In this interview, Colleen Harkin appeared on The Rita Panahi Show – Sky News Australia to discuss the IPA’s research into the National Curriculum.
All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.
Below is a transcript of the interview.
Rita Panahi:
Joining me now for more on this is Sky News contributor Louise Roberts and research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, Colleen Harkin. Colleen, what possible reason, what possible good will come from Dan Andrews and Bob Carr cozying up to the Chinese Communist Party?
Colleen Harkin:
Well, this is not about history, really. This is a show of power, and they are helping carry that message. Daniel Andrews is known for poor judgement and misplaced loyalty. As we all know, he went to China, I think, seven times while he was premier without any transparency about what those trips were about. Their attendance at this legitimises an authoritarian regime that does not adhere, it does not subscribe to our values, and we’ve got thousands of soldiers in history who have fought for our freedoms, and they’re sort of legitimising a dictatorship military propaganda. It is completely undermining and it’s an insult of the sacrifice of all of our thousands of people who have fought for freedoms.
Rita Panahi:
That’s a very good point. Louise, it’s been reported DFAT, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, was not consulted on the attendance plans of Carr and Andrews. Given they’re no longer in government, what is the benefit to Australia or even to them individually attending this rally? We are talking about the Chinese Communist Party here. We know about China’s gross human rights abuses at home and elsewhere. Why would you want to legitimise this regime?
Louise Roberts:
Well, they’ve always had a soft spot for China, haven’t they? I mean, Bob Carr warned Australian politicians years ago about China panic, that we shouldn’t panic about dealing with China, and we’ve just illustrated Dan Andrews’s very cosy relationships with Chinese authorities and Chinese government, and there was that belt and road fiasco, wasn’t it, where he tried to get Australia to buy into this huge economic plan, which fortunately Scott Morrison jumped all over and said that wasn’t going ahead, but look, it’s a PR gold opportunity for the Chinese government to have these two very friendly, soft power favourites in situ to sort of perpetuate the myth of them controlling Taiwan, and for us as Australia, there’s no gain for us. It just makes us look ridiculous on the world stage.
Rita Panahi:
Now let’s move on to the 10 network. They’re refusing to apologise to Linda Reynolds over the cover-up allegations it made against her, despite the former minister’s recent victory in a defamation case against Brittany Higgins, in which WA Supreme Court Justice Paul Toddle ruled Higgins had weaponized her story in interviews conducted by journalist Lisa Wilkinson and aired on Channel 10, noting that a vital part of the story was the false allegation Ms. Reynolds had covered up, the rape allegation. He also called Ms. Higgins’s media interviews objectively untrue and misleading and said there were 26 false or misleading aspects present in her interviews. Colleen Higgins, Brittany Higgins, has been ordered to pay her former boss $340,000 in damages for defamation, but should Channel 10 or any media outlet that aired those allegations uncritically, should they also be culpable for some of that?
Colleen Harkin:
Well, in this sort of environment where misinformation and disinformation is a high topic for people, you would think as a bare minimum, they would come out and admit that they got it wrong and apologise for spreading misinformation. Linda Reynolds has twice now been completely vindicated, and justice has been a long time coming for her, but at least it has come. 26 false allegations is no small accident. It doesn’t happen by that, and we have to remember too, that this entire scenario was weaponized by the Labour Party’s mean girls. It was not just a simple accident that happened along the way. It was quite an orchestrated event. When journalism goes down this path of recklessly spreading misinformation, where is it journalism and where is it activism? There’s also someone else in this scenario who’s been long forgotten, is Fiona Brown, because she was also vilified, and there has been little follow up on her circumstances.
Rita Panahi:
Louise, it really is quite shameful that an incident that was supposed to raise standards in Parliament House and other workplaces has turned into this schmozzle. I think you could argue it’s done a great deal more harm than good.
Louise Roberts:
Absolutely, and I think although Linda Reynolds has been exonerated in this way, I think she really is just looking for a simple apology, but she won’t get that from Channel 10, because they can use silence as a type of corporate shield. They can say that, “Well, the Lerman case is still alive and they can’t interfere with that,” and look, she’s also asking for an apology from Anthony Albanese as well because of the weaponizing and the mean girls thing that we’re talking about. So I don’t think she’ll get that apology, which is a real shame, because she may get the money and she may get the court ruling, but fundamentally, as a person, she hasn’t had an apology for what has happened to her the last four and a half years of hell that she’s gone through.
Rita Panahi:
She may also be entitled to ask for an apology from Scott Morrison, because he mishandled this crisis terribly. He really did not stand by his minister in any way. Now, we’ve spoken a lot on this programme about the widening gender education gap. Boys are struggling in school, trailing girls and being diagnosed with ADHD at disturbing rates. Here, psychoanalyst, parent, coach and author Erica Komisar explains how we’re setting young boys up to fail from an early age.
Erica Komisar:
We basically educate young boys in a way that really favours girls. From a very young age, we talk about being able to sit quietly and regulate your emotions and not be aggressive and not be impulsive, and these little boys are being diagnosed with ADHD, many of them just for being little boys. Little boys need to run around. They have a lot of physical energy. They have tonnes of testosterone. When you’re like between three and six, you have a surge of testosterone, and all you want to do is run and jump and play and be outside, and what we’re doing, we’re putting them in school, making them sit in circle time. So we marginalise them, we label them, we say they have a problem, we say that they have ADHD, that they have behavioural problems, and in many of them, the stress that I talked about is the stress of making little boys be more like little girls.
Rita Panahi:
Louise, if these figures were reversed and it was girls who were struggling and trailing boys academically, there will probably be dozens of programmes to boost girls up, and it’d be an issue we’d be hearing a lot more about.
Louise Roberts:
I agree. I think boys are made to feel a problem from almost the day they’re born, and certainly the day that they enter school. My message to parents is that we’re not raising a generation of disordered boys. We’re just educating them in a system which makes their normal behaviour, very normal behaviour, a problem. That running around at lunchtime and climbing up trees and not being able to sit still in class is somehow a medical condition, they have to be diagnosed and they have to be medicated, and even if they’re not diagnosed with ADHD, that reputation seems to follow them all the way through primary school right up into secondary school.
I speak with some experience of this when my son, who’s now 21, when he was at school, all the boys were… There was a very, very strong campaign to get the boys tested for ADHD because they were coming in from lunchtime with their ties askew and their hair messed up, and I was dragged down to the school on many occasions to explain why my son was full of beans and hyperactive after lunchtime, when he was just being a normal boy that didn’t enjoy sitting still for half an hour. So I really feel we’re doing our boys a disservice, and I’m sure my story’s not uncommon amongst parents in Australia.
Rita Panahi:
Absolutely, and sticking with education, the Herald Sun reports a rogue group of anti-Israel teachers called Teachers and School Staff for Palestine have been circulating an unauthorised teaching guide, urging colleagues to teach students as young as three years old that Israel is committing a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. The fifteen-page guide tells teachers and staff to wear Palestinian stickers and scarves called kafirs to school and suggests methods of weaving anti-Israel rhetoric into subjects. Colleen, this is just a part of the indoctrination that we see at schools. Even though this is unauthorised, there’s plenty of indoctrination in the curriculum itself.
Colleen Harkin:
We have lots of conversations here, Rita, about the indoctrination in the schools, whether it’s climate change, hate your country, this is an extraordinary one, and these people should be found out and suspended or sacked. There is no reason to be having these conversations with children in school, let alone children who are in kindergarten. It is nothing short of absolute political activism, and it has no place in any school.
Rita Panahi:
I think it would just be traumatising, Louise, for children to be hearing about a genocide and children dying, and this is a conversation that their parents can have with them when they’re old enough. It is not up to teachers to be filling their brains with this sort of political activism.
Louise Roberts:
Well, absolutely. I mean, they’re learning apparently about one side of a war before they can even spell or write their own names. It’s insanity, and as you say, it’d be very frightening for a three to four five-year-old listening to that sort of one-sided propaganda. Forget about milk and fruit and reading a book and having a nap. You’ve got Gaza propaganda hours sort of being forced to children, and if I was a parent and my child was coming home and saying to me, “Israel’s bad and Palestine’s good,” or, “There’s a genocide going on,” I’d be absolutely horrified, and as we say, I’d be demanding those teachers be removed from my child’s care. I mean, that’s not what they’re at primary school for.
Rita Panahi:
Louise Roberts, Colleen Harkin, thank you so much for your time tonight.
Louise Roberts:
Thank you.
This transcript of Colleen Harkin talking on The Rita Panahi Show – Sky News Australia from 2 September 2025 has been edited for clarity.
