Liberalsh are *hic* the besht… What are YOU *hic* lookin’ *hic* at?

NOW…

Young Libs arrested at conference
David Rood
The Age
December 18, 2008

TWO Liberal students, including a member of Victorian senator Helen Kroger’s staff, have been arrested for public drunkenness at a student conference. Gideon Rozner and Francesco Cambria were arrested early on Monday morning at Ballarat University, where the National Union of Students was meeting…

THEN…

Top VCE honours for Jewish students
Australian Jewish News
May 3, 2006

…Bialik graduate Gideon Rozner, 18, took out the rare honour of a double award for political and legal studies. An arts/law student at the University of Melbourne, Rozner said that his political background – he has been a member of the Liberal Party for a number of years – helped him achieve scores of 50 in both subjects. “Law has always been an ambition of mine and I’m also very passionate and interested in politics,” he said. He puts his success down to “hard work, good teachers, a very supportive family and one of the best schools in the state. I couldn’t have done it alone. I had a lot of help and support,” he said…

Gideon is ‘a fierce opponent of the ‘nanny state’ policies of both state and federal governments’, according to the ALSF. He is also, presumably, a strong advocate of law and order, and will be asking the magistrate for the maximum penalty to be imposed upon him for his allegedly drunk and disorderly behaviour: imprisonment for three days.

And while drinking kills brain cells, according to the Marvellous Miss Miranda Devine, Monoculture is killing thought (The Sydney Morning Herald, December 4, 2008):

…Gideon Rozner, president of the University of Melbourne’s Liberal Club, told the inquiry about a course on “contemporary ideologies”, comprising 12 lectures, 11 “dedicated to different variations of socialism”. The solitary lecture about liberalism and conservatism had as its compulsory reading an article from the left-wing Monthly magazine titled “Young Liberals in the chocolate factory”. “The entire liberal or conservative tradition [was] summed up by that article … When students enrol in a contemporary ideology subject and finish it not knowing any of the works of Adam Smith or John Stuart Mill or Milton Friedman or any of the great thinkers of our time, that is a significant quality issue.” A month after Rozner’s testimony, on November 4, the inquiry committee received a letter from a “disappointed” University of Melbourne vice-chancellor Glyn Davis, who defended the subject. But he said it was to be replaced next year with a “broader introduction to political ideas subject [with readings from such] liberal authors such as John Stuart Mill and Milton Friedman”. Chalk up a victory to the Young Liberals, even if no one will ever admit it.

Dirty lousy stinking communist Jeff Sparrow has his own thoughts on the subject, but in the absence of a position as Commissar of Education, has had to content himself with the editorship of the notoriously un-Australian publication Overland, from which vantage point he writes, contra Miranda, Young Liberals’ senate inquiry fails (December 9, 2008):

Last week, the Young Liberal-inspired Senate Inquiry into academic bias dribbled to a predictable close.

The Age reported:

The committee found Liberal student organisations were the main agitators for the inquiry and their submissions had a strongly “undergraduate” tone.

“Indeed, the committee believes that the case that Make Australia Fair [the Young Liberal group] makes for the existence of a leftist conspiracy in education faculties and schools borders on the farcical,” it said.

Well, quite. The Young Liberals produced a three-hundred page condemnation, great swathes of which consists of course guides, in which supposedly incriminating phrases have been highlighted in scary red. Our youthful McCarthyists reveal, for instance, that subjects on gender mention “gender” quite a lot, a discovery akin to denouncing the zoology department for an unhealthy fascination with animals.

But the Young Libs are, at least, authentically undergraduate. Miranda Devine, on the other hand, is old enough to know better. Yet she too threw her weight behind Make Australia Fair – and with accusations that were even more risible. Why, there’s a Brisbane school, don’t you know, that celebrates Mao Zedong as a “freedom fighter”, right next to George Washington and Mahatma Gandhi – Liberal Senator Brett Mason popped in once and caught them in the act…