What a narrow world the author lives in.

Being a libertarian, I would say that anyone that says that anything (other than breaking the law) is unaustralian is himself unaustralian.

By circular argument this then includes me.

All one can do is focus on is preferred Australian values and the term un-Australian should be removed from the lexicon before the ghosts of Hoover and MacArther rise again.

Both Pauline Hansen and the Sheik have the right to wear the flag as long as never break the law.

Taj Din al-Hilali was fair game, no problems with how your students reacted to him, that's typical of cartoonists and satirists in a liberal democracy. The problem seems to have been your own ideological stand-point, I'm sure that similar work repudiating Howard, for example, wouldn't have worried you. Who was the teacher and who the taught in this case?

I just loved the supporters of the racists out at Camden trying to prevent the setting up of a Muslim school. One pathetic loser bleated about his problem with being called a 'racist' just because he was against the proposed school. 'What about freedom of speech?' he whined.

Racists need to understand this: you have the right to denigrate anyone you like and I have the right to call you a filthy bigot, racist, loser or whatever I like. And if you don't like it, move to North Korea.

As a senior educator, one of the most important steps in preparing students for the real world is to consider the consequences of what students creatively produce. The idealistic notion of 'free speech' is excellent when it matches our own parameters, but is unacceptable when it challenges them. We all have different parameters though. For some it is unacceptable to challenge the Holocaust, for others to ridicule religious icons - be it Sheikh Taj, or Santa, for others again, to challenge the various hegemonies that dominate our way of life. Ultimately, there are consequences - detention by ASIO for writing a book on terrorism, riots for insulting a religious figure, or expulsion from a Kindergarten as my daughter faced when she informed a fellow classmate that Santa Claus was just an old man dressed up in a red costume. There is really no such thing as 'free speech' - only consequences for exercising it.

At one time the forging of the nation states into a cohesive whole was a very progressive act that took mankind forward. This process overcame narrowness, provincial backwardness and a complicated society; one example being seperate and different gauge raillines for every state. In Europe, prior to the nation you had feudal restrictive barriers whereby a levy or tithe was extracted, generally about a tenth to pass the barrier. After the nation state formed, it was not too long before the nation itself became restrictive and explosive. Today you have a world economy and seperate nation states. You cannot exist in some national exclusiveness. From about 1912 on this was a time when each nation was pitted against every other nation for an ever shrinking market; each against all. Trade war extended into shooting war culminating in 1914, then competition had to be silenced, blown out of the water. Shrinking markets turned all countries aggressive. It has been said by Leon Trotsky that "inflation itself is an expression of disordered internal relationships and of disordered economic ties between nations.
All the crimes of the last century against people have in one form or another had a nationalist agenda. Wars that were founded on nationalism and capitalism have resolved nothing but turned the world into slaughterhouses. Leon Trotsky explained "Most prominent decadent fascist nationalism, which prepares volcanic explosions and grandiose clashes in the world arena, bears nothing except ruin." Germany and Italy were nations devastated for decades after the war, never too dismissing their youth sacrificed on the alter of profits. The alternative is socialist internationalism. Art which is about the cognition and deeper penetration into life including the illuminious life and flux of the world. But not as propaganda, propaganda is precisely propaganda and not art: Art will only become alive inasmuch as its its imaginative and recreative powers are exerted.