Universities Have A Duty To Protect Free Speech

Australia's universities are public institutions with a corresponding legal responsibility to uphold free expression.

This point was made by former High Court chief justice Robert French last week in his Austin Asche oration for Charles Darwin University and the Australian Academy of Law.

French outlined the possibility that universities are covered by the constitutional freedom of political communication.  "To the extent that universities, operating under the authority of acts of parliament which create them, make legal rules affecting freedom of speech, those rules would have to comply with the implied freedom," French said.

The implied freedom to political expression is primarily a negative freedom from state action.  It prevents governments from limiting the ability to discuss matters fully, frankly and robustly, as required for a functioning representative government.

Intellectual freedom at universities to explore ideas in the pursuit of truth is essential for a functioning democracy, and therefore falls under the remit of the implied freedom.

According to legal scholars this applies to executive actions.  Law academics Joshua Forrester, Lorraine Finlay and Augusto Zimmerman have argued that the "implied freedom [of political communication] is to be treated as a relevant consideration when exercising executive power".

Universities are public institutions, created by state, and occasionally commonwealth, law.  For example, the Australian National University is established by the Australian National University Act 1991.

University policies are akin to regulation.  ANU policy, such as the Vice-Chancellorship Statute 2013 and the Discipline Rule 2018, are in the Federal Register of Legislation.  University administrator actions, in the context of these policies, are akin to exercising executive power.

The idea that public universities should come under constitutional free speech protections is settled law in the US.  The US Supreme Court has consistently found that First Amendment free speech rights apply to public universities.

In a 1957 case, the court wrote:  "To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our nation ... Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding;  otherwise our civilisation will stagnate and die."

The US courts have also consistently found that speech codes — university policies which punish, forbid or heavily regulate speech — are unconstitutional.  In a 1991 case involving the University of Wisconsin student magazine, the federal district court found that it "amounts to governmental thought control" to prevent speech merely because it "demeans" people.  Other court decisions have struck down policy which prevents "unintentional offence".

My Free Speech on Campus Audit 2017 found that such policies are commonplace at Australian universities.  La Trobe University's Student Behaviours Policy defines bullying to include "unintentional ... offence".

Federation University's Equal Opportunity and Valuing Diversity Policy defines discriminatory harassment to include "unintentional behaviours" that offend.

The treatment of security fees by the US courts also provides guidance to Australia's current debates.  The University of Sydney has attracted controversy for charging $475 to the Sydney University Liberal Club to host psychologist Bettina Arndt to speak on campus sexual harassment issues.  This follows previous occasions in which conservative students were forced to pay for security, including a $760 fee for an event on the "Dangers of Socialism" that was not protested.

The US Supreme Court has found that it is an infringement on free speech to affix a price tag to speech because of its content.  This court found in Forsyth County v Nationalist Movement (1992) that "speech cannot be financially burdened, any more than it can be punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob".

This is why the University of California at Berkeley paid half a million dollars to secure events with provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos and conservative Ben Shapiro.

The extension of the implied freedom to political communication to universities would ultimately be a matter for the High Court of Australia in response to a specific case.

Nevertheless, the fact that universities are public institutions subject to the Constitution indicates that French's remarks are on a strong legal standing.  Australia's universities, if they are to fulfil their basic function to teach and research, must be open to debate with voices from all sides.

As Unis Stifle Free Speech, We Need A Law To Stop The Rot

The federal government needs to introduce US-style campus free-speech legislation to safeguard free intellectual inquiry and open debate at Australia's universities.

We are in the midst of a campus free-speech crisis.  Universities have cancelled speakers, censored academics and charged special security fees for conservative speakers.  This month a police riot squad was called to the University of Sydney in response to students violently disrupting an event with psychologist Bettina Arndt.

Earlier this year geophysicist Peter Ridd was sacked by James Cook University after expressing a contrary position on the health of the Great Barrier Reef.  Last year Monash University and the University of Sydney ­capitulated to demands for course content censorship — including a quiz and a map — by nationalistic Chinese international students.

Also last year, the University of Sydney Union attempted to block the screening of The Red Pill because, it was claimed, the mere showing of the video could "physically threaten women on campus".  In 2015, the University of Western Australia rejected Bjorn Lomborg's Consensus Centre after he was targeted by students, academics and media for his views on climate change policy.

These are not isolated incidents.  Academics have voiced concern about the progressive mono­culture at our universities jeopardising research and teaching.  Students with a different perspective are too scared to express their contrary opinion.

Meanwhile, risk-adverse university bureaucracies succumb to censorious demands.  Universities also maintain policies that chill free speech by preventing insulting or unwelcome comments, offensive language or, in some cases, sarcasm and hurt feelings.

Activist students are couching their demands for censorship in the language of safety — the absurd claim that merely hearing an idea can make people unsafe.

In recent weeks this logic reached the federal Labor opposition.  Opposition universities assistant spokeswoman Louise Pratt declared the "welfare" of students and staff was more important than "promoting debate".  Despite the mounting evidence to the contrary, Pratt also said:  "I don't think there's a problem on campuses in relation to free speech."  This is a big change of tune from Labor.  In 2011, the Gillard government amended the Higher Education Support Act 2003 to require universities to "have a policy that upholds free intellectual inquiry in relation to learning, teaching and research" as a condition of receiving federal funding.

This protection, however, has proven vague and has never been enforced.  My Free Speech on Campus Audit 2017 found that just eight of Australia's 42 universities had a stand-alone policy that protected intellectual freedom.

Universities are mostly public institutions, built on public land, established by state law, and they receive the bulk of their funding from the taxpayer and state-­subsidised loans.  The public has an interest in ensuring they are able to fulfil their fundamental role:  free debate in the pursuit of truth.  Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan has said the Morrison government is concerned that free speech is under threat.

In response to serious threats to campus free speech, a dozen US states, from North Carolina and Wisconsin to Missouri and Virginia, have legislated to safeguard free expression on campus.  Legislation has been introduced, but not passed, in a further dozen states.  This legislation has included provisions that:

• Require university policies uphold free expression, in the spirit of the University of Chicago's statement on free expression, which states that "it is not the proper role of the university to ­attempt to shield individuals from ideas and opinions they find unwelcome, disagreeable, or even deeply offensive".
• Allow academics and students to express themselves freely in both the classroom and public debate.
• Prevent universities from cancelling speakers invited by the campus community.
• Mandate disciplinary sanctions for students or others who repeatedly interfere with the free-speech rights of others.
• Oblige universities to remain neutral on issues of public debate, and therefore encourage a wide array of viewpoints.
• Necessitate an annual report to the public on the handling of free-speech matters.

Australia should adopt similar legislation.  This would not be a radical departure from the status quo which, following the Gillard government amendments in 2011, already requires universities to uphold intellectual freedom.  This new law merely would give teeth to existing provisions by empowering the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, which regulates the sector, with a specific mandate.

Federal law, and even university policies, cannot alone fix what is fundamentally a cultural and structural problem.  However, they are important to send a signal to administrators, academics and students that the purpose of a university is to freely explore ideas, not to mollycoddle.

Putting Australia First

Standing before a room full of foreign leaders and dignitaries, United States President Trump delivered a blistering rebuke of the unelected global elite who seek to undermine national sovereignty.

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, President Trump added a new flavour to his now familiar America first slogan.

Instead of just America first, it is to be Poland first, Italy first, and Australia first.  America, Poland, Italy, and Australians are to be government by, for, and for the benefit of Americans, Polish, Italians, and Australians.  "We reject the ideology of globalism and embrace the doctrine of patriotism", stated Trump.

Such statements have been backed up with actions.

Under President Trump, the US has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement and the UN Human Rights Council, refused to participate in the Global Compact on Migration, and refused to recognise the legitimacy of the International Criminal Court.

Collectively, these global compacts, treaties, and courts, would have handed control of American energy and immigration policy and legal proceedings from Americans to unelected international bureaucrats.

However, it would be a mistake to think these changes means America will become isolationist.  Rather, the Trump Doctrine could be summed up as sovereignty with cooperation and is defined by the following:  bi-lateral trade deals with friends rather than opaque multi-lateral trade deals through international organisations.

Nation defence based on mutual provision of resources rather than being underwritten by America.

Acceptance of the right of other nations to chart their own future.

Respect for the culture, history, and traditions of the people of other nations.

Realism in international affairs rather universal liberalism.

And scepticism of the motivates behind, and effectiveness of, international organisations such as the UN.

Naturally, President Trump was greeted with mocking laughter by the global elite when he outlined the successes of his administration.  Notably, though, no one was laughing during Iran President Hassan Rouhani's highly entertaining speech, during which he took a thinly vailed swipe at President Trump when he decried leaders with "xenophobic tendencies resembling a Nazi disposition".

Perhaps that's because such accusations are common talking points of the political left and the global elite.  Something they share in common with Iranian dictators, along with their love of censoring the speech of their political adversaries.

What the global elite don't understand is that the Trump Doctrine reflects, rather than creates, a rapidly changing international order.

The primacy of nation-states is being reasserted across the globe.

In Hungary the 2018 elections saw Viktor Orban's ruling coalition returned with a two-thirds majority on a platform of lower immigration.

In Italy around two-thirds of the vote in the 2018 election when to populist, euro-sceptic, and parties wanting lower immigration.

In Poland the governing party has based its policies on Polish national pride with the slogan "getting up off our knees".

The Swedish election earlier this month saw the conservative Swedish Democrats receive their highest vote share in history.

The vote for Britain to leave the European Union in 2016 was a reassertion of control by the British of domestic laws, immigration, and trade policy.

The election of President Trump in 2016 was also about national sovereignty.  Handing control of the American Republic back to the American people from the permanent political class in Washington D.C., Brussels, and Paris.

There is much to learn in Australia from President Trump's successes.

The first is that there is nothing racist about shaping policy that puts Australian citizens ahead of non-citizens.  That is the whole purpose of having a nation with boarders.

Australian citizens mean everyone from the indigenous whose heritage goes back tens of thousands of years, to tenth generation Anglo-Australians, to recently arrived immigrants.

Healthy patriotism is the antidote to divisive identity politics.

Second is to exit the Paris Climate Agreement.  The Agreement hands control of our energy policy to unelected international bureaucrats;  will impose a cost of at least $52 billion according to my research;  and will not make a difference to the global climate.

Third is to take immigration seriously.  Many Australians are uneasy about the size and composition of our immigration program.  And simply shifting immigrants to regions is insulting.  It diverts the problem and is an affront to freedom association and freedom of movement within our national borders.

In putting Australia first, Government ministers would do well to remember these words from President Trump's address.

"The passion that burns in the hearts of patriots and the souls of nations has inspired reform and revolution, sacrifice and selflessness, scientific breakthroughs, and magnificent works of art.

Our task is not to erase it, but to embrace it.  To build with it.  To draw on its ancient wisdom.  And to find within it the will to make our nations greater, our regions safer, and the world better."

We Can't Even Get The Australia Day We Have Right

Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie is only the latest politician to mistakenly suggest that Australia Day celebrates the arrival of Captain Cook on our shores, as reported in her hometown paper, here.  This was in the context of responding to the Prime Minister's idea that Australia Day's status could be preserved while another day is selected to honour our indigenous peoples.

One Australian politician who would have been horrified by the apparent gaffe is former NSW Premier, Sir Joseph Carruthers.

Carruthers was fascinated by the English explorer, Captain James Cook, and raised funds to have him memorialised in Sydney, in London, and in Hawaii.  In 1930, only two years before he died, Carruthers produced Captain James Cook R.N.:  One Hundred and Fifty Years After.

Also to mark the sesquicentenary of Cook's death, Carruthers had represented Australia at the dedication of a bronze tablet in the surf at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii, with the inscription "Near this spot Capt. James Cook met his death Feb. 14, 1779".  The memorial to Cook, built earlier, can be seen here.  Carruthers' role in the commemoration, as part of a global committee, is described here.

The current Commonwealth Government has also chosen to honour Cook's memory and his connection to Australia, and particularly his first landing at Australia, in Botany Bay, on 29 April 1770.  In April 2018, it joined with the NSW Government to announce plans to upgrade facilities at the landing site (which happens to be in the electorate of the then Treasurer, now Prime Minister, Scott Morrison MP).  This is apparently part of wider commemorations planned to mark the 250th anniversary of Cook's first Pacific voyage, in which he reached Australia via Tahiti and New Zealand and mapped the east coast of "New South Wales", claiming it formally in the name of King George III, on 22 August 1770.

Senator McKenzie clearly missed the Media Release issued by way of a critical response in the name of Greens Senator, Sarah Hanson-Young, as well as the subsequent media coverage.  Senator Hanson-Young's Media Release said, "Despite an important national debate about changing the date of Australia Day away from Captain Cook's landing at Botany Bay, the government has decided to spend taxpayer money it is stripping from the ABC on yet another monument to Captain Cook on the land of the Dharawal people."  (Media reports also indicated the release was issued by a staffer, and Senator Hanson-Young had not read it).

It is not only Sir Joseph Carruthers who would be disappointed elected officials (and/or their advisers) could appear to be so confused between the voyages of Captain Cook and the arrival of Arthur Phillip and the First Fleet 18 years later.  The case for historical education and a solid understanding of our British inheritance remains strong.

Readers interested in how Captain Cook laid the groundwork for Arthur Phillip will also be interested in Keith Windschuttle's review of a fascinating new book, Lying for the Admiralty (Rosenberg, Sydney, 2018), relevant to the topic.

Western Civilisation "Not Welcome Here"

In 2017, following the wishes of the late Paul Ramsay, a businessman and philanthropist who made his fortune in the healthcare industry, the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation was set up in Australia.  Paul Ramsay was deeply concerned that Australians are not being taught about Western Civilisation either at school or university.  So he left part of his $3.4 billion fortune so that something would be done about it.  I have been keeping a close watch on developments.

The Ramsay Centre has devised a Bachelor of Arts in Western Civilisation based on great books and works of art, to be taught in partnership with universities.  Since its launch however, the Ramsay Centre has encountered almost nothing but open hostility and resentment from potential university partners.

At the University of Sydney, staff some months ago launched a "Keep Ramsay out of USYD" petition.  The same staff are currently having conniptions because their Vice-Chancellor has now announced that he'll consider taking the Centre's $64 million grant if it gives the university complete control over the curriculum, the reading list, and the academic appointments involved with the Bachelor of Western Civilisation.

Prior to this, the Australian National University pulled out of negotiations at the 11th hour when its Vice-Chancellor cited concerns about academic autonomy following a very public and acrimonious pushback against the program from several ANU academics and the Tertiary Education Union.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to attend a University of St Andrews alumni drinks in Melbourne.  The evening began promisingly enough.  A smart bar hotel bar, eight individuals of various ages and occupations, gathered together with the prospect of a pleasant evening of reminiscing ahead.  Amid the usual exchange of pleasantries, I discovered that my one of my fellow attendees was a senior university administrator.  I detected a slight look of discomfort from him.  Any bonhomie that might have existed at the commencement of the evening vanished as soon as he asked me what I thought about the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation.

The rejection of a Bachelor of Arts in Western Civilisation is predicated on the absurd notion that anyone who wants to talk about or study Western Civilisation must be a white supremacist.  In some academic circles, Western Civilisation is held responsible for all evils in the world, past, present and future.

Earlier this year, the Dean of Arts at Newcastle University wrote a piece for The Conversation in which she stated that Western Civilisation is past its used by date and that it's too "white" to teach in multi-cultural classrooms.  The University of Sydney academics leading the charge, claim that the BA will "pedal racism disguised as appreciation for 'Western Culture'".  At a National Tertiary Education Union forum, former University of Sydney chair, sociologist and gender theorist Raewyn Connell, told her audience that the curriculum "has racism embedded in its agenda."

When I articulated to my fellow alumnus that I had not been surprised at the response from Australian universities — given the antipathy displayed towards Western Civilisation by many academics — he did not think this hostility to be a bad thing.  When I added that I thought all students studying an undergraduate degree in history, or any humanities degree for that matter, should be required to do a foundation course in Western Civilisation, he was shocked and horrified.  From his point of view, knowing about what happened during the Scientific Revolution or the Enlightenment is an irrelevancy and a waste of students' time.  For him, history is about "issues", not knowledge.

It was at this point that I realised that just how far universities, especially the humanities departments, have strayed from their original purpose.  From the Renaissance until the 1960s, the humanities, derived from the expression "studia humanitatis" or the study of humanity, made it their purpose to make sense of and understand the world through the great traditions of art, culture and philosophy.  There appeared in the 1970s and 1980s however, a range of "new humanities" subjects which rejected this tradition.  The new humanities were underpinned by a range of radical post-structuralism and post-modernist theories which had been conjured up in the previous decade by a predominantly French group of philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, as well as the psychiatrist, Jacques Lacan.

The new humanities maintain that for the last 500 years, Western Civilisation has got it wrong when it comes to knowledge, truth and science.  These fields tend to claim that both knowledge and truth are not absolute, but are relative.  For example, there is no objective truth and truth is dependent on who is speaking it and in what context.  Insofar as science is concerned, they claim that scientific theories don't really provide us with what we could call knowledge but are actually "invented" rather than discovered.

History as a discipline best exemplifies the influence of the postmodernists and their ilk on the humanities.  Many historians have enthusiastically embraced the idea that truth is no longer within the historian's grasp and that it's impossible to use history to add to knowledge about humankind.  This is the kind of thing which would normally signal the death knell for any discipline, but historians have risen from the ashes and have forged for themselves a new purpose — the attainment of social justice.

This is not social justice in the Enlightenment sense, which meant equality before the law and equal rights, but social justice in the activist sense, where the ultimate goal is to achieve perfect equality by destroying "oppressive" institutions and rearranging society.  The historians' new role is to tell the inequality narrative of the oppressed and the oppressor through the lens of class, gender, and race.  Matthew A. Sears, associate professor of classics and ancient history at the University of New Brunswick believes that ancient Greek sculptures epitomise racism and white supremacy, and that history is "about politics", it's main purpose being to "better understand the human condition and shed light on questions of contemporary relevance."

This approach has its origins in the nineteenth century, when Georg Hegel constructed his worldview of history into a narrative about stages of human freedom.  His was the view that history was simply the process of moving towards the realisation of such freedom.  Later that century, Karl Marx's built on Hegel's new paradigm with his theory of historical materialism, proposing that society's productive capacity and social relations of production determined both its organisation and development.

Both Hegel and Marx essentially denied the role of individual human agency, treating the past as the product of inexorable forces and trends which were primarily of a material and economic nature.  "Society" wrote Marx, "does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.''

Karl Marx essentially created the template of identity politics for the study of history with his notion that human society is in a constant state of struggle and a zero-sum contest for power.  In the 1960s, his model was adopted by British historian Eric Hobsbawm who deliberately re-wrote the history of the "long 19th century" as being a century of class struggle.  Hobsbawm successfully transformed history as an academic discipline into a vehicle for social policy.

Since the 1970s, historians have embraced Marx's template and applied it to their own particular historical fields, re-writing the past from the point of view of class, gender, and race.  These new histories have gradually replaced the traditional canon of historical subjects which once upon a time formed the basis of an undergraduate degree in history in Australia.

In 2017, a study of all 746 history subjects taught in Australian universities revealed that 244 of those subjects were devoted entirely to class, gender, and race.  Many were a pastiche of identity politics in which the stunning complexity of the past is increasingly reduced to a very limited range of themes.  Students at Melbourne university can take "A History of Sexualities" in which they discuss "how the gendered body and sex have been simultaneously linked to social liberation and control".  At the Australian National University, students can consider "the concept of 'race' within the contexts of the development of scientific knowledge in 'Human Variations and Racism in Western Culture, c. 1450-1950'."  A keyword search of all the history subject descriptions taught in 2017 reveals that there were more instances of the words gender and race than there are Enlightenment or Reformation.

What is more, a perusal of the University of Sydney's history faculty staff profiles reveals that 20 of the 32 staff have variously identified gender and sexuality, racial thought, women's history and power as their current historical fixations.  The left-wing leitmotifs of class, race, and gender have replaced the essential core subjects which explain the political, intellectual, social and material basis of the history of Western Civilisation.

This approach is not only boring and repetitive, it is fundamentally anti-intellectual.  Students in Australia are not being given a "positive formation" by their universities, which is exactly what the Ramsay Centre is attempting to rectify.  Instead, they are being taught a narrow, one-dimensional view of the world seen through the prism of identity, over a curious and inquiring three-dimensional view of the world which opens the mind.

Students studying the humanities are not only finishing their degrees with a distorted view of the world in which the past is viewed as a contest between the oppressors and the oppressed, but they are imposing this particular worldview on society as they find employment in schools, government, and the corporate world.  These days, for example, it's becoming increasingly difficult to work out where gender departments finish and governmental departments or the corporate world begin, so blurred are the lines between them.

Since the 1960s, universities have been leading their students fairly and squarely down a path of un-education, unlearning and enlightenment, and they should be called to account.  Now these students, filled with an ideological fervor and driven by social justice, are leading the rest of society down the same path, whether society wants it or not.

Gender Quotas Are Simply UnLiberal

The story of Scott Morrison since he became Prime Minister a few weeks ago is very much the story of a boss in the modern-day Australian workplace.

On one hand Morrison is attempting to do his best in the face of an external threat — the Labor Party — to his business.

Meanwhile, he has the internal challenge of managing a team of staff — Liberal MPs — comprising a sizeable proportion of those who think they could do his job better than he can.  The team also includes a small but loud minority of individuals who appear committed to acting not as members of Parliament carrying the authority and responsibility of such a role, but as 19-year-old members of the "snowflake generation" currently populating university campuses around the country.

In common with a growing number of teenage undergraduates, some federal Liberal MPs seem to believe having their feelings hurt or their opinions challenged is "bullying" and that the theories of identity politics require MPs and candidates to be categorised according to their gender, race and class.

The issue of bullying in workplaces is serious and real, but when MPs throw the term about as a political weapon and a slur to publicly accuse their colleagues — but then refuse to provide the evidence to support such claims — they are trivialising the issue and making it more difficult in the future for real victims of real bullying.

DEFINITION OF BULLYING

Liberal MPs should know better.  The definition of "bullying" under the Fair Work Act is repeated unreasonable behaviour towards a worker that creates a risk to health and safety.  A colleague arguing with you about who should be the next prime minister is unlikely to be bullying.  And in the world of politics it's not unreasonable for it to be pointed out to some MPs by other MPs that how they vote in a leadership contest could have consequences for their preselection.

Liberal MPs should stop and ponder the consequences of their bullying claims, for not only victims of bullying, but also for anyone accused of bullying.  Liberal senator Lucy Gichuhi said of the leadership dispute:  "Everything was happening so fast.  And that in itself is a form of intimidation because we were supposed to make a very important decision within a very short time."

Presumably from now on any employee anywhere asked to make an important decision "too quickly" will be entitled to claim that they were "intimidated".

As ridiculous as it sounds there might actually be some merit in the Liberals having an inquiry into bullying because then at least bosses would know what bullying is and isn't.

Liberal MPs wanting to play identity politics, however, is a much bigger issue for the Liberal Party.  The suggestion, for example, that the Liberal Party should now adopt gender quotas cuts across every single philosophical principle the party stands for.  Providing equality of opportunity by encouraging more women to stand for Parliament for the Liberals is entirely appropriate.  But enforcing an equality of outcomes is a very different question.

APPLIED CONSISTENTLY

Julia Banks, a Liberal MP who supports gender quotas and who has announced her retirement at the next federal election, said in Parliament last week that, "the concept that this [gender quotas] will begin that path to destruction of micro quotas depending on people's sexuality or ethnicity is ludicrous.  We are talking about quotas for women, who represent more than half our population."

The suggestion that if a category of identity possessed by more than half the population is not represented in at least half of all candidates, then the balance should be redressed through quotas, is at first glance not unreasonable.  But it raises the question of whether gender is the only identity that should be treated in such a way.

According to the most recent census, 52.1 per cent of Australians identify as Christian.

For Banks' formula to be applied consistently, if ever less than half of Liberal MPs were Christian, the Liberals would be forced to create a quota guaranteeing a certain number of Liberal Christian MPs.

It remains to be seen whether the Liberals imposing quotas for Christians would be as popular as the party creating quotas for women.  Especially if such a quota was suggested by Scott Morrison.

National Curriculum Changes Should Sound Alarm Bells For Parents

THE changes to the national curriculum announced by the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) last week should sound some very loud alarm bells for Australian parents.

If adopted, the changes mean that future generations of children will be in danger of finishing school and turning into adults who know nothing at all.

Over the next couple of years, ACARA has promised to add a range of impractical and ideological "21st century skills", with a shift to "critical" and "creative" thinking.

Apparently, students will be taught things like how to "develop curiosity, imagination, resilience and self-regulation", how to "respect and appreciate the ideas, perspectives and values of others" and how to "care about the well-being of their friends and families, their communities and the planet".

This comes despite the fact that the curriculum is already overcrowded, unbalanced, ideologically-biased, systematically hostile to Western Civilisation and failing school children around the nation.

One of the most problematic things about it is the existence of the three cross curriculum priorities of "Sustainability", "Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures", and "Asia and Australia's engagement with Asia".

While they might be worthy topics of investigation, they are incorporated into every subject whether relevant or not.

And students are hearing the same thing in every subject.

If ACARA succeeds in watering down the curriculum even further, children graduating from Australian schools will be very well versed in sustainability and social justice issues, but might not be able to work out basic fractions, know who wrote Hamlet and when, or tell you why Australia is a liberal democracy.

You only need to look at world rankings to see just how useful these "soft skills" and competencies have been to children so far.

Since 2015, Australia has performed incredibly poorly in world rankings.

Reading literacy has fallen from 4th to 16th, mathematics has plummeted from 7th to 25th and science has dropped from 4th to 14th.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) at the age of 15, fourteen per cent of Australian students are functionally illiterate.

That means that they would not understand the instructions on a packet of headache tablets.

Twenty per cent of Australian youth lack basic arithmetic skills, and would fail to determine how much petrol is left in a tank by looking at a gauge.

The government's solution to the problem is to throw money at it.  Between 2018 and 2027, under its "Quality Schools Package" it will spend a whopping $243.5 billion, plus an extra $5.1 million on science, technology, engineering and maths (known fashionably as STEM).

There is no doubt that this will result in falling standards, embarrassingly low world rankings and general ignorance.

It is clear that Australian children are being been "un-educated" at a terrifying pace and money is clearly not the solution.

The focus of modern education is on vague "skills" and "competencies", whereas 60 or 70 years ago, it was about knowledge and facts.  It might be boring to learn your times tables, but you can't do long division without them.  They give you a foundation for the rest of life.

The rejection of knowledge stems from the progressive left, which believes that education makes people less free.

This idea comes from the romantic but completely misguided notion developed by 18th century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who famously announced that "man is born free, but is everywhere in chains" meaning that but institutions like education get in the way of this freedom.

But the opposite is true.

By encouraging young people to read the great books that the Western Canon has given us, by inspiring them to learn about historical events and by teaching them how to read and write, you give them freedom to think for themselves and to undertake real critical thinking.

As a matter of logic, you can't teach children to think critically unless they have something to think about.

People become inquisitive and begin to think critically when they know things, and they can apply this knowledge in different ways.

Rather than following educational fads as ACARA is proposing, Australia should return to the true purpose of education.

And that means furnishing people with knowledge.

For years, standards and real knowledge have been sacrificed by politically correct ideologues who are more interested in teaching students what to think than how to think.

It is knowledge that gives people the tools to get good jobs and makes them decent citizens.

If the government truly understood this reality, it would be spending $243.5 billion on making sure that students are given real knowledge rather than continuing headlong down this path of unlearning which will be to the detriment of Australian society.

Scott Morrison's Politics Must Have Some Policy

"Dare to be different" is an advertising slogan employed in some form or another by companies like Honda to sell cars and Apple to sell computers, and by practically anyone who's ever printed a T-shirt.

If the Liberal Party is to have any chance of winning the next federal election Prime Minister Scott Morrison must not only say he's different from Malcolm Turnbull — from the Labor Party — he must also prove it.

The first part of that task is talking about politics.  The second part is committing to policies.

On Thursday in Albury, the spiritual home of the Liberal Party, in a speech to the Menzies Research Centre, the Prime Minister delivered an unscripted speech about his personal and political philosophy.

Perhaps inevitably the speech was the proverbial curate's egg.  Some parts were outstanding, such as when he made the obvious but important point that "the best form of welfare is a job".

Other parts were trite, such as when he remarked that "as Australians, we look after our mates".

And yet other parts were trivial, such as when he foreshadowed the federal government would ban plastic food wrappings.

Other than when he talked specifically about Robert Menzies and the Liberals there wasn't a lot Morrison said that a Labor MP would disagree with.  Any Labor MP, if they'd been in the audience, would have applauded enthusiastically when Morrison said that the government would remain in the Paris agreement on climate change.

And as good as the PM's remarks are about work and welfare, until they're turned into policy they remain just words.

The point is that, although admittedly he's only been in the job two weeks, the Prime Minister has yet to establish what the main policy differences are between him and Bill Shorten.

Yesterday the PM talked of the need to create "a noble society" and "a caring society".  Whether such a society is very different from a society built on the idea of "the common good" (which is the title of Bill Shorten's book) is unclear.

SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE

Morrison will point to differences such as the Liberals' policy of reducing the corporate tax rate for smaller companies to 25 per cent, while Labor's policy is a tax rate for such companies of 27.5 per cent.  That is merely a distinction without much difference.

To take energy policy, for example, if Morrison announced that Australia was withdrawing from the Paris agreement in an effort to bring down household electricity prices then for the first time since the Coalition was elected in 2013 would there be a significant and easily understood policy difference on climate change between the Liberals and Labor.

If Morrison said that he supported at least an investigation into establishing a nuclear power industry in this country that would be another difference.

Under Malcolm Turnbull's leadership the Liberal Party deliberately narrowed the policy differences between it and Labor.  Liberal MPs acquiesced to the strategy partly because they thought that saying what they actually believed in would prove electorally unpopular and also because many Liberal MPs were in broad agreement with what Labor wanted to do.

If the Liberals' leadership vote between Morrison and Peter Dutton is taken as a proxy for the Liberal party room's views on climate change, about half of Liberal MPs have views more closely aligned with those of Labor MPs than with the other half of the Liberal party room.

Turnbull's approach to politics didn't only result in claims of the Liberals as "Labor-lite", it produced a mere one-seat victory at the 2016 federal election.

While it might be true that in an electoral system with compulsory voting such as we have in Australia, elections are determined by so-called "swinging" voters in the so-called "centre", it doesn't necessarily follow that the two major parties must offer identical policies to gain the support of such voters.

Nor does it follow that if a policy is popular with a political party's "base" it will therefore be unpopular with swinging voters.  John Howard's policies were supported by many more people than just rusted-on Liberals.

The Prime Minister has to be careful not to spend so much time doing politics that he forgets it's policies that ultimately make a difference to people's lives, not platitudes.

ScoMo, Scrap Snowy 2.0

Only politicians could think it's a good idea to spend billions of dollars pumping water uphill to generate electricity in a land with enough coal to last 1,000 years.  Yet that is exactly what the federal government is doing.

Flying in by helicopter, donning a leather jacket with snow-capped mountains in the background, former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull revealed his grand nation-building project "Snowy 2.0".

The new Snowy project is essentially an extension of the original Snowy Hydro Scheme, commissioned by the Chifley government in 1949.  The original participants were the Commonwealth, NSW and Victorian governments, but in a related move the Commonwealth has recently brought out the two state governments for $6.2 billion, and become sole shareholder.

The aim of Snowy 2.0 is to pump huge amounts of water from an existing Snowy Hydro reservoir through reversible turbines into a new power station to be built 1km under the mountains, then on to another existing reservoir, via 27km of tunnels.  What could possibly go wrong?

There are already more problems than there are shovels in the ground.

Firstly, the cost.  It was originally claimed that the scheme would cost about $2 billion, but Snowy Hydro Limited acknowledged it could be up to $4.5 billion.  The final cost would be anyone's guess.

The feasibility study alone cost $29 million.  And having a feasibility study into a government project is like flipping a two-headed coin.  There is no way the government's preferred option will lose out.

The second problem is the hypocrisy.  The government shows no interest in building and nationalising coal-fired assets, but now wants to run and greatly expand a nationalised hydro-electricity project.  If, as is claimed, it is an arms-length commercial venture, then what was the former PM doing in that helicopter, and declaring it a "nation-building project"?

Thirdly, Snowy 2.0 isn't expected to become operational until 2024-25, assuming no delays.  A wildly longer lead time than other alternatives.

Fourthly, Snowy 2.0 will be a net user of energy, as it takes more electricity to pump the water than is generated by releasing it.  The way in which this has worked commercially in the past is to buy electricity in off-peak times and sell in peak times when prices are higher.  However, there is no guarantee the historic size of the difference between peak and off-peak prices will hold into the future, particularly given the massive changes taking place in the energy market.

Meanwhile, Australians are suffering from high energy prices now.  Retail electricity prices have risen by more than 120 per cent in real terms over the past decade, while wholesale prices have tripled in the last three years.

These price rises are primarily the result of heavy-handed government interference supporting renewables through the Renewable Energy Target at the expense of more reliable, affordable coal-fired power.  Unfortunately, Snowy 2.0 will only give us more government interference, more picking winners, and a greater burden on taxpayers.

Blaming Jeff For Our Energy Mess Is A Joke

Blaming your problems on the previous government is poor form.  But blaming your problems on something that another government did over 25 years ago is, to put it politely, taking the mickey.  Yet that is exactly what Daniel Andrews did recently when he effectively blamed former premier Jeff Kennett for the spiralling energy prices that have occurred on his watch.

"Privatisation has not worked," Andrews declared in his "state of the state" speech, alluding to the Kennett Government's sale of Victorian energy assets in the early 1990s.  "The scales need re-setting, privatisation and de-regulation has gone too far".

This despite the fact that the Andrews Government has raked in billions of dollars from privatisation when it suits them, including $9.7 billion for leasing the Port of Melbourne and a windfall of $2.9 billion just this week for flogging off the land titles office.

Let's see this for what it is:  A cop-out, and an extremely weak one at that.  Facing thousands of electricity-starved Victorians in November, Andrews is looking for something — anything — to deflect blame from his catastrophic energy policies.

Andrews is right about one thing:  Power bills are soaring, up by a whopping 20 per cent, or $500 per year for the average family.  But Victorians are not mugs, and few will forget Labor's disastrous stewardship of energy policy that has created this mess.

It doesn't take a Nobel prize-winning economist, for example, to realise that taking a fifth of the state's electricity supply offline would lead to shortages and, in turn, increase prices.  Yet that is exactly what the Andrews Government did by taking the wrecking ball to Hazelwood Power Station.  At the time of its closure, Hazelwood supplied 20 per cent of Victoria's energy, affordably and reliably.  That is until the Andrews Government — for purely ideological reasons — whacked a $252 million tax on the brown coal needed to run it, forcing the operator to close down the plant.

In short, because of Daniel Andrews' vendetta against brown coal, Victoria has walked away from a cheap and plentiful source of power.  To make up the shortfall, Victorian consumers have had to effectively purchase more expensive power from elsewhere, largely by importing it from interstate.  As the Australian Energy Regulator noted in March:  "The exit of Hazelwood removed a significant low cost fuel generator which was largely replaced by higher cost black coal and gas.  Victoria changed from being a net exporter of relatively cheap brown coal generation, to being a net importer."

Worse still, the Andrews Government has kept the handbrake on other sources of cheap power.  Not content with wasting our brown coal, the government has foolishly maintained a moratorium on onshore gas exploration.  This is despite dire warnings from the Australian Energy Market Operator that without an increase in supply, Victorians could face severe gas shortages within just three years.

And for all that, the premier has the chutzpah to blame Kennett-era privatisation for an energy crisis that has flared up more than two decades later.  According to Daniel Andrews, everything would be fine, if only Victoria's electricity assets were still owned by the state government.  But given all the stuff-ups that have occurred in the last four years alone, does anyone seriously think that greater government involvement in the energy market is the answer?

Make no mistake, Australia's energy woes have occurred as a direct result of over a decade of government interference.  Privatisation in Victoria made no difference to electricity costs, with prices remaining relatively stable from the early 1990s until the tail-end of the 2000s.

But from 2009, electricity prices around the country rose rapidly as the Rudd Government massively expanded the renewable energy target.  Whereas previously, power companies were free to buy electricity from whichever source was cheapest, Rudd's turbo-charged RET forced retailers to purchase energy from unreliable and uncommercial sources like wind and solar.  Meanwhile, investment in conventional sources like coal tanked as revenue was effectively redirected elsewhere.  Power prices were pushed even higher in the ensuing decade of government tinkering, ranging from Julia Gillard's carbon tax to the ongoing chaos surrounding the so-called national energy guarantee.

Meanwhile, state governments have made things worse with their own forays into energy policy.  Then-Premier Jay Weatherill famously boasted about his state's "big international experiment" with a crazy 50 per cent renewable energy target.  South Australians saw the results of this "experiment" first-hand when power prices soared and the blackouts started.

Not that Victoria is too far behind, with the Andrews Government committed to its own renewable energy target of 40 per cent by 2025.  According to the relevant government website, this pointless green gesture will "establish Victoria as a leader in renewable energy".  That will be of great comfort to consumers, no doubt, as they shiver through another harsh Victorian winter.

Is Safetyism Destroying a Generation?

In recent years behaviours on university campuses have created widespread unease.  Safe spaces, trigger warnings, and speech codes.  Demands for speakers to be disinvited.  Words construed as violence and liberalism described as "white supremacy".  Students walking on eggshells, too scared to speak their minds.  Controversial speakers violently rebuked — from conservative provocateurs such as Milo Yiannopoulos to serious sociologists such as Charles Murray, to left-leaning academics such as Bret Weinstein.

Historically, campus censorship was enacted by zealous university administrators.  Students were radicals who pushed the boundaries of acceptability, like during the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley in the 1960s.  Today, however, students work in tandem with administrators to make their campus "safe" from threatening ideas.

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff's new book, The Coddling of the American Mind:  How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, persuasively unpacks the causes of the current predicament on campus — which they link to wider parenting, cultural and political trends.  Haidt is a social psychology professor at New York University and founder of Heterodox Academy.  Lukianoff is a constitutional lawyer and president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.  In 2015, they wrote The Atlantic cover story of the same name.

Haidt and Lukianoff's explanation for our era of campus craziness is primarily psychological.  In sum, a well-intentioned safety culture which has led to "paranoid parenting", and screen time replacing unstructured and unsupervised play time, has created a fragile generation.  Haidt and Lukianoff focus on people born after 1995, iGen or Generation Z, who began attending college in the last five years — just when things started to escalate.

This cohort is experiencing a dramatic rise in anxiety, depression and suicide.  When they arrived on campus, in an increasingly polarised political climate, they were unprepared to be intellectually challenged.  They — or at least the "social justice" activists of this generation — responded by creating a culture of censorship, intimidation and violence, and witch hunts against non-believers.  Universities, led by risk adverse bureaucracies, are treating students like customers and allowing an aggressive, censorious minority set the agenda.

THE DANGERS OF SAFETY CULTURE

Haidt and Lukianoff focus on the unintended consequences of safetyism — the idea that people are weak and should be protected, rather than exposed, to challenges.  Safety culture has the best of intentions:  protect kids from danger.  It began with a focus on physical safety — removing sharp objects and choke hazards, requiring child seats, and not letting children walk home alone.  Safety, however, has experienced substantial concept creep.  It now includes emotional safety, that is, not being exposed ideas that could cause psychological distress.  Taken together, the focus on physical and mental safety makes young people weaker.

Humans are what author and statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls "antifragile".  We "benefit from shocks;  [humans] thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty".  Peanuts are a case in point of needing to be exposed to danger to build resilience.  From the 1990s, parents were encouraged to not feed children peanuts, and childcare centres, kindergartens and schools banned peanuts.  This moratorium has backfired.  The LEAP study (Learning Early About Peanut Allergy) found that not eating peanut-containing products during infancy increases allergies.  The researchers recruited 640 infants with a high risk of developing peanut allergy.  Half were given a peanut-containing product.  The other half avoided peanuts.  The study found that 17 per cent of those who did not consume peanuts developed an allergy by age 5, compared to just 3 per cent of those who did consume the peanut-containing snack.  Our immune system grows stronger when exposed to a range of foods, bacteria, and even parasites.

Antifragility applies to emotional health as well.  When you guard children against every possible risk — do not let them outside to play or walk home alone — they exaggerate the fear of such situations and fail to develop resilience and coping skills.  Stresses are necessary to learn, adapt and grow.  Without movement, our muscles and joints grow weak.  Without varied life experiences, our minds do not know how to cope with day-to-day stressors.  Measures designed to protect children and students are backfiring.  Fragility is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  If you think certain ideas are dangerous, or are encouraged to do so by trigger warnings and safe spaces, you will be more anxious in the long run.  Intellectual safety not only makes free and open debate impossible, it setting up a generation for more anxiety and depression.

Haidt and Lukianoff use an array of data that shows a shocking increase in American youth anxiety, depression, and suicide in the last five years, but particularly for young women.  By 2016, one out of every five American girls met the criteria for having experienced a major depressive episode in the previous year — an increase of almost two-thirds over five years.  There has also been an increase in male suicide by one-third, and female suicide has doubled since the early 2000s, reaching the highest recorded since 1981.

Notably, it is not just the American mind that has been coddled.  Consistent with Haidt and Lukianoff's findings in the United States, there has been a substantial increase in youth mental health issues in other Anglosphere countries such as Britain and Australia.

In July, Britain's National Health Service reported a record 389,727 "active deferrals" for mental health among people aged 18 or younger.  The crisis is more pronounced among women, who have experienced a 68 per cent rise in hospital admissions for self-harm over the past decade and a 10 per cent growth in anxiety.  Another survey found a doubling in self-reported mental health problems among university students between 2009 and 2014.

Mission Australia's Youth Mental Health report has found that a 23 per cent of young Australians have a probable serious mental health, an increase from 19 per cent just five years ago.  A separate Mission Australia survey in 2017 found that for the first time mental health is the number one issue of national concern for young people in Australia.  Meanwhile, the suicide rate among young Australians grew by 20 per cent over the last decade.

FEELINGS OVER DEBATE

There is a link between rising mental health issues, safety culture and campus trends.  It is notable how often students put censorious demands in the language of feeling safe.  Students demand trigger warnings because ideas are emotionally challenging, safe spaces to hide away from scary situations, and the disinvitation of controversial speakers to feel safe on campus.  While it is important to show courtesy in public debate, it is patently absurd to suggest that simply hearing an idea you dislike makes you unsafe in any meaningful way.  As the old saying goes, "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me".  In fact, the opposite is true, post-traumatic growth is a real phenomenon:  difficult situations do make us stronger.

While America has experienced the worst of campus craziness, over-parenting and rising mental health issues correlate with similar university trends across the Anglosphere.  In Britain, speakers are "no platformed", and songs and newspapers are banned.  In Canada, teaching assistant Lindsey Shepherd was reprimanded for showing a debate in class.  In Australia, universities are adopting trigger warnings, succumbing to demands for censorship to protect "feelings", and on some occasions protests have turned violent.  In New Zealand last month a free speech debate was interrupted by protesters.

In recent weeks La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia almost banned sex researcher Bettina Arndt from speaking about sexual assault issues on campus.  While the university reversed their earlier decision, it nevertheless informed students that counselling would be available — solidifying the idea that the mere existence of a contrarian voice necessitates therapy.  Students have continued to demand censorship of Arndt on the basis that her ideas make them feel "unsafe".

In recent days the La Trobe Student Union's student representatives released a statement calling for Arndt to be prevented from speaking.  The statement mentions the word "safe" a total of nine times.  One of the student representatives explicitly declared that "What Arndt chooses to speak on makes me feel incredibly unsafe ... The university is currently allowing this event to go ahead under the pretence of free speech, however I do not think free speech should come at the expense of student safety".  This is not the language of radicals — this is young people appealing to authority figures for protection.

Safety culture undermines the entire purpose of a higher education.  Universities exist to challenge students, to expand their worldview and develop their critical thinking.  This is done by hearing and responding to ideas that make us feel uncomfortable.  Efforts to censor speakers because they make some people feel "unsafe" prevents the necessary process of argument and counter-argument in the pursuit of finding the truth.

Debate on campus is already undermined by the lack of viewpoint diversity — most academics come from a similar political pedigree, meaning students have fewer opportunities to be challenged in the first place.  A lack of exposure to different ideas means a much more limited and weaker education.  As British philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote, "He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that".  In other words, to make an argument thoughtfully, it is necessary to understand the counterfactual of one's own argument.

EMOTIONAL REASONING AND GOOD VERSUS EVIL

The encouragement of cognitive distortions also undermines academic pursuits.  For example, the claim often made in academic fields such as critical race theory that "all white people are racist" is an overgeneralisation that can lead to both anger and aggression in students who believe it.  Haidt and Lukianoff argue that the focus on feelings is a symptom of a culture that encourages emotional reasoning:  letting feelings guide our interpretation of reality.  Students are being taught to engage in thought patterns that make the world appear more threatening — such as focusing on a worst possible outcome, overgeneralising, assuming that one knows what other people are thinking, and only seeing the negative in situations.  These are the precisely the same cognitive distortions that lead to anxiety and depression (e.g. the world is a dangerous place for a person like me, everyone I know hates me, etc).

Another untruth that has become prominent within academic and wider public discourse is the notion that life consists of many small battles between good and evil.  In this framing, it is presumed that one's opponent has the worst possible intentions, creating feelings of victimisation, anger, hopelessness in students who believe it.  The notion of "microaggressions" presumes many innocent comments — such as "I believe the most qualified person should get the job" — are hiding underlying racist sentiments.  Encouraging students to be concerned about unintended sentiments ensures that they are always suffering.  And in practice, it means students do not speak their minds for fear of being misinterpreted as sexist, racist or homophobic.  This is not an environment conducive to freely exploring ideas.

Haidt and Lukianoff recommend confronting this challenge by following the proven method of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).  Considered the gold standard of psychological therapy, CBT focuses on not letting your feelings and cognitive distortions consume you.  Exercises that are used in CBT help people to understand that situations are not black and white.  Not every ambiguous interaction is designed to hurt you.  Catastrophic thinking in response to negative events is largely within our control.

HOPE FOR THE FUTURE

The Coddling of the American Mind is both an enlightening but disquieting read.  We have a lot of challenges in front of us.  Safety culture is embedded into parenting styles.  Mental health issues among young people are rapidly increasing.  A censorious culture is the norm on campus.  Universities are facilitating a self-destructive culture not only through speech codes, but in teaching simplistic theories about human society.  Academics far too often pursue social justice causes over empirical inquiry.  New ideas — like speech is violence, and therefore it is justifiable to use violence against speech — are downright frightening.

Haidt and Lukianoff conclude by offering a wide array of useful suggestions for students, parents, teachers, schools, and colleges — from choosing a college that clearly prioritises intellectual freedom, to increasing unstructured and unsupervised play time for children, and reducing screen time.  They effectively mix together diagnoses of the problem, and some ideas for how to fix it.

But more fundamentally, we should not discount an entire generation.  Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.  Safety culture and censorship is engendering its own backlash.  Arguably, more than any time in recent history, we are seeing an intellectual renaissance outside of traditional institutions such as the university.  The more that some students — and administrators — seek to censor contrarian views, the more the mischievous instinct will play out, online and elsewhere.

At least from my experience on campuses across Australia, young people are thirsty to partake in the battle of ideas, challenge orthodoxies, and investigate dangerous ideas.  While there are some who violently shut down opposition, there are many others who reject the imposition of safety culture.  The challenges are not insurmountable.