2021-03-25
by Adam Bandt –
Academic freedom is essential to our universities, for both academic and general staff, and university staff must be free to conduct their teaching and their research and to critique their own institutions without fear of reprisals. The Greens support efforts to protect academic freedom and so do not oppose the Higher Education Support Amendment (Freedom of Speech) Bill 2020.
But it is incredibly rich for this government to come in here and say it is concerned about academic freedom when, in my time in this chamber, it has become almost a yearly occurrence for a government backbencher or even a minister to get up and read out a list of grant applications that they think, according to their own personal predilections, are objectionable, and in some cases they then get defunded. The government come in here with a bill that says they're going to implement and entrench freedom of speech, in the context that the French review said that there is not a freedom of speech crisis at universities. But this very same government gets up time after time and finds and picks on particular academics or particular proposals, to the point where sometimes their funding is cut.
Some of us would have heard various members of the backbench get up and do that routinely—with an anti-academic, anti-intellectual bent—reading one line, which is a title, and from that thinking they can deduce what someone's whole thesis or grant application is about and saying that it should be defunded. But it wasn't that long ago—in fact, only 2018—when that kind of attack on academic freedom coming from the government side in fact came from the ministerial level. In 2018 the then education minister, Simon Birmingham, tweeted:
I'm pretty sure most Australian taxpayers preferred their funding to be used for research other than spending $223,000 on projects like "Post orientalist arts of the Strait of Gibraltar."
He'd gone through these defenders of academic freedom on the government side and they had trawled through all the lists of the grant applications and picked out one title that they thought might get them a good headline and then stood up and said: 'Oh, isn't this outrageous? No-one should be funding this.' I don't know about 'post orientalist arts'. That is not my field of expertise. But, for all I know, we might have the world's leading expert in the field here in Australia. We might have someone who is called on from around the world and asked, 'Tell us about this important matter.' We might have someone who is publishing book after book after book and doing their institution and our country proud.
That's why we have a system of independent review of what grant applications should get funded and what ones shouldn't. Key to academic freedom is that process of peer review, where someone puts in an application in their own field of expertise. It may well be very narrow and something that is very foreign to all of us here in this place. Nonetheless, the peers, the best people working in that area, look at it all in a highly competitive environment and say, 'Yes, that is worthy of funding, because it may well be world-class research'—and it's certainly best-in-Australia-class research, which is why it's being recommended for funding.
The then minister—not a backbencher anymore, but the minister—then went on to veto 11 Australian Research Council grants in the humanities, as part of the government's waging of a culture war on academic freedom. Someone wanted to do a research project on the history of men's dress, and they said, 'No, we're not going to fund that; we'll get up in parliament and we'll ridicule it'—again. And who knows? Maybe that particular area was part of a broader piece of research that was going to contribute to the stock of human knowledge in ways that we might not be aware of. I bet that, if I, as someone who's not trained as a scientist, sat down and read the title of a physicist's grant application, I wouldn't understand it. The chances are that I wouldn't understand it. But the fact that I, sitting here as a politician, don't understand what someone in the Australian Research Council and the peer reviewer have said—and they are saying, 'Actually, this field of research is important'—is not the point.
The point, if we are serious about defending academic freedom, is not to come in here and find research pieces that we think might somehow make for a good headline or might be a bit of red meat to throw at the conservative backbench, and then get up and ridicule that research in parliament. The point of us here in parliament and our job, if the experts in the field and the independent peer reviews say something's important and provided it's not something that offends some other thing—perhaps there's a national security implication or something like that that the minister might want to take into account—is to say, 'If the experts want to grant it and support it then we should support that.' Legal secularism in Australia—what's objectionable about that? But the minister decided, 'I'm going to make a big point about it and I'm going to reject that grant, even though it's been recommended by the experts.'
Then, more recently, we have seen the university sector deliberately decimated by this government. This government has used the COVID crisis to attack the ability of universities, academics and other staff at universities to do their work and engage in academic freedom. You can't talk about academic freedom in the abstract and say, 'We support academic freedom,' on the one hand, while on the other hand sacking people and removing their funding. And that is what this government has done. This government has taken the approach to universities of waging ideological war on them during a crisis. It is said, 'Never waste a crisis,' and the government has denied JobKeeper to universities. At a time when two million people are either unemployed or haven't got enough hours of work, governments in a pandemic should be maintaining or increasing the size of the public sector because that's one area that we know we can expand work in. But, instead, this government took a deliberate decision to slash universities and to oversee the slashing of university staff. That is an attack on the ability to exercise your academic freedom, if you're fighting every day just to keep your job, which is what has happened on this government's watch.
Not only that but the government then deliberately said, 'We don't like people studying the arts and so we are going to make young people pay twice as much as they had to before to go to university.' The very same people who include a bunch of backbenchers and ministers who enjoyed free education are now saying, 'Because of our own ideological bent, we're going to make people pay twice as much to go and study the arts.' It's at the point now in this country where, thanks to this government, you can graduate with a debt the size of a small mortgage just because you happen to have chosen to enrol in a course that the Prime Minister doesn't like. It's not that students should be able to exercise freedom of choice and go and choose what they want to study anymore under the government. No, they want to remove students' freedom to choose and engage in their own form of social engineering by saying, 'We're going to make you pay twice as much as we as politicians paid.' In fact, it's more than twice as much if they are one of those politicians who had a free education. They're saying, 'We're going to make you go into debt more than you otherwise would have had to because you're studying the kind of course that we don't like.' So for students at the moment, and for academic and general staff of universities, life has got a lot tougher under this government, and the ability to exercise their freedom, as the government bleats on about, has been attacked and savaged.
There's an answer to this. The answer is to recognise that education and universities are a public good. The answer is to say that Australia, as we deal with the long-term problems that we face and try and emerge from the COVID recession stronger, should be investing in education, including higher education. That is one of the advantages that we could have in the world. We could also bring down unemployment and underemployment by expanding our higher education sector and not allowing it to be cut in the way the government has. We could relieve the debt burden that is going to face students who are studying now and hang around their neck for years by making education free again, like it used to be. Like for so many of the politicians here who got a free education, we can make it free again.
That is how you get out of a crisis. You invest. You invest to recover. You invest in free education, you give people who work in universities secure employment and you expand the sector. Some will say, 'How can we afford this?' I say to them: you've just spent over $300 billion on a tax cut package for millionaires, which is going to see millionaires and billionaires, like Gina Rinehart, walk away with extra cash in their pockets and extra handouts—thanks to the government. You could stop giving big tax cuts to the very wealthy. But you could go even further. One in three big corporations in this country pay no tax. While everyone else gets tax taken out of their pay before it even hits their bank account, one in three of the biggest corporations in this country pay no tax. If we make the big corporations and the billionaires pay their fair share of tax, we can fund free education and expand our university sector to help us recover from the economic crisis and bring down unemployment.
The question is: if you've got a fixed amount of money, what's the best thing to do with it? Is it to give Gina Rinehart more handouts, which is what the government did, with Labor support, when they passed their tax-cuts-for-millionaires package, or is to ask those big corporations and billionaires to stop dodging tax and pay their fair share so that we can get dental into Medicare, put a roof over everybody's head and make education free again? That is how we give our young people real freedom. That is how we give them the opportunity to grow and come out of this pandemic with a secure job and a good education. At the moment the future for young people looks pretty bleak. They're facing a climate crisis, which this government is intent on making worse. They can't get into the housing market, because this government is giving billions of dollars in tax breaks to people who already own two or three houses, and that's pushing up prices. If you're a young person at the moment, you graduate into a world of insecure work and unaffordable housing, with a bigger debt around your neck because the government has made it more extensive to go to university. If you're a young person at the moment, you try to do what the government tells you is the right thing and you come out into a very harsh world of insecure work, unaffordable housing, a climate crisis and high debt from going to university. We could fix all of that if we just had the guts to stand up to the big corporations who pay no tax and make them pay their fair share, to stand up to the billionaires and say, 'It's time you paid your fair share of tax as well.'
While two million people now find themselves without a job or without enough hours of work, the billionaires in this country actually increased their wealth during the course of this pandemic. Not only did one in three big corporations continue to pay no tax, but the government actually gave many of them handouts. The big corporations got handouts in the form of JobKeeper, and they're going to get them with the JobMaker hiring credits as well. During this pandemic, inequality has increased. That has been the deliberate design of the government. Part of that design has been the attack on higher education. We've got to reverse it, and we can reverse it. Stand up. Make the big corporations and the billionaires pay their free share of tax. Let's have free education, put a roof over everybody's head and make sure that no-one in this country lives in poverty.