The Howard years from a nationalist perspective

Adrian Barnett reviews The Howard Legacy: Displacement of Traditional Australia from the Professional and Managerial Classes by Dr. Peter Wilkinson.

The author, Dr. Peter Wilkinson, has had a long involvement in patriotic political movements. He is a scientist by training, with several associated qualifications and has headed several scientific institutions.

The book is called “The Howard Legacy” but it is really about how the universities have a bias towards foreign students and against Australian students. The outcome being that the foreign students don’t go home, but instead they stay in Australia and they are progressively becoming Australia’s professional and managerial class.

A lot of Australian universities now have high percentages of students from non-English speaking backgrounds; in one instance in NSW it is 50%. Peter Wilkinson says that this situation was already growing under previous Labor governments, but that the Liberal government of John Howard had turned it into a flood.

The presence of foreign students in the nation’s universities can impede Australian students as they either have to interrupt their own studies to help the foreign students or lose valuable time in classes when those students require special help from university educators. Final exams are often marked by casual staff who have never taught the subject.

There is an gross over-representation of Asian, especially Chinese, students in Medicine, Optometry, Dentistry and other select lucrative professions. Chinese students are over-represented by up to nine times more than other nationalities.

According to 14 academics interviewed:-

* Universities have become corrupted as they are run as businesses.

* Many foreign students are allowed to graduate even when it is clear that they don’t even have basic skills in that field.

* International students often win appeals against fails because of considerations regarding the ongoing financial viability of universities.

* Academics had been ordered to pass foreign students by Senior Staff, even when they knew they had cheated.

* Appeals committees treat foreign students very differently to Australian students who, on the rare occasions they do appeal, generally lose.

Because universities are now being run as businesses they are not interested in the local HECS demand but instead chase high fee paying foreign students that expect a pass and many even expect to gain permanent residency in Australia as a result of their studies.

Plagiarism is a big problem with foreign students, and “cutting and pasting” from the texts of others has become a widespread practice.

Chinese students protested against fails at Deakin University; the protest leader Chen Zhang had failed four times. They were then given passes. The course co-ordinator, of 15 years service, was so disgusted that he resigned in protest, saying that student results had become a negotiable commodity — in an atmosphere where universities were being driven by business practices rather than by reaching for academic excellence.

Chinese living outside of their home country have become the most successful minority group that the world has ever seen and now have a far-reaching influence all over Asia.

In such circumstances, it is virtually impossible for a politician to refuse an invitation to a Chinese organization and such politicians have to carefully heed the wishes of the Chinese communities.

The Chinese community is already influencing migration policy and are progressively dominating the economy.

This book is a “must read” for those who want to understand what is going on with the future of Australia. The implications arising from the information contained within will haunt our nation for generations to come.



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