WA Liberals journal claims Indigenous recognition risks '60% of Australian continent'

One of Australia’s most famous conservative historians has warned Liberal party members that the push to recognise Indigenous Australians in the constitution has a “hidden agenda” to carve out a separate state or nation, and has urged them to oppose a referendum.

Party members have also been told that modern Australian feminists are relying on an “unholy trinity” of lies – about the gender pay gap, the alleged domestic violence “epidemic” and male privilege – to weave a web of misplaced victimhood.

The warnings can be found in the Contributor, a journal of articles published by the policy committee of the West Australian Liberal party.

The journal, seen by Guardian Australia, will be distributed in hard copy at the WA Liberal party’s state conference this weekend, starting 2 September.

The well-known historian Keith Windschuttle, the editor of Quadrant Magazine, has contributed an article to the journal titled “The Break-Up of Australia”.

He warns the long-term agenda of the Indigenous “political class” is to form an independent Indigenous government, or governments, that will control “more than 60% of the Australian continent”.

“It means the 140,000 people now living on traditional Aboriginal lands will be the owners of 60% of the entire continent, while the remaining 24 million of us are left with less than 40%,” he warns.

“If it was put to the Australian people that sovereignty over this much of Australia was the outcome Aborigines want from the constitutional referendum, the chances of it passing would be slim, to say the least.”

He has urged Liberal party members to oppose the push for constitutional recognition of Indigenous Australians and says if a referendum goes ahead they should mount a nationwide campaign to vote No.

Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, an Alice Springs councillor, has supported the argument not to have referendum. She has contributed an article saying the push for referendums and treaties “comes from the separatist mindset”.

Guardian Australia understands the WA Liberal party will be moving a motion this weekend at its state conference calling on the federal government “to oppose any move towards facilitating a treaty with, or between, any groups of Australia’s citizens based on ancestral, ethnic, religious, or linguistic differences”.

The Contributor magazine also contains a critique of modern Australian feminism, by the conservative columnist Daisy Cousens.

Cousens argues first- and second-wave feminists achieved “extraordinary leaps” but their Generation X and Millennial successors have “adopted the concept of retribution as their primary objective” that encourages women “to cry ‘misogyny’ at every missed opportunity or criticism”.

She says new-age feminist ideology is based on purely middle-class concerns that absolve women “of any responsibility for anything wrong with their lives”.

“If we are to believe what is presented to us in the cultural mainstream, the most insidious issues facing women today are not genital mutilation, or underage marriages, or sexual slavery,” Cousens argues.

“They are ‘manspreading’, ‘mansplaining’, and ‘micro-aggressions’. These made-up, anecdotal issues resonate with nobody outside the bourgeois ladies of the inner cities.

“There is no joy in their gospel, no empowerment, no recognition of potential, only bitterness, resentment and, above all, perpetual victimhood.

“Without realising it, third-wave feminists perpetuate the image of women as fragile, delicate and prone to hysteria, a stereotype akin to the couch-fainting ingenues of the 1850s.”

Other contributors to the magazine include Tony Abbott, Alex Ryvchin, Philip Ruddock, Martin Drum, Aiden Depiazzi, Ross Cameron, Lyle Shelton, Robyn Nolan, Nick Cater, Eric Abetz, Rajat Ganguly, Caleb Bond, Neil James and Alexey Muraviev.