Classy, biased bigotry, brought to you by your ABC

Barnaby Joyce still speaks to the ABC, but they don’t deserve the privilege.

If you don’t know Vikki Campion, she is a journalist and former media staffer to Joyce. They are now married and have children together. She manages the family and the farm while he tries to fix a broken country. If she were a radical leftie, she would be upheld as a legend. The woman who left the Canberra bubble, raised children off the grid, and kept a household standing through public humiliation. Instead, she is target practice for everyone from former colleagues to the ABC’s running gallery of Joyce-hunters.

As Jesus put it, take the plank out of your own eye before pointing to the speck in your brother’s. Or, in this case, your sister’s.

My article in The Spectator Australia, Classy, biased bigotry, brought to you by your ABC.

Woke hasn’t killed Australia’s adventurer spirit

With Waren Brown at his book launch in Goulburn.

Brown brings back Boy’s Own Birtles and the Bean

I was brought up on Boy’s Own adventures. I remember pacing up and down with Sir Douglas Bader’s Reach for the Sky, at the scene where his grandmother crowns a would-be thief in the night. I read Enid Blyton’s Secret Seven to my kindergarten class in 1976. If you know Robert Westall’s The Machine Gunners, that is the ilk.

The point is that Australian men and boys were raised on a diet of toughness. Not the street-fighting meanness of Fast Eddy. More the ethic of the other bloke in Rose Tattoo’s The Butcher and Fast Eddy. Sport did some of the same work. Football, hockey, and cricket were, among other things, training for a harder world. Try catching a cricket ball in the outfield now. With or without spectacles, the trajectory will bewilder you. You will probably shite yourself when it hits you, or when you miss it completely.

We have lost something. Mention Boy’s Own today and you will be branded – yes, see Rose Tattoo – a misogynist or a coloniser. It is that stupid.

A century ago, the real thing was still walking around. Francis Birtles set long-distance and speed records as a cyclist and a driver. In October 1927 he left Australia House in London in a 1924 Bean 14, later called Sundowner, and became the first man to drive from England to Australia. The run took nine months and some 26,000 kilometres through Europe, Egypt, Persia, India, the Naga Hills, with ships and a bamboo punt where the road ran out. When he reached Darwin in 1928, customs seized the car for import duty. It was released only at the insistence of Prime Minister Stanley Melbourne Bruce. Imagine that happening today? The Prime Minister intervening, I mean.

That car now sits in the National Museum of Australia. I thought the type of man who would take it any further was extinct.

Enter Daily Telegraph cartoonist Warren Brown.

Warren lives in the Southern Tablelands, draws some of the best political cartoons in the country, and is a decent bloke. He had already written Francis Birtles: Australian Adventurer in 2012. Then he bought a 1925 Bean 14 and, as far as roads, ferries, and officials would allow, ran Birtles’ route again. His co-driver was the Tele’s editor-at-large, Matthew Benns. Their mechanical saviour was Tony Jordan.

They left London in September 2024 and rolled into Melbourne on January 30, 2025, after some 130 days and 17 countries. With the same mad idea in an open car. Along the way they raised money for the Royal Flying Doctor Service. That is not nostalgia. That is useful.

I followed the trip as it happened. The book of it is called Chance It! Buy that for the yarn, the photographs, and the bits no column should steal. I am not going to attempt to recreate the Hindu Kush or the Top End here.

I did get the next best thing. Last week, at the Goulburn launch, Warren, Matthew, and Tony spoke about the journey with Ray Hadley as MC. Hadley started his career in Goulburn. The Southern Tablelands remains, on the available evidence, the centre of the universe. The event was first-class. They signed my copy. The house white was Lerida Estate’s 2024 Chardonnay. (Which is also my house white in Gunning. As it happens, my federation cottage ‘Keswick’ was built 100 years ago this month.)

There is also a Chance It Ale from a Goulburn brewery that people persist in calling Bean Beer. It is bloody good.

So, the record stands. Birtles did it in a Bean. Brown brought the Bean back. How very Australian. If the adventuring habit has thinned out, this is the cure. Get a car, get a bike, take the long way. Drive. Ride. Chance it.

Thanks to Warren, Matthew, Tony and the team for putting the thing back on the road. It was quite the adventure.

Our universities are captured and don’t even know it!

How education lost all sense of reality inside the identity politics echo chamber.

Universities Australia is the sector’s peak lobby. Evans is about to run one of the country’s most prestigious universities. That is why her answer mattered.

I asked her this:

Universities Australia has advanced identity politics across the sector. With taxpayers contributing over $21 billion annually, how does this partisan agenda represent value for money?

She deflected. She spoke about Indigenous participation and inclusiveness. She did not meet the question.

To be fair, the wider speech was not a sermon. She quoted John Curtin and Sir Robert Menzies. She warned against command and control from Canberra. On that point she is right. It is a poor way to run universities.

However, she also called for academic freedom and, in the same breath, for legal protection of university autonomy against ‘creeping regulation’ and Populist backlash.

But Populism is hardly the problem. Why aren’t universities setting themselves against identity politics? Evans can see capture when it wears a ministerial badge. She cannot see it when it wears an inclusion lanyard.

The gap is what she cannot see. Academic freedom is not only threatened by ministers and regulators. It is threatened when campus orthodoxy decides which questions are legitimate. Identity politics does not merely add new topics. It treats dissent as harm, converts contested moral claims into professional credentials, and makes career-minded people keep their heads down.

Most of what I heard today sounded like a brief for why conservative or classical-liberal objections get in the way of a progressive program.

That is now a national habit. Equal opportunity, the liberal promise that people should not be locked out by class, sex, race or religion, has been displaced by equity of outcome, the demand that institutions engineer matching results. The second is not a small adjustment to the first. It is a different theory of justice, and it has become the operating language of much of the sector.

Alexandra Marshall wrote in the Unfiltered newsletter:

And our Canberra Correspondent, Michael de Percy, waded back into Canberra for a National Press Club address by Professor Carolyn Evens, who is the Chair of Universities Australia and the incoming vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne. Something was going on. He expected the room to be empty – but it was packed…

Terry Barnes wrote in the Morning Double Shot newsletter:

Former academic and now fearless federal press gallery correspondent, Michael de Percy, has seen the university sector from inside and now out. From his personal experience, he is all too aware of the wokery, identity politics and DEI madness that has not just infiltrated our centres of higher learning, but devoured them. Having had to listen to the head of the universities’ lobby group and incoming vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, Carolyn Evans, he decries the success of the Left’s long march through our universities. Not just universities, we will add, but schools and even kinders. But I disagree with the article’s title. Universities, and their academics, very much know they have been captured by the Left’s follies, because they willingly welcomed them in. Oh, for the days when Enoch Powell taught at the University of Sydney!

My latest in The Spectator Australia, Our universities are captured and don’t even know it!