Australian universities are abandoning their role as custodians of Western civilisation in favour of a seemingly endless obsession with identity politics. I wrote recently about the University of Sydney's Resurgent Racism project, a flagship program that provides taxpayer funds to academics so they can berate Australians for supposedly being racist. But it is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to taxpayer-funded identity politics research. My new report has confirmed the extent to which our universities are fixated on class, race and gender — and just how much Australians are paying for it. The Humanities in Crisis: An Audit of Taxpayer-funded ARC Grants found the Australian Research Council's national competitive grants program has distributed $1.34bn in funding to humanities research since 2002. These projects cover historical studies, linguistics, cultural studies, human geography, and communication and media studies. According to the ARC, its purpose is "to grow knowledge and innovation for the benefit of the Australian community". It also claims "the outcomes of ARC-funded research deliver cultural, economic, social and environmental benefits to all Australians". So, has the research of the past 17 years done that and helped ensure our success as a prosperous, peaceful and stable nation? Not quite. What the audit reveals is academics spending millions on projects that are narrow, incomprehensible and reflect the obsession with identity politics, cultural studies, critical theory and radical feminism. At Macquarie University academics received $391,000 for a historical studies project called Sexing Scholasticism: Gender in Medieval Thought, which explored "medieval theological debates about why it was necessary that Christ was born as a man". Academics at the University of Sydney were awarded $735,000 for a cultural studies research project called Reconceiving the Queer Public Sphere: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Same-Sex Couple Domesticity. By "critically analysing queer home life" the project would "transform current understandings of the relation between homosexuality, private life and the public sphere". The ARC awarded the University of Melbourne $100,000 for a cultural studies project examining Female Stardom and Gay Subcultural Reception. And James Cook University was given a bumper $2.7m for a cultural studies proposal, How Gender Shapes the World: A Linguistic Perspective, the authors claimed would "enhance our nation's capacity to interpret and manage gender roles in multicultural contexts". The preoccupation with identity politics is especially notable in historical studies. There have been 616 such research proposals to have received funding since 2002 — with the total cost amounting to $192m. The most common theme is "identity politics", with 112 of the proposals focusing on the leitmotifs of class, race and gender. The second most common theme is "indigenous history and studies", with 99 projects, while the third most common, "war and conflict" attracted 88 proposals. In contrast, there are only three research projects that talk about the rule of law and a solitary proposal examining free speech. This shows our universities are not interested in the history or values of institutions that are essential to understanding Australia's present and shaping its future. As curators of Western civilisation, academics have a duty to look after some of society's most valuable material. But two decades of ARC funding shows they are neglecting their duties. Having bought into the postmodernist notion that Western civilisation is a white patriarchy, they have released themselves from the obligation to study the Western canon. Aristotle's thoughts on the meaning of tragedy are apparently irrelevant, as are Shakespeare's observations of human nature and John Stuart Mill's views on democracy. There is a great deal that universities could pick up from Machiavelli when it comes to the problem of free speech on campus. Today's academics mostly believe there is nothing we can learn from the 2500 years of accumulated wisdom and knowledge passed down to us by those who have lived before us. This arrogance was articulated by academics at the University of Sydney when they rejected the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation's proposed curriculum, which at the time was derided as "structurally, institutionally, morally and epistemically violent to other knowledges" and summarily dismissed as "white supremacy writ large". By rejecting the Western canon, academics not only are depriving university students of their dues but they also are depriving us all of the intellectual and moral nourishment that only the humanities can provide. Academics are no longer interested in properly feeding the society that ultimately feeds them.

The phrase "Go Woke, Go Broke" doesn't quite apply to Westpac.  But it nearly does.

Allegations that it breached anti-money-laundering laws 23 million times probably won't send Westpac broke.  But the bank's share price has been smashed and Prime Minister Scott Morrison has as good as called for the Westpac board to sack its chief executive.

If you're a company like Westpac that parades its progressive social agenda credentials at every opportunity, you'd better make sure you're not accused of turning a blind eye and facilitating the funding of some of the most evil crimes imaginable.

One day it's going to dawn on chief executives that you can talk all you want about climate change and gender diversity and asylum seekers — as Westpac has spent the past 10 years doing — but that won't save you if you when the government and the regulators start coming after you.

Attending to your customers and shareholders and not breaking the law is usually a better path to long-term success.

The website Know Your Meme provides a handy definition of "Go Woke, Go Broke" — "an expression typically used to express the sentiment that companies who embrace political correctness or cave to demands of social justice activists will suffer financially as a result".

The idea of being "woke" originated in the United States as a way of describing someone who was awake to the ills that left-wing activists and academics believe plague Western liberal democracies, in particular racism, sexism, and "classism".

The most notorious manifestation of Australia's woke corporate culture is what Luke Sayers, the chief executive of consulting firm PwC Australia, did in 2016.

After Donald Trump's election as US President, Sayers wrote to PwC's 7,000 Australian staff offering counselling and support to those who were worried or upset by the poll result.

PwC Australia has a "chief diversity and inclusion officer" and apparently the firm puts "diversity and inclusion" at "the centre" of its strategy.  It's a topic for debate as to just how "included" a PwC staff member who supported Trump would have felt on the receipt of Sayers' message.

Admittedly Westpac hasn't done anything as outrageous as that, but nonetheless over the years it has missed few opportunities to signal its virtues, especially on climate change.

Under former chief executive Gail Kelly, Westpac was a vocal supporter of Labor's emissions trading scheme.

Current CEO Brian Hartzer received front-page publicity in 2017 when he announced Westpac would not provide finance to the Adani coal mine, and the Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility, a lobby group for centre-left causes, has ranked Westpac as having one of "the most progressive positions on climate change".

In the wake of what's happened to Westpac, the claim from the political left has been, "here's the proof of the crisis of capitalism".  Nothing could be further from the truth.

The tale of Westpac demonstrates what happens when a company, and especially a bank, starts to forget it's a capitalist enterprise and thinks of itself instead as a progressive political outfit, telling everyone else how to live their lives.

The pity of what's happened to Westpac, as much as the temptation to schadenfreude, is that the bigger issues of what the government and regulators can reasonably expect of companies will be ignored.

The bank has something like 14 million customers.  The worst of the 23 million breaches of the law Westpac is alleged to have committed relate to the supposed activities of 12 of those customers.  A sense of the scale of the challenge Westpac and every other financial institution faces under anti-money-laundering laws has so far not been discussed.

Westpac is theoretically liable to a maximum penalty of up to $400 trillion.  Whether the risk of a potential financial penalty a few hundred times larger than the entire Australian economy is the best way to improve corporate behaviour is likewise something that won't get much talked about.

Within a few days there'll probably be calls for yet another inquiry/investigation/royal commission into what's happened.

And no doubt there's going to be a whole new series of laws/regulations/rules proposed so that politicians can declare to the public, "I have made sure that this terrible thing will never happen again."  If only that were true.