Majorityrights Central > Category: Australian Politics

I’ve just come across an extraordinary research paper. It examines, in a remarkably open and honest way, the reasons why some Sydneysiders are leaving the established western suburbs and moving to “master planned communities” on the urban fringe.

What it finds is that the residents of these new communities are fleeing precisely those suburbs in which there is both a large amount of public housing and a rapid influx of immigrants. The residents are trying to recreate a traditional Anglo-Australian community in which they feel their identity, values and way of life are secure for themselves and their children.

In other words, the paper takes an academic (and surprisingly unbiased) look at the process of white flight.

READ MORE...

Keith Windshuttle‘s new book “The White Australia Policy” is not going to make the big splash his work on the British colonisation of Tasmania has had. There Windschuttle more or less single handedly overturned the established wisdom on Tasmanian frontier history and rammed home his argument with repeated volleys of documentary evidence, something he shows time and time again his targets either don’t have or frankly distort. Windschuttle’s big splash is not going to be overturned by his critics. They were caught with their pants down. Their collective embarassment and outraged response probably has more to do with the full glare exposure of their professional laziness and competence than with their ideological blinkers.

READ MORE...

In a recent Melbourne Age newspaper column Joanna Murray-Smith questioned the feminist values she had been brought up with. She felt that feminist careerism hadn’t left her enough time to properly mother her children.

Predictably there was a backlash. There have been five newspaper columns in the Age attacking the single Joanna Murray-Smith column. On Friday alone, there were two such columns.

There was nothing terribly new in these opposing pieces. One of the Friday columns, by a single mother and full-time writer, Allison Croggon, was most interesting for the kind of liberal language it used.

According to Allison Croggon motherhood has been a lot more fun than she expected. However, she describes the “role” of being a mother, rather than the “tasks” (which she enjoys), as an “iron cage” from which women have to seek “freedom”.

Why attack the “role” of motherhood in this way? Because liberalism (on which feminism is based) insists that we choose our own roles. Traditional motherhood is not a role that women choose for themselves but is, according to liberal thought, a mere “biological destiny” from which women have to escape. That’s why Allison Croggon can simultaneously confess that she enjoys the actual work of motherhood, but still insist that women need to “escape” from the “iron cage” of the motherhood role.

READ MORE...

Joanna Murray-Smith confesses

in a recent Age article,

“I am leading the life the feminists of the ‘70s dreamed of: successful professional and mother - but it’s no dream.”

Why not? Because of the mental anguish she feels at not having time to spend with her children. She asks,

“Where is the play time with our kids? Where are the long hours of unhurried togetherness?”

She admits that “I go to bed at night asking myself over and over again how much our working lives really benefit our children?” and that “increasingly I resent the dishonesty of pretending that our children are not guinea pigs in an experiment that is, in many ways, a failure.”

READ MORE...