The Chinese Communist Party has spent a great deal of effort and money infiltrating Australia’s university system. They’ve got what they paid for, and more. Not only have university administrators and academics spinelessly, in many cases one suspects gladly, kowtowed to the CCP’s demands, but they’ve churned out yet another generation of brainwashed credentialled cretins robotically genuflecting to the murderous communist dictatorship.
A major split has emerged in the electorate over whether President Xi Jinping’s China poses a significant threat to national security, with a growing number of left-leaning and university-educated voters rejecting threats posed by Beijing despite the communist regime ramping up aggression towards Australia.
As Orwell said, some ideas are so obviously foolish that only the ‘intelligentsia’ could believe them. “No ordinary man could be such a fool.” Case in point: a clear majority of high school-educated, TAFE and trades-qualified Australians see China as a threat. Just 41 per cent of the university-educated do.
This is despite years of bullying and provocative threats against Australia from China. These include summarily enacting trade bans on Australia as punishment for the then-PM speculating (correctly, as we now know) that Covid originated in a Chinese lab, sailing massive fleets firing live missiles and shells around Australia’s coastline, apparently deliberately injuring Australian Navy divers, stealing Australian military secrets and firing long-range ballistic missiles at Australia’s Pacific partners.
The latest Newspoll merely confirms what every sensible Australian already knows: a university degree is now less a mark of learning than a certificate of ideological capture.
Nowhere is the CCP’s successful colonisation of our ivory towers clearer than in the case of Drew Pavlou at the University of Queensland. The young man had the temerity to protest Beijing’s concentration camps, its Hong Kong crackdown and UQ’s cosy cash-for-silence deals with Confucius Institutes and Chinese state entities. For his trouble he was bashed by pro-CCP thugs on campus, suspended and nearly expelled. University brass treated a critic of a foreign dictatorship as the problem, while Chinese national enforcers – plainclothes CCP minders who patrol campuses keeping students in ideological lockstep – operated with near-impunity. Pavlou’s ordeal was not an aberration: it was the system working as designed.
Universities have gone further still, openly sanitising course content to keep the yuan flowing. Critical discussion of the Uyghur genocide, Taiwan or the Tiananmen massacre is quietly dropped or watered down. Academics self-censor rather than risk losing Chinese fee-payers or research grants. Confucius Institutes, those soft-power Trojan horses, have long dictated what may and may not be taught about China. The result is an entire generation of ‘educated’ Australians who will solemnly inform you that pointing out Chinese espionage, cyber attacks on critical infrastructure or military intimidation is somehow ‘provocative’.
The fall in concern about China’s myriad military, espionage and cyber operations targeting Australia and Indo-Pacific partners is likely associated with the Albanese government’s efforts to avoid direct confrontation with Beijing despite several high-profile and provocative actions by the People’s Liberation Army.
This is the other head of the pimple: the Labor government know China is a threat, but the ideological whip-crackers in the party backrooms are rusted-on communist sympathisers. Anthony Albanese and Richard Marles can dampen Labor left rebellion against AUKUS all they like, but we all know what happens to people who try to walk a barbed-wire fence with a foot in each paddock.
Worse, the deeper rot is upstream. When the institutions charged with producing the nation’s future leaders treat a totalitarian rival as a cash cow and its critics as heretics, the national interest is already compromised.
This is of a piece with the rampant antisemitism that has festered unchecked on the same campuses since October 7. Universities that once claimed to be bastions of free inquiry and enlightenment have unilaterally torn up the social contract that justified decades of lavish taxpayer funding. They no longer produce citizens capable of defending the open society: they manufacture useful idiots for hostile foreign powers and domestic radicals alike.
The ordinary Australians who still see China for the predatory dictatorship it is are not the problem. The problem is the credentialled caste who cannot and will not. Until the universities are forced to choose between CCP silver and Australian sovereignty – and until funding is cut for those that choose the former – we will keep graduating people who would rather genuflect to Beijing than defend their own country.
