The Left needs to destroy the family unit to succeed in the long-term. Over the last few years, we have seen numerous attempts to make the meaning of the word “family” whatever anyone wants it to be, to strip it of any collective meaning. The Left needs to attack and to destroy the family as the basic building block of society in order to progress its goals.

I went to a Quaker school in Tasmania from kindergarten in 1978 to term one of 1986. The Society of Friends, or “Quakers”, fancy themselves as pacifists. The school punished any kind of violent play, including guns imagined in a stick picked up from the ground. If a child hit someone and the victim retaliated, the latter was punished more severely than the assailant, for perpetuating the cycle of violence. They took turning the other cheek literally, as applicable to all situations. At least, they affected to. But they were hypocrites. I don’t know if they are now, but they were then.

Over the course of the upheavals of the sixties, their ersatz pacifism merged with anti-West fantasies about atonement for colonialism. We spent hours making origami paper cranes and listening to poetry about how Nagasaki was neglected in all the focus on Hiroshima. Any mention of Darwin or Papua New Guinea was frowned upon. Seven-year-olds were being told that winning the war was akin to a war crime.

They had developed as a well-regarded school with an outstanding academic record. But in 1980, things changed. The Headmaster retired and was replaced by a highly ideological left-wing couple, calling themselves co-principals. They changed the uniform from a traditional blazer with red and blue striped trim and striped tie, to plain grey with a red tie – basically a fancier version of the uniform of any given communist country. The co-principals and a few enablers in the staff then embarked on nothing short of a cultural revolution in the school environment. Like any socialist, they were happy to receive the fees as the most expensive school in Tasmania, to then use them to pervert the minds of their charges.

In 1982 the Falklands War unfolded. This was a Boys’ Own adventure writ large, our own chance to share in the esprit de corps that was the birthright of every boy born into the Commonwealth. Tasmania used to be conservative. My local member was Michael Hodgman. My family letter-boxed for him. The Union Flag was to fly atop Parliament House Hobart for a further decade until Ray Groom ordered it removed. The Empire was striking back. This was a just war and a just war was glorious. My school was horrified.

At the outbreak of war, the Left had trouble backing a horse. At least, most of them did – I am given to understand that Jeremy Corbyn backed Galtieri simply because he wasn’t British. But for most of them, because they couldn’t back Thatcher, and because Galtieri was not a socialist, they called a pox on both houses. This was the approach my school took.

I recall two years after the war, the Head of Junior School reading to us a highly controversial picture book, “The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman”. A satire on the Falklands War and written in the format of a picture book for very young children, it was pure propaganda. Perhaps it was written for adults, in the same vein as “Go the F–k to Sleep”, but the school found it irresistible as a tool to shape our pliable young minds. The premise was that Thatcher was no different to Galtieri, that the Falkland Islanders had no interest in the war, that they simply ate “mutton for breakfast, lunch and tea” before and after the war. Even at age 10, I could see the inconsistency of this book and what I was seeing on the news and hearing at home. I preferred to watch television footage of Prince Andrew heroically using his helicopter’s rotor wash to blow laden life rafts away from the burning HMS Sheffield.

As the years went on, the school dug in on its mission. Years 9 and 10 were subjected to a unit called “Peace Studies”, whence they emerged convinced that Reagan and Thatcher were evil and that the West was on the wrong side of the Cold War. Prefects had been abolished. School sport was a joke. They lost nearly every game they played because competition was considered inherently evil.

We were told repeatedly that we didn’t have to obey our parents. Kids as young as 12 were told that their academic performance was up to them. If they didn’t want to work, they could make that decision and live with it but that if they were self-motivated, they received a lot of help. There was to be no coercion. If you weren’t with the program, you got left behind.

At the news that the school was planning to abolish school houses and intra-school competition, about eighteen children were pulled out of school. I knew exactly why; I had always known. Because through all the propaganda about Imperial Japan, Soviet Russia, the Khmer Rouge, the Thatcher Terror, Ronald “Star Wars” Reagan, and the forced transformation of Australia into a multicultural paradise, my parents had been undermining the school the whole time. The Society of Friends failed to turn me into a neo-Marxist because my parents would not let them.

So it is today. When my children bring home stories they learnt from teachers or from forced viewings of the ABC’s “Behind the News” (to which we were also subjected in the eighties), such as “Gillard is good, Abbott is bad”, “Abbott is a misogynist”, “Israel invaded Palestinian land”, or “Trump is racist”, we set them straight. We provide the nuance.

Without parents constantly undermining them, the Left would possess a whole generation in toto. “Give me a child until the age of seven and I will give you the man,” goes the Jesuit motto. The Left knows this and will do anything to obtain your children’s minds. In a rare slip, Gillian Triggs’ lamentation that she cannot control what is said across the kitchen table is the quintessential manifestation of that.

The Left wants your children and, knowing the indelible significance of the word “family” in our shared culture, they seek to own the idea of the family, by redefining it out of existence.

Without the protective influence of the family, we are left with “all within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state”. Guess who said that?

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