Tracy Grimshaw on A Current Affair.

The allegation of rape by a parliamentary staffer that the PM correctly described as a catalyst for debate on the treatment of women “hasn’t been a wakeup call to 52 per cent of Australians”, declared Grimshaw. “It was critical and a lightning rod for me when tens of thousands of women took to the streets around Australia, including here, to protest, to say, ‘enough is enough’, to protest against rape and sexual assault and discrimination and marginalisation and the patriarchy and underpayment and all of those things … perhaps you’d be better off starting to actively discriminate against Neanderthal men like the so-called Big Swinging Dicks Club”.

When standpoint theory has taken hold on prime-time commercial television, obliging the holder of the highest elected office in the land to sit back and take it like a man as Grimshaw says her piece, egalitarianism has been overturned. Grimshaw is to be accorded respect as a woman, the Prime Minister deserves none.

We are touching only the edge of the intersectional web woven by critical theory that radicalises marginalised groups and sets one against the other. Biological and transgender women find themselves at odds over the right to compete in women’s sport. White men and women alike are guilty of bearing invisible knapsacks of white privilege. Boys as young as 12 must stand in shame at Brauer College for complicity in misogyny, domination, and violence.

Woke, in other words, is no joke. It represents the biggest threat to liberalism, Australia’s riding philosophy since European settlement, since the rise of totalitarian ideology a century ago. For liberals, there can be no leave passes from the culture war until this alien ideology is defeated.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/militant-culture-warriors-make-all-men-the-bad-guys/news-story/418b92b89b5d35c3794fc865dbd8fd5d

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Claim academic research funding is becoming politicised

A former policy adviser to the Australian government says funding for academic research is becoming increasingly politicised and projects that are critical of the government are less likely to be funded.

Yun Jiang, director of independent research organisation the China Policy Centre, said ministerial discretion on Australian Research Council grant funding decisions was “opaque” and could lead to the “political interest” being dressed up as the “national interest”.

Five applicants for Australian Research Council grants were last year denied funding of up to $500,000 a year after then-education minister Dan Tehan ruled they would be against Australia’s national interest.

The Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee is currently holding an inquiry into the contribution of government funding for public research into current and emerging foreign policy issues.

In a submission to the inquiry, Ms Jiang, a former adviser in the Department of Defence, Treasury and Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, said no full and proper explanation has been offered for the ARC grants that were knocked back last year on national security grounds.

She said Australian research was “subject to increasing political interference, as government ministers seek to intervene in research grant decisions”.

“The opaque process of referring specific applications to national security agencies as well as the lack of explanation by national security agencies or the Minister on the decisions mean there is substantial scope for political interference and corruption,” she said.

“As the process is not transparent and the scope for discretion is high, there is a real risk of censorship. The Minister may use grant decisions to promote only those views that are aligned with the government.

“Future applicants are also more likely to self-censor as they try to guess the Minister’s intentions for vetoing projects. Such politicisation of Australian government research funding extends to funding for foreign policy issues.”

Ms Jiang said there was no objective criteria for assessing the “national interest”, and it was “deeply problematic and undemocratic if only the government of the day or the minister gets to decide what is in the national interest”.

“This can lead to abuses where the minister substitutes ‘political interest’ for ‘national interest’,” she said. “The risk of this happening is why it is extremely important that a full public explanation is provided if a decision is said to be made in the national interest.

Collaboration between Australia’s intelligence services and universities has ramped up over the past three years in response to the escalating threat of foreign interference on campus.

While anti-espionage agency ASIO has said a number of foreign countries are of concern, there has been growing fears from national security experts that partnerships with Chinese-government organisations have resulted in Australian academics giving Beijing access to sensitive research and technologies.

ASIO boss Mike Burgess has previously said that his agency is not concerned with research that is critical of Australia or tied to a foreign government so long as it declared transparently and the foreign government isn’t using “covert, clandestine and deceptive means to obtain Australian research”. Mr Burgess last month said the existence of China’s Thousand Talents Program was “in and of itself not concerning”. The program gives financial scholarships to top talent in return for China getting access to their research.

Federal Parliament’s powerful intelligence and security committee is holding an inquiry into foreign interference at Australian universities, including the role of the Chinese government’s talent recruitment programs.

During a hearing last month, it was revealed the Department of Home Affairs and ASIO are currently drawing up an expanded list of emerging technologies that should be protected from foreign interference.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/real-risk-of-censorship-claim-academic-research-funding-is-becoming-politicised-20210402-p57g4i.html

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)

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