Page 2564 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 2 July 2008
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nothing to do with environmental education and, instead, is merely a means to inculcate a captive audience of eight and nine-year-olds with political propaganda while attending government primary schools.
I do not expect that the minister necessarily knows all this is going on, but when parents take these issues to me and bring them to my office because they are distressed and concerned I think it behoves the Assembly to put in tighter controls to put an end to this sort of nonsense.
There is another one. In fact, we have recently been alerted to a far more serious inexcusable instance of indoctrination in our public primary schools where blatant political propaganda has been recommended to children in ACT public schools, including ACT primary schools. And I am of course talking about the notorious planet slayer website, which has recently come under investigation in the Senate and has been subject to an avalanche of criticism from commentators all over the world.
Mr Barr: It is a Howard government initiative, is it not?
MR MULCAHY: I do not care if it is John Howard’s initiative, Nick Minchin’s or Kevin Rudd’s; I think it ought to be taken down. This website is explicitly recommended for children under the ACT government’s sustainable schools initiative. This initiative applies to all ACT government schools, including ACT government primary schools for children as young as four or five years old. The website is allegedly designed to assist children to learn about the environment.
However, it is in fact nothing more than barefaced political propaganda for a variety of left-wing activist causes and is manifestly unsuitable for children. I will give a few instances of the content of the website, which should give a taste of the kind of alleged education that it involves. Bear in mind, when you are listening to these examples, that they are not arguments or assertions given to university students whom one would expect to have developed a sense of critical assessment ideas; rather, the website and the examples of propaganda that I cite are all designed for young children who lack the ability to critically assess what they are being told.
The website begins by welcoming children with the following message, spelled incorrectly, incidentally:
Get the dirt on greenhouse without the guilt trips. No lectures. No multinomial bashing (well, maybe a little …). Just fun and games and the answers to all your enviro-dilemas.
That is not correctly spelt. On the website’s greenhouse calculator, children are asked to “find out what age you should die at so you don’t use more than your fair share of the Earth’s resources”. For an average Australian, which the website refers to as an “average Aussie pig”, the website calculates an emission level of 24.6 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. At this level, the website informs children:
Based on the emissions from your greenhouse usage, you used up your share of the planet by the time you were 9.3 years old! … You should die at age 9.3.
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