• – A photo taken many years after the author left the Liberal Party.

I’m in the final year of my PhD. It’s been a long tertiary education road, tempered by less educational pursuits such as practicing law and writing a silly memoir. And it all started down the road from my parents’ house at Macquarie University.

I wasn’t exactly an activist sort of undergraduate student. I found the earnestness of revolutionary leftwing students rather silly and in many cases hypocritical. How could they support socialism and communism after what these forces did to the Afghans during the 1980’s?

Yes, I wasn’t very fond of the United States in many things, but it was a case of the lesser of two evils. When it came to the Cold War inside my brain, America always trumped the Soviets and China. And Nicaragua and North Korea. And those silly campus lefties.

It made sense that in my second last year, I would end up joining my Liberal Club, contributing to their publication Liberal University Students’ Tabloid (LUST) and eventually joining the Liberal Party.

Throughout this time, it never occurred to me to study Western Civilization as a course. If a degree on Western Civilisation was ever offered, there is no way in the world I would have abandoned my accounting and law degrees to study such unemployable nonsense. I’d expect my left wing opponents to waste years of their pathetic lives studying this tosh as part of their 10-year-long Arts degrees, sponsored by their super-wealthy parents.

Most people in the Liberal Club were like me. They were interested in politics, but their kind of politics involved getting experience working in the private sector. Preferably in a major accounting or law firm or in a merchant bank. We Liberal students were too busy worrying about making lots of money.

Gosh, how times have changed. I’m no longer a Liberal student. I’d rather write for Crikey or AMUST than LUST. Politically speaking, I’m left right out.

But now I’m seeing this madness of conservative Liberal Party MP’s and Liberal students jumping up and down about some Ramsay Center for Western Civilization wanting to establish a degree on western civilization. The degree course, accounting to my old buddy Tony Abbott (he donated $10,000 to my election campaign in 2001!) is about proving western civilization is better.

Better than what? 60,000 years of indigenous Australian civilization? Judaeo-Islamic civilization in Andalusia? Over 5,000 years of Chinese civilization? The civilization of my ancestors in the Sub-Continent?

And how can we understand civilizations without understanding the other civilizations they plagiarized from? What is it that makes western civilization so western? Is it experimental science that was plagiarized from the Arabs? Was it mathematics taken from the Indians via the Arabs? Was it ideas about warfare taken from the Chinese?

And what about Islamic civilization? Can we claim domes on mosques to be our own? Or will we admit our early architects copied them from Byzantine Churches?

Who knows? What cares? I doubt many Liberal students would. They certainly didn’t in my time.