Decolonising dentistry? Why woke university antics will drive Trump-style politics in Australia

The only way this can possibly be legitimised is by the leftist cultural elites offering up one big dumb target after another, writes Joe Hildebrand

If I were a secret agent tasked with sabotaging our political and cultural institutions and ushering Trump-style populist politics into mainstream Australia, this is what I would do.

I would enrol as a postgraduate at a prestigious university and then bury my face in edibles until I came up with the most stupid, self-indulgent and bizarre research topic imaginable – something like “Decolonising Dentistry”.

I would then put in an application for the government to give me money just to spend all my time examining this topic at the expense of the taxpayer.

And not just any amount but a figure so absurdly large that it would appear to anyone else to be a parody – like literally a million dollars.

And then I would do nothing – I wouldn’t even decolonise the dentistry.

I would simply wait for somebody’s jaw to hit the floor as they came across it, and then for their jaw to drop a thousand times more as they told the world how useless, woke, wasteful and pretentious our public institutions were – thus incinerating their credibility, fuelling public outrage and paving the way for a charismatic leader to sweep in with a pledge to drain the swamp.

But of course I wouldn’t even have to do that – I wouldn’t have to do anything at all – because the left are doing it to themselves.

And no, not just stuff like this, literally this.

Someone at the University of Adelaide actually got a grant of almost $900,000 for an anti-racist dentistry program which “aims to develop and evaluate an anti-racism curriculum for dental students”.

Not quite a million you say? No, that would be the $1.07m being spent on a project titled “decolonising breastfeeding”.

And there’s more than $300,000 for “subverting souvenir tea towels” and $18,000 for “drag shows interwoven with scientific concepts and research”.

And how do I know all this? Because it was on the front page of The Sunday Telegraph.

And what has the Coalition’s response been?

To form a DOGE-style crackdown on such spending, with finance spokeswoman Jane Hume declaring it was time to “end the rot”.

Any of this starting to sound familiar? Because of course anyone reading this would be spraying Weet-Bix on the cat. It is so obviously stupid and pretentious and ideological that the fact that such projects even exist would be maddening to most taxpayers, let alone the fact that they are paying for them.

And it not only makes the educational institutions facilitating them look ridiculous, it also makes the Labor government look ridiculous too – even though these would be pet projects by activist academics signed off on by nameless bureaucrats.

As a result the Coalition has been handed yet another absolute gift by elite tertiary-educated progressives who consider themselves the smartest people in the room.

Yet again the off-kilter orbit of the lunar left drags the whole planet off its axis and leaves normal people looking for anything to right it.

Or perhaps they too are working undercover to usher Trump-style politics into Australia?

Perhaps there is a secret network called Drag Queens for Dutton that meets on Tuesday nights?

Because there really is a great move afoot in Australia for Peter Dutton to adopt a more Trumpish posture, openly encouraged by many on the right.

And the only way this can possibly be legitimised is by the leftist cultural elites offering up one big dumb target after another.

To which of course Macquarie University says: Hold my beer!

The day after the grants story splashed across this masthead, The Australian carried this story on its front page:

“Law students at Macquarie University face the threat of failing a key exam if they perform an ­underwhelming acknowledgement of country or refuse to acknowledge traditional Abor­iginal owners at all.”

Yes, a year and a half after Australians overwhelmingly voted against the Indigenous voice to parliament, the university is forcing law students to enthusiastically adopt what is now a highly contested political position or be academically penalised.

As someone who actively supported and championed the voice I can assure you that this sort of ideological idiocy is why it went down in flames. Speaking of which, if Anthony Albanese happens to lose the upcoming election he might well wonder just how much campus lefties have cost him over the past three years.

Our activist dentists see “the mouth as an expression of racial injustice” but if they ever come across Albo they might see an expression of something else.

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