Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I recently had the great honour of attending a function for a young institution building on our shared history and carving a very bright future: Campion College. The President, Dr David Daintree, made a brief address at this function, which I believe contains an important message for the Australian people. He began:

There's a saying, 'You can't see the wood for the trees.' We talk sometimes about crises in education but the real crisis is almost too big to be visible. It is not about class sizes or funding or lack of physical resources. The real crisis is specialisation—too much and too soon. It is the loss of the common shared culture. It is the failure to ground students deeply in history and language, ethics, reasoning, skills and faith. We're producing generations of people who are spiritually blind and historically tone deaf. The result is moral and intellectual atrophy. People who have no sense of history can have no sense of direction, no formed or mature sense of where they are heading.

Belief in God, which should be the most natural thing in the world, has been sidelined so effectively that it now appears perverse and crazy to people who put their trust in crystals and astrology and reincarnation and silly pseudoscientific notions of multiple universes. To many people now in this dysfunctional and disordered world whales are more important than babies, endangered possums more precious than old people in nursing homes, smoking a more grievous sin than infidelity.

The way back, if by God's good grace it's not too late, will be hard to win. Perhaps you can't teach wisdom but you can certainly cultivate and nourish the seedbed in which wisdom can grow.

The vital purpose of Campion is to strike at the roots of the crisis, not merely the symptoms. Let others focus on teaching practical knowledge. Our efforts are directed to a deeper purpose. We offer an education that forms Catholic minds, that blends faith and reason in the classical Christian way, that is intellectually rigorous and religiously faithful. That is the special contribution which Campion trusts to make to the Church and the nation.

I often quote Edmund Burke: 'No-one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could only do a little.' Though we are small, we will strive to do more than a little. By the end of this year we will have sent a total of 70 graduates out into the world—a very evangelical number that—and they will make a difference. Campion has the potential to be a bright beacon in a darkening world.

Question agreed to.