ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact
The federal opposition has today unveiled a bold suite of education reforms aimed at strengthening Australia’s national identity and cultural unity, including a proposed reclassification of Bidjigal warrior Pemulwuy as the country’s first domestic terrorist.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton says the changes will help ensure young Australians learn the “full story” of colonisation, particularly the parts that reframe organised Aboriginal resistance as a threat to law and order.
“Pemulwuy led violent raids, destroyed crops, and disrupted peaceful British settlement,” said Dutton.
“In today’s terms, that makes him a terrorist.”
Born around 1750, Pemulwuy led a sustained guerrilla campaign against British settlers in the Sydney Basin for over a decade, launching attacks on military barracks, burning farms, and mobilising surrounding nations to push back against the colony’s expansion. He was shot multiple times and survived, eventually being killed in 1802 before Governor Philip Gidley King ordered his head be removed and sent to England in a jar of spirits.
“People talk about him like he’s a freedom fighter,” said a senior policy advisor to the shadow education ministry.
“But if he were alive today, he’d be on a no-fly list. He wouldn’t be allowed into Bunnings. Perhaps under a Labor Government, he’d be able to continue setting crops on fire and spearing pastoralists but not under a Dutton-led coalition.”
The curriculum changes come as conservatives push back against what they see as a growing trend of woke revisionism, with statues of Captain Cook and Governor Macquarie routinely targeted by activist vandals.
“We’ve had enough of progressives tearing down our history,” said Dutton.
“So we’re balancing the ledger by reclassifying any Aboriginal resistance as extremist behaviour.”
The Opposition has also flagged plans to rename the Frontier Wars to the Agricultural Disruptions, and introduce new Year 5 lessons on how Cook and Phillip were actually early victims of cancel culture.
More to come.
