The Death Of The Scientific Method

A court case this week in front of three judges of the Federal Court was a further stage in Peter Ridd's fight for freedom of speech on climate change.  The case, James Cook University v Peter Vincent Ridd, has enormous significance for the future of Australia's universities and scientific institutions.

Ridd's case is a dramatic illustration of the free speech crisis in Australian universities, not least around matters as politically and emotionally charged as climate change.  It will determine, in effect, whether universities have the ability to censor opinions that threaten their sources of funding.  It is one of the most important cases for intellectual freedom in the history of Australian jurisprudence.

The Ridd case has resonated around Australia — and has attracted significant attention worldwide — for good reason.  It confirms what many people have suspected for a long time:  Australia's universities are no longer institutions encouraging the rigorous exercise of intellectual freedom and the scientific method in pursuit of truth.  Instead, they are now corporatist bureaucracies that rigidly enforce an unquestioning orthodoxy, and are capable of hounding out anyone who strays outside their rigid groupthink.

JCU is attempting to severely limit the intellectual freedom of a professor working at the university to question the quality of scientific research conducted by other academics at the institution.  In other words, JCU is trying to curtail a critical function that goes to the core mission of universities:  to engage in free intellectual inquiry via free and open, if often robust, debate.  It is an absurd but inevitable consequence of universities seeking taxpayer-funded research grants, not truth.

Worse still, it is taxpayers who are funding JCU's court case.  Following my Freedom of Information request, the university was forced to reveal that up until July last year, it had already spent $630,000 in legal fees.  It would be safe to assume that university's legal costs would have at least doubled since that time.  The barrister who JCU employed in the Federal Court this week was Bret Walker SC, one of Australia's most eminent lawyers.  Barristers of his standing can command fees of $20,000 to $30,000 a day.  And all of this is happening at the same time as the vice-chancellor of the university, Sandra Harding — who earns at least $975,000 a year — complains about the impact of government funding cuts.

While Australian taxpayers are funding the university's efforts to shut down freedom of speech, Ridd's legal costs are paid for by him, his wife and voluntary donations from the public.  As yet, neither the federal nor the Queensland Education Minister has publicly commented on whether JCU is appropriately spending taxpayers' money and, so far, both have refused to intervene in the case.

Ridd describes himself as a "luke-warmist".  "I think carbon dioxide will have a small effect on the Earth's temperature," he told a podcast recently.  "But it won't be dangerous."  He has been studying the Great Barrier Reef since the early 1980s and was even, at one point, president of his local chapter of the Wildlife Preservation Society.

But Ridd is sceptical about the conventional wisdom that the Great Barrier Reef is dying because of climate change.  "I don't think the reef is in any particular trouble at all," he says.  "In fact, I think it's probably one of the best protected ecosystems in the world and virtually pristine."

The problems Ridd's views cause for JCU are obvious.  The university claims to be a leading institution when it comes to reef science, and has several joint ventures with taxpayer-funded bodies such as the Australian Research Council Centre for Excellence in Coral Reef Studies.

Ridd challenged his sacking in the Federal Circuit Court on the basis that the university's enterprise agreement (which determined his employment conditions) specifically guaranteed his right to "pursue critical and open inquiry", "express unpopular or controversial views", and even "express opinions about the operations of JCU and higher education policy more generally".  In September last year, Ridd won his case as the court found he had been unlawfully sacked and he was awarded $1.2m in damages and compensation for lost earnings.

The case in the Federal Court this week was an appeal by JCU against that decision.  At issue was whether the intellectual freedom clauses in the enterprise agreement covering JCU staff protected his criticism of quality assurance issues in reef science at the university.  The university alleges that in going public with his concerns that organisations such as the ARC Centre "cannot be trusted" on reef science, Ridd committed several breaches of the university's staff code of conduct, with its vague, faintly Orwellian requirements to act "collegiately", and to "uphold the integrity and good reputation of the university".

In other words, even though the enterprise agreement specifically declared that staff had the right to intellectual freedom, it was for the university to determine the limits of what that freedom actually permitted.  If it is accepted, it will be the death knell of free intellectual inquiry in Australia's universities.  As Ridd's barrister, Stuart Wood QC, said to the Federal Court:  "If you can't say that certain science cannot be trusted because it is 'discourteous' and 'not collegial', then you cannot call out scientific misconduct and fraud.  It's not just the end of academic freedom, it's the end of the scientific method.  At that point, JCU ceases to be a university and becomes a public relations outfit."

An academic who doesn't have the ability to challenge the research findings of their colleagues because those questions threaten the university's funding doesn't have intellectual freedom.  And if academics know they could get sacked, as Ridd was, for asking uncomfortable questions, they will stop asking uncomfortable questions.

Academics should of course be open to criticism — particularly for some of their more outlandish conclusions — but as a matter of public policy it is vital that universities be places where bad ideas can be expressed as well as good ones.  The difference between the former and the latter should be resolved by free and open debate, not opaque "disciplinary processes".  We may not like what university professors say, but a strong university sector requires that we defend to the death their right to say it.

It is up to the Federal Court now to decide exactly how far universities can go to censor and sack their staff.  But in Ridd, James Cook University has one professor who will not go quietly.

Equality for all couples won't destroy society

The extension of marriage to same-sex couples needn't come at the expense of a stable society or religious human rights.

In its fashionably early 1996 article on opening marriage to same-sex couples The Economist magazine correctly argued ''marriage remains an economic bulwark [because] single people (especially women) are economically vulnerable, and much more likely to fall into the arms of the welfare state ... [and] call sooner upon public support when they need care''.

For these reasons and many more the legal and societal confirmation of consensual, stable relationships remains an entirely desirable public policy objective.

However, the value governments have placed on matrimony has been devalued during the past 30 years.

The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics data identified the number of marriages registered each year dropped by one-quarter between the early 1980s and mid-2000s.  Since that decline the rate has stumbled at about 5.5 registered per 1000 people annually.

Marriage is under threat.  But it isn't from those locked out.

Turning the tide requires government and society making marriage a preferable norm rather than unmarried alternatives.

The significant decline of marriage shouldn't come as a surprise.  The creation of legally comparable de facto relationship recognition undermined marriage's cultural role as the determiner of an established relationship.

But no matter how much reform advocates argue otherwise, broadening the definition of marriage to two people is a radical departure from the mainstream tradition.

From a conservative perspective significant societal change should be treated warily, especially when it is led by government.  But that doesn't justify holding back societal change and adapting when it occurs organically.

The Australian experience is that societal attitudes have changed organically in support of same-sex couples.  And this is likely to continue.

It might have taken until the age of 60 for former High Court justice Michael Kirby to be open about his relationship, but the same isn't applying for those generationally younger.

As a consequence the deprivation of legal formalisation and equality is compounding beyond couples directly affected and changing their family and friends' attitudes as well.

Conservative philosopher Edmund Burke argued that a ''state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation''.

Similarly, British conservative Michael Oakeshott argued that conservatism was about the manner of ''accommodating ourselves to changes''.

In light of a clear societal shift, the challenge for preserving the important status of marriage is to ensure the tradition survives the risks of calls for reform and the consequences of not doing so.

Fortunately, other countries have already undergone the experiment.

According to Gay Marriage for Better or Worse:  What We've Learned from the Evidence, by William N. Eskridge Jr and Darren Spedale, the Danish experience found reforming marriage coincided with a reversal in declines of heterosexual marriage rates, lower divorce rates and fewer children born outside of wedlock.

Similar trends have also been identified in Sweden, with heterosexual marriage rates increasing by 30 per cent.  The correlation doesn't prove causation, but it is clear the reforms haven't undermined heterosexual marriages.

With some US states also changing their laws, culturally comparable evidence is also emerging for Australia.  Former speechwriter for George W. Bush and anti-same-sex marriage reform advocate, David Frum, recently acknowledged ''the case against same-sex marriage has been tested against reality [and] the case has not passed its test''.

The remaining arguments against change also lack consistency.  A primary argument against allowing same-sex couples to marry is that it's an institution for raising children and should be preserved for those who procreate.

Therefore Bob and Jill who've been married for years and chose international holidays over school fees shouldn't have been able to get married, even more so if they are past a procreative age.

Instead reform increasingly appears inevitable, with polls finding three-quarters of Australians across all age groups believe marriage will eventually be extended to same-sex couples.  The same level of support for reform exists among younger Australians.

Therefore the risk to preserving marriage is ensuring an elite-driven, but increasingly broad-based, civil rights proposal isn't advanced while impinging on religious human rights.

At its most basic level, much of the marriage reform debate is an elaborate trademark dispute over the divergence between government and private religious certification terms for conferring a contract between two people as well as the state, their God, or all four.

Religious faiths have a legitimate ownership claim over marriage for historical and cultural reasons.  Dismissing that ownership disrespects their contribution in maintaining the institution.  But is it not just a religious institution.  It is also a public one.  And the best way to resolve this impasse is to disentangle ownership, ensuring that civil relationship recognition and religious marriage celebration aren't one and the same.

There are two options.

The first is to follow France and privatise marriage, where government offers civil unions for all couples, and religious faiths set the conditions in their tradition for celebrating marriage.

The second is to adapt the spirit of ''covenant'' marriages that exist in some US states.

These marriages have stricter rules for entry and divorce, based on religious values, and effectively compete against a more secular marriage also offered by government.

But rather than establishing a singular covenant alternative the commonwealth could establish a competitive marriage market where private religious faiths register their own marital contract based on private rules and traditions set by the appropriate hierarchy of the faith.

Government could then offer a civil marriage alternative between two people reflecting societal standards.

An example of a private religious marital contract could include that it only be accessed by heterosexual couples who attend religious services regularly, have undergone preparatory relationship counselling and can only be conferred by that faith's celebrant.  Couples could then choose the marriage model appropriate for them.

Under either scenario all couples would be treated equally for public purposes, but not for private religious ones.

ADVERTISEMENT