The people who wail about Australian government agents maliciously stealing kids from their parents as part of a program of ‘cultural genocide’ are half right.

They are just wrong about which kids were actually stolen, and by whom.

Let’s start with the so-called ‘Stolen Generations’, which were the subject of a comprehensive report by the Australian Human Rights Commission, published in 1997.

The report, deliberately or not, misinterpreted a historically rare dilemma: what to do with kids trapped between the hunter-gatherer culture of their often drunk parents and the liberal democracy into which they’d been born as citizens. It claimed ‘many thousands’ were forcibly removed from their parents and placed in institutions or, if they were lucky, a loving foster home.

In truth, few were forcibly removed, and the number of kids totalled, according to historian Keith Windschuttle, about 8,250 – all of them in desperate in need of rescuing.

Most people with part-Aboriginal ancestry are now happily part of modern Australia. It is those who, for whatever reason, never escaped their remote ‘communities’ who continue to suffer misery and deprivation.

Nevertheless, leftists have been able to twist the Stolen Generations report into proof of the genocidal intent of ‘colonialism’. Politicians across the nation have ever since been cowed into avoiding policies that could in any way be construed as a repeat of last century’s ideas.

Which is ironic because, despite widespread fervent opposition to the idea of stealing kids from their parents, the practice has only since increased on an industrial scale. Only now the victims are mostly white, and they number in their millions.

Ask any parent or grandparent aged over, say, 50 and you will hear the same story –they have all lost at least one child to the state. I’m only mildly exaggerating here; almost every parent I know in this cohort has been affected by this.

The story never varies: a beloved child of devoted parents diverted from a happy, conventional life towards a future defined by victimhood, intersectionality, gender fluidity, nihilism, contempt for tradition, state dependency and (spoiler alert) depression.

The story is invariably delivered with the same mix of profound sadness and bewilderment that a child could turn his or her back on loving parents and a bright future.

But, as anybody who has passed even a cursory glance over our education system, this shouldn’t be bewildering at all. While we parents were at work earning money to pay for the state-designed education of our kids, that education system was busily stealing our kids away from us.

For most of us older parents, this happened when the child was sent off to university.

What should have been a rite of passage into a world of intellectual wonder and opportunity turned out to be an indoctrination into useless knowledge about environmental catastrophism and colonial guilt.

But now it’s worse. Not only are secondary and primary teachers stealing kids (by encouraging kids to change gender without telling their parents, for example), pre-school teachers are also getting in on the act.

‘Meaningful engagement with philosophies and pedagogies for social justice… opens up space to explore issues of profound importance, such as gender equity, LGBTQI+ rights, trauma and its impacts, and the climate crisis,’ says a report about education of 0 to 5-year-olds by the New South Wales government from last year.

‘While these are key examples, there are many other issues and ideas to explore, and a multitude of perspectives that children can bring to these important conversations as we continue working to honour children’s rights and social justice in early childhood education.’

And you thought pre-school was about playing in the sandpit followed by an afternoon nap.

Every time you hear a politician boast about increasing subsidies for childcare, remember this: they aren’t doing it to ‘help working families’, they are doing it to enable their apparatchiks in the education industry to convert children into brain-dead, pliable cogs to be fed into the government’s increasingly ubiquitous ideology-machine.

There is now no part of the entire education system where it is safe to send children. How the parents of toddlers today will cope is beyond me.

My generation of parents (late boomer/Gen X) are partly to blame.

I remember hearing the term ‘Participation Award’ for the first time, twenty years ago. My kids were playing Auskick at the time, where end-of-season participation awards were obligatory for even the least physically gifted child.

Some newspaper commentators said this was wrong because it shielded kids from a harsh reality, that not everyone gets a trophy in life, and that merely turning up and performing badly is not a cause for celebration.

Perhaps, I thought. But can you really dismiss the joy these kids felt from being part of something?

I now realise I was wrong. Those ridiculous participation awards encouraged kids to celebrate failure in a field to which they were never suited. I imagine that if some of them had been harshly but fairly discouraged from playing football, they might instead be playing violin in a symphony orchestra by now.

My generation was also mostly preoccupied with raising kids with love, and not much else.

In hindsight, a bit of discipline, not to mention religious spirituality, might not have gone astray. It was a bit presumptuous of us to think we could dispense with these ancient parental traits without consequences.

Our shortcomings as parents have made our kids sitting ducks for the faceless generals who are now recruiting them as woke foot soldiers in the culture wars.

This has happened before. Mao taught his young Red Guards to dob in their parents if they showed signs of being counter-revolutionary. Some did, sending their parents to the firing squad.

In his history of the Third Reich, Michael Burleigh says the Hitler Youth of the 1930s ‘became strangers’ to their parents, ‘perpetually barking and shouting like pint-sized Prussian sergeant-majors’.

In both these cases, things did not end well.

Australian parents who feel victims of a similarly malign and overwhelming force are loath to imagine things panning out quite so badly. They just want their kids back.

Perhaps the Human Rights Commission could hold a similar inquiry to the one it held in 1997. After all, this Stolen Generation is infinitely bigger, and the people doing the stealing are far more sinister. Worse, this time cultural genocide is a distinct possibility. I’m not holding my breath for it, though.

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