Zealots hijack tragedy

By Luke McIlveen
October 20, 2006 12:00
The Daily Telegraph

FIVE years ago this week, a rickety vessel carrying asylum-seekers sank in international waters south of Indonesia, drowning 353 people.

These poor creatures had given two Middle Eastern crims everything they owned, believing they could illegally buy their way to a better life in Australia.

The SIEV X tragedy on October 19, 2001, came amid furore over John Howard's tough immigration laws - and the loony conspiracy theories began.

They claimed the Australian Defence Force brought the SIEV X down to deter people smugglers or, at the very least, the military knew the boat had gone down but decided to let them drown anyway.

On and on it went until a Senate inquiry cleared the military and the Government in 2002 - and that should have been the end of the vaudeville.

But the theories are being rekindled as part of a trendy campaign to hijack the Year 11 modern history curriculum.

Now the black armband brigade wants permission to give students a 35-page case study.

It includes asking the teenagers: "Was the sinking of the SIEV X and subsequent loss of life preventable?''

The SIEV X project's author, Don Maclurcan, told The Daily Telegraph he did not want his project seen as a Left campaign: "We are on the fence, we have no political view of what should have happened or what did happen either way.''

The start of the HSC is the ideal time to reflect on the conspiratorial claptrap drifting into NSW classrooms.

Take the SIEV X question. Presumably it's not multiple choice and is meant to be answered at some length.

But how could you be expected to argue the "no'' case beyond one or two sentences? "The SIEV X sank because it was unseaworthy before it left port.'' What is there left to say?

Compare this to the endless pages of colourful fiction available to the student who decides to answer in the affirmative.

An essay outlining the secret involvement of the ADF as part of a Howard plot to deter asylum seekers from coming to Australia will be a cracking read every time.

The fact it is patently untrue would not seem relevant.

Monash University's director of the National Centre for History Education, Tony Taylor, pointed out the killer flaw in the question.

"As for conspiracy theories, it's always difficult to prove a negative; that is, to prove that there isn't a conspiracy,'' the associate professor told The Australian.

The SCEGGS English faculty tried something similar recently when teachers decided that Shakespeare's Othello should be interpreted in a Marxist, racial and feminist context.

It hardly seemed to matter that the play was written more than 200 years before the crazy drunk Karl Marx set about laying the platform for Stalin and Chairman Mao.

Education Minister Julie Bishop was so concerned about the ideological butchery of one of Shakespeare's treasures that she asked the Australian Council for Educational Research to investigate.

It found there was no political bias in SCEGGS' approach.

The school is now free to rabbit on about how the black Othello's relationship with the white Desdemona should be seen against the background of the Los Angeles race riots.

But don't dare to question this madness - after all, the teachers know better than Shakespeare.

The obsession with left-wing causes is the reason our universities have largely become refugees for the welfare-dependent and socially inept.

I vividly remember the moment I decided a university arts degree was a poor substitute for the real world.

A PhD student posing as a lecturer had gone around to every desk in the classroom and placed leaflets promoting an anti-capitalist protest.

This bloke enraged me.

Perhaps it was the beret, or the fact he was a second-generation Irishman who believed the IRA was a tremendous organisation which - apart from the odd mix-up - was doing God's work.

But most of all it was the fact I was working 25 hours a week at Pizza Hut to make ends meet while this clown spent his afternoons trying to undermine the evil capitalist regime that paid his salary.

Education is supposed to arm students with the facts and teach them the powers of reason.

Only then can they make an informed decision to identify with the Left or Right or eschew politics altogether.

Schools and universities should not be a vehicle for post-modern thinkers to use their positions as a means of replenishing the ranks of the Socialist Alliance.