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oth the Liberal party Prime Minister and leaders of the Labor party, such as then-New South
Wales Premier, Bob Carr and then-Queensland Education Minister, Rod Welford. B. Carr,
who sees “...history as a superior intellectual discipline” (Salusinszky, 2006, p. 25) kept it as
a separate school subject in NSW. In asserting the need to maintain History as a distinct,
separate and interesting school subject, B. Carr expressed the following opinion in a radio
program interview Sunday Profile with then-ABC journalist (now Federal Labor politician in
John Howard’s former seat of Bennelong in Sydney, New South Wales) Maxine McKew:
One is, we've got to teach it better. And when the History teachers came to see me as
Premier and said: Look, great idea, but these two compulsory years aren't working as
we wanted, we revised the syllabus and made it, I think, made it more exciting.
I think, second, we've got to look at the ideas advanced by an American who
wrote a book called: The lies my teacher told me. History shouldn't be an uplifting
civic narrative, it should have controversy, and confusion, and argument, and
bloodshed. (Sommer, 2006, emphasis added)
Although Bolt tried to establish the debate as partisan, making in total five explicit comments
in the one article, such as “the Queensland Education Department is indoctrinating our
children with Left-wing values…” and “…the Beattie Government thought it could get away
with this devastation of education in this state” (2000, n.p.); the criticisms of the SOSE
syllabus and the impact of the history/culture wars on school curriculum can be seen as bipartisan.
Rod Welford criticised the curriculum and “vowed to get rid of ‘postmodern mumbo
jumbo’ in year 12 English” (Eunson, 2006, para. 6). Whilst this comment received
widespread support from conservative aspects of the mainstream press and emerging e-media
(see, for example, Ferrari 2007b; Burk 2005), the English curriculum remained the same in
Queensland after the retirement of Rod Welford in 2008. In an attempt to maintain a non
party political approach to the debate, B. Carr prior to attending the national history summit
of August 2006, was careful to say “I go there a little cautious, however, about embracing an
agenda from one school of history writing. I’m not prepared to see the egalitarian strand in
Australian history junked in a bit of neo-con spring cleaning” (Salusinszky, 2006, p. 25).
It is the case that the SOSE syllabus was—and remains—controversial, with people who Bolt
would otherwise claim as being left-wing ideologues also criticising the syllabus content.
There are those from both sides of the debate who call for a return to single subjects, rather
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