At Julia Gillard’s triumphal rallies, her ecstatic audiences applauded the idea that her valour in standing up to misogyny will make life easier for future women prime ministers. But in every state and territory we have had women leaders who have not been troubled by misogyny. Gillard’s problems were matters of policy and even more of trust. That is the real lesson for up-and-coming women leaders.

Tony Abbott will get his legislation through the Senate with our help,’ said Senator-elect David Leyonhjelm of the micro-party the Liberal Democrats ‘… if he is nice to us.’ He was speaking at an Institute of Public Affairs bash of some 450 libertarians in Sydney. It had been billed as part of the IPA’s nationwide tour publicising threats of freedom of speech such as the infamous 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act used to stigmatise freethinkers for their opinions. (We were all given a free copy of Chris Berg’s historical survey In Defence of Freedom of Speech — From the trial and execution of Socrates to the, well, trial of Andrew Bolt.)

But in no time the meeting turned into a celebration of the defeat of the Labor government. How they cheered when someone welcomed the abolition of the Climate Change Commission! They could barely contain themselves when someone else called for the abolition of the Human Rights Commission. Meanwhile, they will take heart from Senator Brandis’s plan to appoint Freedom Commissioners to the HRC to oversee legislation which infringes our freedoms. Senator-elect Leyonhjelm had a word of warning: he would not vote for the Coalition’s costly scheme for Direct Action on Climate Change or for Abbott’s extravagant Paid Parental Leave program. (‘We are libertarians. We are for scrapping taxes, not introducing new ones.’) But the rally soon reunited behind a proposal that Senator Brandis’s first Freedom Commissioner should be Janet Albrechtsen of the Australian! Loud cheers all round.

Tim Fischer, the ever popular former leader of the National party, used his platform at the Sydney Institute last week to defend himself against renewed attacks that he is some sort of anti-Semite. The issue arose over a chapter in his latest memoir: Holy See, Unholy Me. 1,000 Days in Rome: Tales From My Time as Australian Ambassador to the Vatican. The chapter is headed ‘Anti-Semitism in the Vatican?’ One veteran Australian journalist called it a ‘mind-boggling… exercise in anti-Semitism.’ This seems to me ridiculous. Fischer is no academic scholar. He does not have the authority of, say, the English historian Michael Burleigh who described Pius X11’s 1937 encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge — banned in Hitler’s Germany but read from the pulpits — as ‘one of the most penetrating intellectual demolitions of Nazism’ ever made, although he added that throughout the relevant years ‘legitimate questions remain about the Pope’s hesitations and tone’. But Fischer has made his own inquiries and made up his own mind. ‘After the examination of a great deal of historical material, my conclusion is that the Holy See and its head of government, Pope Pius XII, took action that led to the rescue of thousands of Jewish people from the Nazis. Could it have done more? That will always be debated.’

Since the issue is the holocaust and murder of millions, Fischer’s response is obviously inadequate. But at the Sydney Institute he declared ‘We must never forget the Holocaust!’ His book also condemns anti-Semitism on the internet and in the social media. He found none in the Vatican. His instinct as a Catholic is to defend his Church and the Pope but he endorses the panel in the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem that the issue cannot be settled until ‘all relevant material is available to scholars’ and not confined to the Vatican and other restricted archives. Or as Fischer puts it: ‘Let the facts and the truth come out as soon as possible.’ In the words of Pius XII: ‘Spiritually we are all Jews.’

In the Australian Financial Review last Monday, the economist Paul Oslington welcomed the emergence in Australia of private liberal arts colleges which teach traditional disciplines and attempt to arrest the slide in the quality of education delivered at ‘the bottom end of the Australian university system’ and in some of the older public universities as well. He is thinking of such private colleges as Campion in Old Toongabbie, Alphacrucis in Parramatta, or the Wesley Institute in Sydney. They are all church-related and operate largely outside the university system. Time will tell how well they compete academically with the older, better endowed and heavily subsidised public universities, but meanwhile Oslington predicts that well remunerated university administrators will run scare campaigns claiming that only a university crest above the front door can keep charlatans at bay, when in fact ‘it provides excellent cover for some of the worst of them.’

Keith Windschuttle takes up Oslington’s theme in the current and celebratory 500th issue of Quadrant. Forget about the pursuit of philosophy, science, or literature. Don’t worry about history or ancient languages. At Monash University the student will be directed to the Research Unit on Gender, Leadership and Social Sustainability (Glass). At Deakin he may be drawn to the Centre for Memory, Imagination and Invention (CMII). The names of these pseudo-inquiries, Windschuttle says, are ‘beyond parody.’ But university committees must have approved them. ‘Hence the rot they represent must permeate their institutions.’