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Abstract
This article reviews the relationship between the conservative newspaper The Australian and the development of a national history curriculum in Australia. The lead author surveyed the major Australian press in the five-year period between 2007 and 2012 and found clear patterns of difference between The Australian and other press outlets in relation to education in general and history curriculum in particular. Using Jonathan Haidt's five-point model of moral values, the article analyses the behaviour of the press in Australia in relation to history education as a feature of moral preferences. Extending from this analysis, it then highlights a number of cases of press campaigns in The Australian targeted against individuals including one academic involved in the development of a national curriculum. The article demonstrates that a culture of aggressive conservatism exercised in this Murdoch press outlet reaches beyond the field of conventional political debate to constitute a serious and concerning influence in the dynamics of curriculum policy development.
Notes
1. Several observations in this article are based on the lead author's sustained dealings with the Australian print and electronic media over an 18-year period. Newspaper data is drawn from the Dow Jones Factiva database. For simplicity, all media-based references are provided in the endnotes.
2. The Daily Telegraph still provides a platform for Chris McGovern. See for example, ‘GCSE Grading System Faces Biggest Overhaul in 25 Years’, The Daily Telegraph, 12 May 2012.
3. Cited in Sally Neighbour's ‘The United States of Chris Mitchell: The Power of Rupert Murdoch and The Australian's Editor-in-Chief’, The Monthly, August 2011. Available at: http://www.themonthly.com.au/power-rupert-murdoch-and-australian-s-editor-chief-united-states-chris-mitchell-sally-neighbour-3589
4. ‘Intellect and Work Ethic keep Mitchell in Chair for 20 Years’, The Australian, 4 June 2012. As an indicator of Mitchells's penchant for micromanaging, in 2000 he rang the lead author twice in the midst of a Courier-Mail campaign against generic social education in Queensland which his paper was running at the time; editors are not normally so directly involved in seeking out material for stories in their paper.
6. For more details of the interventionist approach of The Australian and of Chris Mitchell towards history education (and in history matters generally) see Macintyre and Clark (2003), Taylor (2008) and Taylor (2012, 34–41).
7. ABC journalist Sally Neighbour's comment in her 2011 profile in The Monthly.
8. For more details of The Australian's personal approach see Taylor (2008, 203–6 and especially 284).
9. Ryan, who had already committed a public faux pas by cheerfully suggesting that historians made up their statistics about Indigenous massacres, then led with her chin in provoking an attack in The Australian by egregiously arguing that the newspapers (of the Murdoch variety) were ‘raping’ historians, The Australian, 7 July 2004, ‘Historians Seek to Silence Their Critics’.
10. Simons's view can be found at http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/caj/2012/05/21/my-response-to-the-australian/
11. Crikey.com, 25 May 2012: http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/05/25/the-oz-v-academics-manne-universities-hit-back/
12. Cit. Sally Neighbour ‘The United States of Chris Mitchell’, 2011.
13. See, for example, ‘Mitchell Defends The Australian's Revenue Record’, The Australian, 18 March 2011.
14. December 2011 figures from a Fairfax Media report The Age Circulation and Readership: adcentre.com.au/media/…/circ%20&%20rship%20map%20jun11.pdf. See also respected commentator Glenn Dyer's analysis (10 February 2012) in Australia's major political blog Crikey.com ( http://www.crikey.com.au/2012/02/10/latest-circulation-figures-read-all-about-it-or-not/). These snapshot figures do not take into account an overall 10% fall in all press readership 2006–2011.
15. The many authors and commentators who have, over time, been critical of Murdoch press interventionism were eventually to be vindicated by revelations that came out of the UK government's 2011–2012 Leveson Inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the press. See http://www.levesoninquiry.org.uk/
16. The Australian reported Manne's comments on 8 November 2011 under the headline `Academic Robert Manne Tells Inquiry Murdoch's Newspaper Empire Should be “Broken Up’”.
17. See academic/journalist Clive Hamilton's piece ‘When a Newspaper Calls in its Lawyers: The Chilling Effect of The Australian vs Robert Manne’ in political/cultural blog The Conversation, 8 March 2012: http://theconversation.edu.au/when-a-newspaper-calls-in-its-lawyers-the-chilling-effect-of-the-australian-vs-robert-manne-5730
18. To his credit, Mitchell runs a very strong line on contemporary Indigenous disadvantage. His view, in brief, is that the way out of the cycle of deprivation, substance abuse and violence that affects many Indigenous communities is to foster self-help rather than to increase welfare.
19. Best summarised in ‘Story of a True Blue Country’, The Australian, 18 August 2006; ‘Narrow View of History’, The Australian, 16 September 2008; and ‘Factual Narrative is the Basis of History’, The Australian, 14 October 2008.
20. Respectively, comments from Ross Fitzgerald, leftish columnist/author and Mitchell's friend, and from a former workmate. Cit. Sally Neighbour, 2011.
21. ‘(Team) Sport is to War as Pornography is to Sex’. Jonathan Haidt, March 2008 on TED Talks: http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html
22. Phase 2: Languages, Geography and the Arts; Phase 3: Health and Physical Education (HPE), Information & Communications Technology (ICT), Design & Technology, Economics, Business and Civics & Citizenship.
23. The Age, 14 December 2006.
24. Post-election headlines in The Australian included the following: ‘Howard's Legacy Lives on in New Era’ (4 December 2007), ‘Howard's History Crusade to go on’ (11 January 2008) and ‘Labor Ignores the Left and Gives the Education Revolution a Chance’ (12 January). An early sign of the turnaround came in early April 2008: ‘Rudd Should Take a Long Term View (leader headline) … Kevin Rudd's Long-lasting Political Honeymoon is Coming to an End’ (3 April 2008).
25. ‘The Education Revolution’, such as it was intended to be, was launched in August 2007 as a plan to insert computers in all Year 9/10 classrooms with a focus on teacher performance and an emphasis on a back-to-basics approach in primary schools.
26. ‘Education Evangelist Calls for Culture of Performance’, The Australian, 26 November 2008. Klein's departure from his position as Chancellor had already been announced in the US. He left for a senior position at News Corporation.
27. This editorial began ‘It's not full moon for another fortnight but the opinion page of The Age is already in lunar orbit. The “culture warriors”, according to columnist [leader writer] Ray Cassin yesterday have been vanquished and left to bray impotently at the moon while the rest of Australia gets on with “life”’.
28. Professor Barry McGaw of the University of Melbourne. McGaw is an experienced educational policymaker and researcher who was Director for Education at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) 2005–2007. He had earlier been Executive Director of the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER). Largely seen as an astute, highly capable and non-political appointee.
29. ‘A Show About Nothing’, The Australian, 19 April 2008.
30. See ‘Restoring Literature to its Rightful Place’, The Australian, 20 May 2008; ‘Schools Failing to Teach on Holocaust‘, The Australian, 10 July 2008; ‘Sorry, Not All Teachers Are Maths Teachers’, The Australian, 12 July 2008; and ‘Literacy, Numeracy and Now “Visuacy”’, The Australian, 15 August 2008.
31. Quotes in this paragraph come from various feature, leader, opinion and review articles in The Australian on these dates respectively: 10 February 2003; 3 September 2003; 6 September 2003; 5 July 2004; 22 July 2004; 3 December 2005; 15 December 2005; 30 January 2006; 17 August 2006; 23 August 2006; 23 September 2006; 1 January 2007; 12 October 2007; 29 September 2008.
32. See Macintyre and Clark (2003 edition, 72–92) and Taylor (2008, 187–8 and 279).
33. Former teacher Donnelly was employed by the Howard government as a civics education consultant in the 1990s.
34. According to a journalist who works at The Australian, there was a ‘left wing communist’ sub-editorial template to be applied to all articles mentioning Macintyre (personal remark to Macintyre reported to the author).
35. The reference to the Clarks, senior and junior, is a typical guilt-by-association tactic of The Australian. The late Manning Clark (one-time doyen of Australian historians) was posthumously accused of pro-Soviet treachery in a risibly erroneous (but personally hurtful to the Clark family) 1996 campaign, first instigated by the (Murdoch) Melbourne Herald Sun in 1996. Even though the claim was declared false by the Press Council in 1996, it was then revisited with some force by Chris Mitchell in 1999 when he was editor of the (Murdoch) Brisbane Courier-Mail in reports that accused Manning Clark of being a ‘Soviet agent of influence’. The deceased (and therefore unable to sue) historian's massive, if florid, History of Australia carries an estimated 800 references to God.
36. At the same time, The Australian was winding itself up for a campaign against the English lead writer Peter Freebody on the grounds that Freebody had once been an advocate of (leftist) critical literacy and the (ineffectual) whole language approach to learning literacy. Meanwhile, the science and mathematics lead writers (Canberra University's Denis Goodrun and Monash University's Peter Sullivan) were out of the firing line, and remained so.
37. Some of University of British Columbia professor Peter Seixas's recent work-in-progress ideas on updating historical thinking were used in drafting the document. Unknown to The Australian, several of these ideas, such as the importance of empathy and making judgements in history, had been around in North American, UK and Australian history education circles for over 30 years.
38. ‘Office of PM is More Than a One-man Band’. Mitchell referred to this article as a turning point in their relationship.