If you missed the Daily Telegraph‘s sepia-soaked front page this morning, they’re all up in a tizz over the University of New South Wales‘s diversity guidelines, which recommends students and teachers refer to Captain Cook invading Australia (true) rather than the far more colonial-era language of ‘discovering’ it.
They also accused the university’s stance as having “reignited the history wars”, a decades long argument in academia over the early colonies treated Aboriginal people (relatively minor conflict vs a massacre).
Alan Jones: “[the guidelines would make] smoke come out of your ears!”
Kyle Sandilands: “It divides society. All the flogs at uni reckon we invaded the joint… I’m not interested in who was here first and who did what, get out it already, it’s 200 years ago.”
But, as we’ve seen recently with the Safe Schools program (to disastrous affect), something doesn’t have to be ‘new’ for News Corp papers to pen outrage about it – it just has to exist.
And these guidelines? Well, they’ve been around for four fucking years, UNSW has confirmed.
So the Tele’s “whitewash” of Australian history is four years old. Diversity toolkit has been in place since 2012, UNSW spokeswoman confirms
— Eryk Bagshaw (@ErykBagshaw) March 30, 2016
A UNSW spokeswoman confirmed as much to PEDESTRIAN.TV, and that no changes had been made that would possibly cause the Daily Tele to suddenly pounce (our words, not theirs). She also confirmed that the Daily Tele had simply not even asked.