The fog of Postmodernist Vs Modernist aside - yes Labour has become rather sterile or rather as sterile as Liberal. I thnk there is a third era coming into being here where all the ideological posterings which served to justify the existence of both Labour and Liberal have come to nought. What does Howard stand for? What does Rudd stand for?? I dont know and compared to 10 years ago I no longer care. Its time to move on from those Coo-eee dinosaurs and do the panel thing. "Did you arrest green house gasses in light that it has been a problem we have known about for 25 years? Have you brought the living standards of Indigenous Australia equal to the mainstream? Do women have operationalised equal rights and equal pay? In view of technology has the life expectancy increased, chronic illness decreased ? Have you prepared for wellbeing of an aging population? Have you supplied clean energy and brought down its costs? Have you provided equal education ? ect,ect.

The Liberals have proved incapable of effective government and Labour under Rudd warns it will be more of the same self serving drivel as we have had since the late 1970's.

How about voters fill in a report card at the ballot box to sack ministers who the nation deems as liabilities?

You ask: "Where, beyond the fear-mongering accusations and alarmist spin, would you find this new “totalitarianism” that the “middle-class, tertiary-educated left” has produced, out of loathing for the West and hatred for Australia, from the utterly preposterous idea that there is no such thing as truth?"

Well, how about this one from the Manning Clark Professor of History at ANU, Ann Curthoys, from Meanjin, 1991:

"Most academics in the humanities and social sciences, and as far as I know in the physical and natural sciences as well, now reject positivist concepts of knowledge, the notion that one can objectively know the facts. The processes of knowing, and the production of an object that is known, are seen as intertwined. Many take this even further, and argue that knowledge is entirely an effect of power, that we can no longer have any concept of truth at all."

You'll find plenty more like it in The Killing of History (1994) or try my website www.sydneyline.com.

How about an apology guys. Thanks.

Keith, maybe Ann Curthoys was (and is) wrong, and that neither humanities/soc.sc nor natural sciences academics do possess such views. She was, after all, offering an opinion, not standing as the fountainhead of knowledge. As it happens, I don't know many academics who do hold such opinions!

Don, please look at the quotation again. Ann Curthoys put this forward not simply as her opinion but as a factual statement about the incidence of views that prevailed in universities at the time she wrote in 1991. At the time, there were so many people saying the same thing in various guises that I thought the subject deserved a book.

In their opinion piece, Lucy and Mickler, by way of rhetorical questions, accuse me of inventing "the utterly preposterous idea that there is no such thing as truth?" That is, they accuse me of lying about the issue. On the strength of Curthoys's statement alone, they owe me an apology.

Keith,

I read that statement as her opinion or, to move your way a little, as her belief as to the state of things. Since she gives no source and no evidence for the assertion, I regard it simply as an opinion — an unsupported assertion, if you like. My own opinion (which may be quite wrong, but I do and did encounter a lot of academics and am interested in these issues) would be that only a small minority, say less than 10 per cent, of academics in the social sciences and humanities would hold that there is no such thing as objective truth, and that that the proportion among natural scientists and in those in the professional faculties would be quite tiny.

Keith and Don can discuss the various quotes as if they were just a little chunk of academia, but I hope we are also looking at the real world implications of Manning Clarkes quote, as provided by Keith, that any idea of the absense of truth is catastrophic for education and morality.

I wonder why any person would want to 'teach' if they were convinced that all is relative and simply 'opinion'.

We can have many opinions about real events, but that doesn't change the core event reality.

I wonder why anyone would want to live in any other way than hyper hedonism in such a situation ?

If Manning Clarke is right, we have in one brief paragraph basically destroyed the foundations of Western society, and its just a matter of time before most people wake up to that, and the true depths of philosophical decay begin to destroy us from within.

If all truth is simply relative, then so is the position of the materialist determinist left, they have nothing to offer, or be passionate about.

While I point to Christ, and His resurrection from a 'faith' viewpoint, I also do so from an evidentiary one.

Without a love for and from God, it's only a matter of time before the nihilism we are left with eats away at our social and individual souls, leaving empty shells of humanity, and we are in the world of Mad Max.