In my last post, I expressed the hope that the Voice referendum had let the genie of Australian common sense out of its bottle, and might be the start of the rehabilitation of Australian liberal conservatism.

It’s clear from Saturday’s result that a sizeable chunk of the rural aboriginal population share my distrust of their urban elites, and are tired of their lazy habit of blaming ‘the English’ for all their woes. Perhaps, then, there may be a growing willingness to see their children receive the ‘Three Rs“ educational canon that arrived on their shores in 1788, and to repudiate the Anglo-phobia which sees English as the language of the oppressor, and the teaching of it disparaged as an unnecessary distraction?

And what better place to start ‘closing the gap’ than with the Aboriginal disadvantage that most certainly exists, but which decades of muddled, sentimental thinking, attended by vast expenditure of tax-payers’ dollars seem, if anything, to have exacerbated?

In My Crazy Dream, I posted a copy of an email I’d sent to Jacinta Price in 2021, before she was elected to the Senate. Perhaps my dream of teaching marginalised aboriginal kids living in remote areas plain English in tandem with their own traditional tongue was just too crazy, or perhaps my email just got lost in the maelstrom of a career suddenly taking off, but I never received a reply.

Perhaps it was just too crazy – perhaps it still is. The referendum campaign, however, has, if anything, strengthened my belief that indigenous Australians, simply by virtue of their citizenship, already have a voice. The disgraceful truth, however, is that they lack the means to use it.

The ability to put one’s thoughts into the world’s most mutually understood language, and thereby engage effectively with the world around us, ought to be the birthright of every Australian, whatever their heritage. That fewer and fewer Australian children are properly taught English is a tragedy, but not one I can address here. Protecting Australia’s children from the pernicious influence of bad teaching is a daunting task, and one I leave to others. Children in Australia’s remote aboriginal communities, however, already have that protection by virtue of their very isolation, and presently receive such a threadbare education that It ought, in theory at least, to be possible to cheat the system and give them a proper grasp of English.

Of course, it will be objected that it’s barely possible to get aboriginal children in remote communities into a schoolroom (or what passes for one in those parts), and that such a scheme would be doomed to widespread failure from the start. And it’s certainly true that to put such a scheme in the hands of Australia’s educational establishment would be to guarantee its failure. These people seem incapable of teaching the mainstream of Australia’s children the three Rs, preferring instead to indoctrinate them with their pet ideologies. To entrust to them the task of educating, in remote parts of Australia, children whom they believe, as an article of faith, to be victims of permanently debilitating oppression would be to allow hope to triumph over bitter experience.

So instead, my crazy idea would be to do the thing on a voluntary, bottom-up basis. Start by finding a core of retired or retiring teachers who are capable of teaching English properly – including the rudiments of grammar, sentence construction and so on, and who are willing to spend time teaching in remote communities where comforts are few, and even their safety not necessarily guaranteed. Then find one community (just one will do for starters) whose authority figures buy into the idea of getting their 7–year-olds (and up) reliably into the classroom.

Children who grow up using two languages have an inherent intellectual advantage over their monoglot contemporaries, even if one of those languages is a ‘dead’ one such as Latin, or has next to no currency beyond their immediate communities, like many of Australia’s indigenous languages. A key aspect of my crazy dream, therefore, is the notion that the survival of Australian aboriginal languages, like those of Wales, Cornwall, Scotland and Ireland, depends on their curation by people with a mastery of English. Finding speakers of local languages willing partner our English teachers in class time will be a crucial element of the scheme.

Funding such a modest pilot project ought not to be difficult – the groups involved in the No campaign would surely offer a suitable platform.

My hope is that success in one community will persuade others to participate, and allow the scheme to grow organically. All Australians, no matter how isolated their circumstances, already have a Voice. Trouble is, far too many lack the means to use it. I believe competent use of the English language is the greatest gift we can give Australian children. But following hard on its heels is numeracy – the ability to understand and calculate numbers without using a calculator – and I would expect that the teaching of arithmetic would quickly be added to English in the academy of my crazy dream.

The view of the self-anointed elites who were given such a drubbing on October 14th is that Aboriginal Australians are the perennial victims of the injustice that was done to them by European, and specifically British, settlement. The same elites are responsible for the debauching of education that has led to so many Australian children leaving school, and in many cases entering tertiary education, unable to spell or use grammatically correct English, and unable to add, subtract, multiply and divide without the use of a calculator. At present, the isolation of aboriginal children condemns them to even worse educational outcomes.

The wrongs done to those indigenous Australians are responsible not just for some, but for all of the woes that afflict today’s aborigines. In the lazy, simplistic reasoning of the woke, the remedy is obvious – sentence non-aboriginal Australians (in reality, white non-Australians) to a permanent seat on the naughty step of Australian society. Make the descendants of the original sinners pay unending reparations to the descendants of the original victims. And perpetuate the myth that, to live happy and fulfilled lives, aboriginal Australians need only free themselves from European oppression by rejecting European culture, and rediscover their traditional ways.

But in my crazy dream, the very isolation of our deprived aboriginal communities serves to protect them from the pernicious educational theories peddled by the woking class. It gives us and them the opportunity to get a grounding in the sort of literacy and numeracy that has been all but lost in mainstream Australia. And for a few, it gives them the opportunity to contribute to the preservation of indigenous languages which will otherwise surely wither on the vine, or to go on to higher education, where they will find that, far from being incapacitated by some historic injustice done to their forebears, they have an unfair advantage over their urban peers.

I can’t do this on my own. Anyone with me?