The Humanities in Crisis: An Audit of Taxpayer-Funded ARC Grants

Australian Research Council (ARC) grants to the humanities are disproportionately biased towards identity politics, according to a new research report released today.

The Humanities in Crisis: An Audit of Taxpayer-Funded ARC Grants investigates taxpayer-funded ARC humanities grants awarded to Australian universities since 2002.

The report finds that between 2002 and 2019, the ARC National Competitive Grants Program has administered a total of $1.34 billion in funding to humanities research projects.

This included 616 Historical Studies research projects, which received $192 million in taxpayer-funded grants. Of these, 112 focused on the themes of class, race and gender; while only 5 projects focused on the rule of law, free speech, or capitalism.

These findings further prove the humanities departments are obsessed with identity politics.

The ARC states that “the outcomes of ARC-funded research deliver cultural, economic, social and environmental benefits to all Australians.”

There is an enormous disconnect between the ARC’s stated aims and the predominance of identity politics in the research proposals that have received funding.

Australian taxpayers need to know that their hard-earned money is funding research that can in no way be considered of benefit to society.

The report recommends the introduction of the National Interest Test proposed by the Minister for Education, Dan Tehan. It also suggests that another solution could come in the form of self-funded research, similar to what exists in Britain and Canada.

The ARC needs to exercise greater rigour when evaluating projects, and introduce an element of accountability at the end of each project, so that taxpayers can have confidence in how their money is being spent.

REPLACE THIS SUMMARY WITH HTML OF THE REPORT HERE.

Let's Be An Open, Modern Society Without Trashing Our Heritage

For a political party that preaches tolerance, the Greens never miss an opportunity to take a whack at Australia's roughly 12 million Christians.

So it was this week, when the NSW Greens took aim at the humble Lord's Prayer, with a motion to scrap it in the state upper house.

For those unfamiliar with the finer points of parliamentary procedure, the Christian Lord's Prayer is ­traditionally recited at the beginning of every sitting day.  It has been a ­parliamentary tradition for almost two centuries.

The Greens aren't the first to take issue with this harmless little ritual — it's long been a bug bear of the usual crop of militant atheists with nothing better to worry about.

Just months ago, Victoria's virtue-signaller-in-chief Daniel Andrews left the door open to replacing the Lord's Prayer with some kind of "multi-faith" moment that better reflects the state's "diversity".

One wonders how Andrews will find the time to actually govern, given the number of traditions that will need to be incorporated into this spiritual catch-all.

Fortunately for NSW, the Greens' proposed replacement is more ­workable:  A depressingly bland "meditation-style" ritual in which MPs will simply stand there and say nothing at all.

Let's call this out for what it is:  Empty pandering that is almost, dare I say, offensive.

There is something deeply condescending about the idea that non-Christians are so emotionally fragile that any and all references to Christianity must be scrubbed out of public life, lest we feel "excluded".

Ironically, this nonsense almost ­always seems to be peddled by ­people of white, Anglo-Saxon and presumably Christian backgrounds themselves.

No tradition is safe from this ­patronising mindset.

Every year, we see stories about how nativity plays, Christmas carols and even Santa are being blackballed by individual schools.

Meanwhile, "merry Christmas" has long been replaced by insipid platitudes like "seasons greetings".

This de-Christianisation fad is being driven by more than cuddly ­notions of "diversity".

There is also the tired idea that religion is antiquated, irrational and divisive, that it should be done away with in the interests of a more enlightened society.

But religion does much more good than harm, and we will all be poorer for its absence.

Think of all the civic institutions run by religious orders:  schools, hospitals, aged care homes, homeless shelters, drug rehabilitation programs and community centres.

Could all of these services be provided voluntarily without religious motivation?  Theoretically yes.  Would they?  Probably not, at least not to the same extent.

Aside from its practical civic value, religion forms part of Australia's cultural heritage.

It has influenced many of our institutions, values and fundamental freedoms.

Lessons such as "love thy neighbour" and "do unto others" are still valuable, even if we don't subscribe to the particular religious tradition from which they came.

None of this takes away from the fact that we are an open, pluralistic and, yes, largely secular society.

We should be fiercely protective of our freedom to practise any religion we like, or no religion at all.

And we can be proud of the fact that we have welcomed people of all faiths, backgrounds and cultures to our shores.

But conversely, none of this means that we need to trash our heritage and chase religion from the public square.  We can be a modern and open society without erasing the past.

There's no need to throw the baby out with the holy water.

Journalists Want Free Speech For Them, Censorship For The Rest Of Us

The self-importance and self-interest of the Canberra bubble of journalists and the media has been on full display this week.  Blacking out the front pages of newspapers across the country was an effective way of saying:  "Look at me, look at me".

Media companies, the ABC, SBS, and the journalists' trade union have formed the Right to Know Coalition to lobby for a number of legal and regulatory changes to protect "public-interest journalism".  Some of those changes are worthwhile and long overdue.  For example, the coalition is right to argue for reform to defamation law — and in fact the right to sue for defamation in all but the most egregious cases should be abolished anyway.  Similarly, the coalition is correct to say that governments are far too quick to classify information as "secret" and that freedom of information laws are now largely ineffective.

These are the good bits among what the media companies and journalists want.

But, unfortunately, they want a lot of very bad things, too.  Which is why this particular campaign will, hopefully, end up going nowhere.

At the heart of the demands of the Right to Know Coalition is that there should be one law for journalists and another for everyone else.  For instance, the coalition wants journalists to be exempted from prosecution under certain national security laws and for media outlets to have special rights to challenge search warrants.  Scott Morrison has been absolutely right to hold the campaign at arm's length.  As the Prime Minister says, said "no-one is above it [the law], including me or anyone else, any journalist or anyone else".

The coalition's justification for these special privileges for the media is that freedom of the press is essential to a well-functioning democracy.  That's true, of course, but it is subject to an important qualification.  "Freedom of the press" is actually the freedom to print and publish — for anyone, not just the press.

In a democracy, governments, media companies, and journalists' trade unions don't have, and should never have, the right to decide who is or isn't "a journalist" and who qualifies as "the press", so they can get special rights.  To do so would be to create an "official media", so effectively license and censor the media — yet, bizarrely, this is what the coalition seems to want.

In 2012, when the Labor government-appointed Finkelstein inquiry into media regulation recommended a de facto scheme for licensing the press, much of the media welcomed such an initiative.

At the moment, the Right to Know Coalition can too easily be portrayed as wanting to run a protection racket for the established media companies against interloping bloggers sitting in their pyjamas at their dining room table, publishing political commentary on the internet at 2am.

No doubt some supporters of the coalition are acting from the purest of motives.  But it's very easy to sense a degree of hypocrisy from at least some of those who are lending their name to the campaign, as in the case of Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young.  Yet it was the Greens who went to the last federal election with a policy to censor commentators whose opinions they disagreed with.  Admittedly the coalition can't be held responsible for winning the support of the Greens, but then it would be taken a lot more seriously if it disassociated itself from people who believe in "freedom of the press we agree with".

"CULTURE WARS"

The campaign of the Right to Know Coalition has also uncovered the double standards of some in the Canberra press gallery.

In 2014 the efforts of the Liberal government to reform section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (which makes insults based on someone's race unlawful) were dismissed by many journalists as merely a part of the "culture wars", and the idea of freedom of speech was portrayed as irrelevant to most Australians.

Now, five years later, those same journalists are proclaiming freedom of the press as a basic principle of democracy.

An unfair cynic would say that this reveals that too many in the media start caring about freedom only when it affects them.  And when their complaints can be used as a stick to beat a conservative government.

Age Of Appeasement

We can be thankful to the Hong Kong protesters for highlighting the moral conflict at the heart of the rivalry between Red China and the West.  While an important aspect of the power struggle is one of economics and geo-political power, which has been the focus of much of the commentary, only recently has the West awoken to the contest of values that divide us and China.  It is a contest about the core values which define our civilisation.  In the West, it is the values of individual liberties, the rule of law and the ideas underpinning liberal democracy.  In China, it is the resilient ideas of Mao, a governing ideology which combined one-party autocracy, militarism and the censorship and control of all levels of society.  Through a vast network of influence, the Chinese government is exporting its brand of communism around the world.  It has met a level of compliance that the Soviet Union could only have dreamed of.

The struggle for the people of Hong Kong to retain their freedoms has exposed this compliance.  Naturally the people of Hong Kong have been much more aware of the precarious state of their freedoms.  After decades of repressing, starving, and murdering its own people, the People's Republic of China was inexplicably gifted the crown colony of Hong Kong in 1997 on the mere hope that mainland governance would improve.  The given basis for this transfer was the expiry of a "lease" signed in 1898 between the British Empire and the Qing dynasty, a document to which the Chinese communist party was not a signatory and whose claim should not have been recognised.  It is a sad note in modern history that in the same decade the West prevailed over the communist bear, it immediately made territorial concessions to the communist dragon.

The terms of the handover provided that Hong Kong would be governed under a "one-country, two-systems" model, meaning the territory would be incorporated as a territory of mainland China but would retain many aspects of its pre-existing legal and political system, underpinned by the British common law, the rule of law and individual freedoms.  However, the "one-country, two-systems" model is due to expire in 2047, and the communist party's attitude to its "autonomous" territories such as Hong Kong and Macau, as well as its ambitions towards Taiwan, is to see their full integration into the mainland's economic and political systems.  In other words, it will no longer be "one-country two-systems", but "one-country, red-system".

The present conflict between the people of Hong Kong and the Chinese authorities erupted in June when one million Hong Kong residents took to the streets in opposition to a proposed extradition treaty between the two systems.  The treaty, which was ultimately withdrawn in September, would have meant that Hong Kongers could be extradited for trial on mainland China where the rule of law is not practised, legal rights are not protected and the conviction rate is 99.9 per cent.  The proposed law gave a glimpse into what Hong Kong post-2047 might look like, and the protests continue as a cause for democracy.

The Chinese communist party has been sensitive to any public remarks made in sympathy to the Hong Kong protesters and have used their influence to shut those comments down.  Earlier this month, Daryl Morey, the general manager of National Basketball Association team the Houston Rockets posted an image on Twitter saying "Fight for Freedom.  Stand with Hong Kong".  As sponsors and broadcast partners begun to cut ties with the Rockets and the competition as a whole, the Rockets disowned Morey's comment and Morey himself apologised and deleted the tweet.  The NBA released an official statement, where it acknowledged Morey's post "deeply offended many of our friends and fans in China, which is regrettable".  In a statement for Chinese audiences, the NBA went further, saying it was "extremely disappointed" by the "inappropriate" comment which "severely hurt the feelings of Chinese fans".  It is standard now to equate the interests of the Chinese communist party with the feelings and sentiments of the Chinese population as a whole.

Also this month, American video game developer and publisher Blizzard has come under fire for how it has responded to a professional game player expressing his support for Hong Kong protesters.  During an official Blizzard interview, a victorious competitor and Hong Kong-based professional gamer "blitzchung" wore a face mask in reference to the government-issued ban on wearing masks while protesting, and also shouted "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our age!"  Blizzard brought the hammer down on blitzchung, relying on discretionary competition rules to take away his victory and prize money and to ban him from competition for a year.  Like the NBA, Blizzard released an official statement to Chinese social media expressing its "strong indignation" of blitzchung's actions and concluded that the "players involved will be banned, and the commentators involved will be immediately terminated from any official business.  Also, we will protect our national dignity."

The commonality of the response by NBA, Blizzard and their sponsors and partners is emblematic of the swiftness of Western corporations to self-censor to appease the thin-skin sensitivities of Chinese communists.  In effect, corporations that are based in the West and which arose from the opportunities presented by Western economic systems, have become vessels for the dissemination and enforcement of China's values around the globe which are ultimately anti-Western.  As Scott Morrison pointed out in a speech to the Lowy Institute earlier this month, this is an era of strategic competition between China and the West.  In fact, it is the clash of civilisations defined by our attitudes to freedom and human dignity over oppressive totalitarianism.  And it is a battle we are currently fighting with one hand tied behind our backs.

Reserve Runs Out Of Ideas To Stimulate The Economy

The Reserve Bank's extended low interest rate policy and consideration of "unconventional monetary policy tools" reveals a lack of self-reflection and a commitment to a model that is unsustainable.

This month the RBA continued its 84-month unprecedented experiment with low interest rates, setting a record low 0.75 per cent.  Since October 2012, every interest rate decision has held or set another record low.

With little economic success to show for this experiment, the solution according to the RBA is to go even harder.

"Unconventional monetary policy tools" now are being considered, including negative interest rates and quantitative easing that would result in rapid monetary expansion through the credit market.

This approach relies on expanding a debt-based economy already approaching its limits.  Australia has the second highest household debt-to-GDP ratio in the OECD behind Switzerland and, despite recent budget improvements, government debt remains at record highs.  The RBA has created its own quagmire.  Any tightening of monetary policy risks popping the RBA-induced debt bubble, while additional easing of policy will likely further inflate the bubble and worsen the inevitable economic consequences.

This same predicament was faced earlier this year by the US Federal Reserve when it abandoned an attempt to normalise interest rates.  By holding interest rates at zero for seven years the Fed created an economy dependent on high levels of debt with low borrowing rates.

Despite low unemployment numbers, the Fed is clearly concerned by weaker-than-expected growth, a volatile stockmarket and increased government debt.  The US economy simply cannot handle a return to normal interest rates, causing the Fed to change course and continue with monetary expansion.

The underlying problem is that the RBA remains committed to a view that boosting consumption spending will ignite the economy.  Low interest rate policy promotes consumption by leaving households with more to spend by lowering loan repayments, the single largest expense for many households.  Low interest rates and monetary expansion also inflate asset prices, increasing asset owners' wealth and making them more likely to consume.

But the attempt to expand debt-financed consumption is losing its stimulus effect as it is becoming increasingly inconsistent with individual financial interests.

With high and rising household debt, and an uncertain economic future, it is little wonder households are reluctant to increase spending and instead are taking advantage of low interest payments to pay down their debt.

But according to the Keynesian economic framework that informs RBA decision-making, responsible individual and household behaviour leads to undesirable economic outcomes.  Rather than saving for the future, individuals should consume for the present.  The Keynesian view is that higher savings at the individual level leads to a reduction in demand through less spending, which reduces economic growth.  According to this view, this will lead to reduced income and in turn reduce total savings, often referred to as the "paradox of thrift".

The problem with this approach is that it reverses the economic fundamentals of growth.  Increasing consumer spending at the expense of saving will produce only a short-term boom.  No amount of meddling by the central bank can bypass the basic economic reality that economic expansion requires resources to be diverted away from present consumption towards the production of future goods.

Long-term sustainable growth requires savings to invest res­ources into expanding the nation's capital stock, which enables productivity and wage growth.  And it is precisely the investment, not the consumption, side of the equation that is missing.  New private sector business investment is just 11.2 per cent of GDP, lower than the rate during the economically hostile Whitlam years and near the recessionary lows of the early 1990s.

There are several areas governments need to address to boost investment.  High and complex taxation discourages domestic and international investment and distorts resources away from their most productive use.

Added to this is a substantial red-tape burden.  This week the latest World Economic Forum global competi­tiveness figures were released.  The report provides a comparison of global competitiveness based in part on a worldwide survey of business executives.  Australia's competitiveness is being weighed down by regulation.  Australia has dropped from 77th to 80th in the world for the burden of regulation.  Red tape is stif­ling business investment and reducing economic opportunity and growth.  Rather than focusing on boosting debt-financed consumption within a highly indebted economy, governments should focus on expanding the ability of the econ­omy to generate long-run prosperity.  This means liberating supply rather than artificially and unsustainably stimulating demand.

Freedom Is Not A Government Gift

There is a freedom of religion problem in Australia because there is a freedom of speech problem.

The Coalition government has failed to refute the notion that freedom of speech is a positive right granted by government as the right to discriminate.

Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, for example, makes it unlawful for a person to engage in an action, including speech, that is reasonably likely to "offend, insult, humiliate, or intimidate another person or a group of people" on the basis of their "race, colour, or national or ethnic origin".

Having imposed this general restriction on speech, the government then provides for a series of conditional exemptions via section 18D, where offending, insulting, humiliating or intimidating someone on the basis of their race, colour, or national or ethnic origin is permitted.

There are two things to notice.  First, discrimination in this context has been defined down to the right not to be offended or insulted.  This is not discrimination at all.  It is a subjective and emotional interpretation one person has of what someone has said to or about them.

Second, section 18C reframes freedom of speech from a natural right, which all Australians possess as citizens of a free nation, to a positive right bestowed by government in certain circumstances.  That is, section 18C takes away freedom, and section 18D gives it back in a qualified, truncated and demented fashion that depends on the good grace of government and the Australian Human Rights Commission.

The confusion over the government's proposed approach to protecting religious freedom is a direct result of its failure to offer an alternative to its political opponents' framing of freedom of speech.

There are two processes under way in the context of freedom of religion.  The first is the Religious Discrimination Bill 2019, which proposes to outlaw discrimination on the basis of one's religious beliefs or actions.

The second is the review into the framework of religious exemptions in anti-discrimination legislation being undertaken by the Australian Law Reform Commission.  This review is to consider whether today's religious exemptions to anti-discrimination laws for people of faith remain appropriate.

The failure is that both processes propose to maintain the underlying structure of the anti-discrimination law.  This is paradoxical since the government is seeking to introduce laws that preserve freedom, placed within the context of anti-discrimination, a concept antithetical to freedom.

But this approach also opens proponents of religious freedom to the same types of attacks as proponents of freedom of speech.  Those who argue for the maintenance of section 18C assert that those who seek its abolition are seeking not freedom of speech but the right to be a racist or a bigot.  Similarly, it is argued that those who seek the limiting or removal of anti-discrimination laws are seeking not freedom of association but the right to discriminate.

Of course, such criticisms are logically correct, given the framing of freedom as a positive right from government.  If freedom of speech and religion are gifts from government, then government has every right to choose how those freedoms should and should not be exercised.

If, however, freedom is a gift from God, as many of faith hold, or a natural pre-government right, as secular liberals maintain, then its curtailing through anti-discrimination laws is unjustified.

Newspeak was integral to the ruling class of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, not just because it provided a medium of expression for the state ideology but because it made all other modes of thought impossible:  "If you control the language, you control the argument."

Redefining freedom to mean discrimination implies we can never be free but can be given the privilege to discriminate only by government.  It is an inherently disempowering and inhuman notion.

If freedom is the product only of government fiat, then humans are not born free, nor are they endowed with free will, nor are they assumed to possess the dignity that comes with freedom.

Adding new anti-discrimination laws, as proposed by Attorney-General Christian Porter, or altering existing exemptions to anti-discrimination laws, as the ALRC is investigating, will only further embed the idea that freedom is solely provided through state power.

The only policy approach that will help protect freedom of speech and freedom of religion is to remove government-imposed constraints on those freedoms.

But to win the argument about freedom, the Coalition must change the language.  And changing the language means recognising that freedom is not a gift from government.  It is a natural human right that is necessary to human dignity and human flourishing.

Sydney Motorists Do Not Want A Congestion Tax

If there were fewer poor people on the roads, rich people could get to work more easily and everyone would be better off.  This, in a nutshell, is the argument for the congestion tax, a charge on drivers of vehicles seeking to enter and exit the city during morning and evening peak times.

The idea has returned to public debate this week after the Grattan Institute released a report recommending its implementation in Australia's capital cities.

Pointing to international examples London, Singapore and Stockholm, the report argues for a flat fee to be imposed on vehicles crossing a cordon around the inner city in peak hour.

The fee would be roughly equivalent to the cost of a public transport ticket.

This enables the remaining vehicles to move through the city more efficiently.  People deterred by the fee would be expected to use alternatives like public transport, cycling and walking.

According to the Grattan Institute, we should care about congestion not only because it is uncomfortable to sit in traffic but because transportation inefficiency reduces the economic benefits of cities.  Delays impose opportunity costs, limit employment mobility, and make it harder to access goods and services.

If this all seems familiar, that is because the congestion tax is a zombie idea, one that has already consumed many brains.

Around the country, various government-backed bodies have floated this idea since it was implemented in London more than 15 years ago.

Yet time after time, governments continue to reject it.

This time, the New South Wales and Victorian governments, coming from either side of the political aisle, both rejected the idea immediately.

And for good reasons.

A congestion tax hits the least wealthy hardest.

The suburban working-class would be forced either to pay extra to get to work or to cram themselves into unreliable, already full trains.

Or take the bus, gazing out the window at the people who were able to afford the new tax.

Car commuters may be more likely to have above-average incomes, but this will be no consolation to those working-class people who are priced out of their preferred mode of travel.

Moreover, the connection between car commuting and higher incomes is probably just that owning a car is increasingly expensive anyway.

Motorists already pay registration, insurance, parking fees and the fuel excise.  In the eyes of the government, driving is becoming a vice, akin to drinking or smoking.

We should also doubt the supposed social benefits of this tax.

It is not possible to know whether economic growth will be higher if people are forced against their will onto public transport.  Nor is it possible to calculate the value of lost amenity as people move into higher-density housing closer to the city or public transport.

This gets to the fundamental problem with rationalist schemes such as this one.

Whenever a system is directed by central planning towards a specific end, in this case efficiency, other values within the system are displaced.

The choices of drivers and public transport users are burdened by the costs of realising the priorities of the planners.  This is what bureaucrats mean when they speak of changing people's behaviour:  they mean penalising choices that they don't like.

In fact, this is what government is for.  The real question is who determines what gets penalised by whom.

As always, what is at stake is a clash of values.

The congestion tax replaces the experience of a city as a home with the planners' vision of the city as an economic engine.

It is consistent with the agenda of centralisation and densification that has reshaped our cities over the past generation.

Governments across the country have regulated small and medium businesses out of existence, while encouraging the move to a service economy by rendering Australian workers uncompetitive.

Now, if you want a job, the city is the only place you can find one.

At the same time, the government has made suburban life more expensive and inaccessible.

The Commonwealth has gamed its aggregate economic figures with mass immigration, while the states have artificially tried to limit the development of new suburbs.

Just as the congestion tax suggests government would prefer you take a train than drive, the recent history of our country suggests that apartment life is being promoted ahead of the mainstream Australian dream of a family home in the suburbs.

This track record might suggest that the day of the congestion tax will come eventually.

But governments would do well to remember that recent elections here and overseas have been decided in the suburbs, which have roundly rejected the elite class that wants to impose its vision of progress upon them, preferring their traditional order to promises of dynamism and efficiency.

Identity Politics Thrives On The Ideas That Divide Us

Everything that's wrong with the toxic culture of identity politics was revealed by the reaction to a photo of four people watching an NFL football game in the United States on Sunday.  At the game between the Dallas Cowboys and the Green Bay Packers, George W. Bush was sitting between his wife Laura and Ellen DeGeneres.  On the other side of DeGeneres sat her wife, Portia de Rossi.

Bush is a former Republican president who opposed gay marriage.  DeGeneres is a high-profile talk-show host whose political stance would in Australian terms be called centre-left, but in America is described as liberal or progressive.  Social media and many parts of the mainstream media in the US erupted as DeGeneres was attacked for, among other things, creating "a bad look", betraying the gay and progressive community, and being "irresponsible and dangerous" for being seen with Bush.

DeGeneres has since replied, "Here's the thing:  I'm friends with George Bush.  In fact, I'm friends with a lot of people who don't share the same beliefs that I have.  We're all different, and I think that we've forgotten that that's OK ... Just because I don't agree with someone on everything doesn't mean that I'm not gonna be friends with them."  DeGeneres has so far failed to placate her critics.

A new book by the British writer Douglas Murray, The Madness of Crowds:  Gender, Race and Identity, is a brilliant analysis of the world in which we now seem to be living, in which a gay liberal woman is condemned on social media because she's friends with a heterosexual conservative man.

Douglas describes the new political and social culture of the US, Britain and Australia whereby people are encouraged to discover not how we are all essentially the same as each other, but how we are all different — and how we will always be different, with all the consequences that follow.  Instead of looking for things on which to agree with each other, we're urged to emphasise how many things we disagree on.  As Murray notes this is not a recipe for long-term social cohesion.  His previous book was titled The Strange Death of Europe:  Immigration, Identity, Islam.

The Madness of Crowds offers a few DeGeneres-like examples of what happens when people step out of their assumed identity.  In 2016 at the Republican national convention, the billionaire entrepreneur Peter Thiel gave a speech endorsing Donald Trump.  Thiel was condemned by the most prominent gay magazine in the America.  Thiel is gay.  Last year when Kanye West met Trump in the Oval Office, he was criticised for meeting a white Republican.  West's response was he rejected the idea that "if you're black you have to be a Democrat".

Murray writes that organised religion and the "grand narrative" of human equality has been replaced with a search for meaning "by waging a constant war against anybody who seems to be on the wrong side of a question which may itself have just been reframed and the answer to which has only just been altered".

He highlights how the public sector, universities and increasingly the corporate world are in the grip of a mania for diversity and difference based on gender and race, but not on other characteristics such as religion, political opinion or, interestingly, socio-economic class.  Furthermore, the notion of "diversity" is full contradictions.

"For instance, every firm that makes a concerted effort to promote people of colour, women, or sexual minorities will always arrive at a moment where they make some version of the following discovery:  the people they have promoted are themselves likely to be comparatively privileged.  In many, though not all, cases they are people who have already been well served by the system ...

"At companies across Europe and America which have adopted this approach to hiring, a common story is emerging, albeit one only talked about in whispers.  For people in such companies are gradually realising that there are costs to all this.  That is, while their companies have managed to increase female mobility and ethnic minority mobility, their level of class mobility has never been lower.  All they have managed to do is build a new hierarchy."

Climate Change: The Facts — And How You Can Help To Spread Them

As the editor of many books, I spend a lot of time pondering the nature of "facts".

A fact is something that has become known as true.  A fact may be dependent on accumulated knowledge.  Facts are considered superior to an opinion or an interpretation.  But sometimes the facts change.

There is the famous quote variously attributed to John Maynard Keynes, and sometimes Winston Churchill:  "When the facts change, I change my mind.  What do you do?"

Right up until the city of Brisbane in my home state of Queensland was flooded back in January 2011 — flooded following the emergency release of water from the overflowing Wivenhoe Dam — the considered opinion from Australian experts was that the dams would never fill again.  This was accepted by many as a "fact".

After that exceptionally wet summer, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology continued to forecast below-average rainfall even for Australia's Murray Darling Basin through the exceptionally wet spring of 2016.  Now there is drought again across much of eastern and southern Australia, and what farmers really need to know is:  "When will it rain again?"

Of course, droughts in Australia always break, and with flooding rains.  But there is no indication from the Bureau when we can expect this break.

Many claim such flood events are unpredictable.  In which case, we arguably don't have a scientific theory of climate.  A scientific theory is something substantiated:  a body of facts that has been repeatedly confirmed through observation and experimentation and that can be confirmed through accurate prediction.

There is no doubt that the Western World is currently being significantly affected by climate change activism.  But, the more rational amongst us — who are not necessarily those with a more formal education — can perhaps already see that very little of what is currently being articulated by this populist movement resembles fact.

Currently what we see from activists is more prophecy than numerically verifiable prediction — certainly no testing of falsifiable theory through what might be considered the scientific method.

Indeed, the leaders of the current populist movement against climate change seem unaware of the history of science or the history of climate change embedded in the geological record.  And while obsessed with climate, they seem unable to make a practical forecast for next week or next year when it comes to issues such as when the drought here in Australia might break.

This is a long introduction to my next book, which will be available for sale early next year.

It will be a book obsessed with facts that the climate is always changing.

As editor, I get to choose chapter authors.  The four most important chapters will be on "water" and it is my intention that they will move us towards a new theory of climate.

The four chapters are variously about cosmic rays, cloud cover, tropical convection and water vapour.  Indeed, water — in its many forms rather than carbon dioxide — will be dominant in the new emerging theory of climate.

This theory perhaps has its origins in a little-noted paper written by Richard Lindzen, Ming-Dah Chou and Arthur Hou back in 2001.  It got physicists like Peter Ridd thinking.

Dr Ridd is contributing one of the four seminal water chapters in the next book.  He will explain how deep convection, which can be thought of as a huge heat engine — is an alternative pathway for the upward transfer of energy from greenhouse gases.  The other important chapters in this section on water are by Henrik Svensmark, Geoffrey Duffy and the great Richard Lindzen.

I am seeking your support for the book's publication.

If you can spare more than $A400, you have the option of your name being printed in the book.  I am proud that will be my own name will on the front cover of the book alongside Duffy, Svensmark, Ridd, Lindzen and other fine scientists.

The last book in the series sold more than 30,000 copies.  It has made a difference, in a small way.

My hypothesis is that this next book will sell three times as many copies, and eventually be recognised as articulating the beginning of a new theory of climate, with Peter Ridd's contribution significantly building on the earlier work of Richard Lindzen.

But these four water chapters will be controversial, with technically complex elements, but 
the book will also include chapters that are easier to digest, and a few that are more philosophical.

One of the most popular chapters in the last book (my 2017 edition) — and the least technical, and most literary chapter — was by legendary poet and writer, Clive James, which was an amusing poke at "climate change" and catastrophism as popular culture.

Scott Hargreaves has already written something literary for the next edition (CCTF2020) and he has drawn on Clive's James' translation of Dante's Inferno to help describe the nine circles of "climate skepticism".  This will perhaps be the last chapter in this next 2020 edition.  What Scott has written is so insightful and also fun.

There will be about 20 chapters in total in the next book, including several chapters on Antarctica.  So, of course, there is a chapter on penguins, and perhaps will be two on volcanoes.

Antarctica is twice the size of Australia, and has a complex climate that is central to understanding global atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns — including drought and flood cycles in Australia.

The history of science suggests that paradigms are never disproven until they are replaced.  So, now more than ever, it is important that you back this book that will challenge the current consensus, which is the current dominant paradigm.

Physicist and philosopher, the late Thomas Kuhn, explained that competition within segments of the scientific community is the only process that historically has ever actually resulted in the replacement and then eventual rejection of one previously accepted paradigm or theory.  It is so important that alternative voices are heard, that there is opportunity for a new theory of climate to emerge.

If you are at all sceptical of the catastrophist's claims that the current drought in Australia is the very worst on record, sea levels at record highs, and the planet about to melt — and most importantly, if you would like to contribute in a practical way to a fact-based new theory of climate change — then make a financial contribution to my next book in the series.

After all, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.

Why Hong Kong Matters

As the Chinese Communist Party celebrated its 70 years of rule in China on Tuesday, an 18-year old anti-government student protester in Hong Kong was shot at point blank range in the chest by police.

The contrast between the youth of Hong Kong, demanding political and economic freedoms, and the brutal repression of the Chinese dictatorship could hardly be clearer.

The protests in Hong Kong began on 4 June when one million Hong Kong nationals took to the streets in opposition to a proposed extradition treaty between Hong Kong and China.  The treaty, which was withdrawn in September, would have meant Hong Kongers could be extradited for trial on the Chinese mainland, where the conviction rate is 99.9 per cent.

That one million people came out to protest out of a country of seven million demonstrates the deep desire for freedom and independence that runs through Hong Kong.  It would have been the equivalent to some 3.8 million Australians turning out to protest, around half of Victoria's population.

Protestors saw the proposed extradition treaty as another step of Chinese involvement and influence over Hong Kong's internal affairs.

Hong Kong was a British colony from 1842, when it was ceded from the Chinese following the First Opium War, until 1997.  In 1997 the British handed Hong Kong back to China under a model of "one country, two systems", meaning that Hong Kong would notionally be recognized as a part of China but remain as semi-autonomous city-state.

As a consequence, Hong Kong has its own legal and political system, underpinned by the British common law, the rule of law, and individual rights including freedom of speech, association, and assembly.

Hong Kong is also the most economically free nation in the world, according to the annual Index of Economic Freedom published by the conservative United States think tank the Heritage Foundation.

The index uses measures such as the security of property rights, the ease of starting a business, the extent of personal income and business taxes, and government integrity to rank the economic freedom of 180 nations around the world.  As the famous free market economist Milton Friedman once remarked, "if you want see capitalism in action, go to Hong Kong."

And it is this economic freedom that has allowed Hong Kong to flourish.  Hong Kong is an international trading and financial mecca, with an economic growth rate of close to four per cent and an unemployment rate of just three per cent.

But under the British handover agreement, the "one country, two systems" model is due last 50 years and expire in 2047.  What will happen to Hong Kong at that point is anyone's guess.

The protestors see the 800,000 people held in prison camps in mainland China, the mass surveillance state, and the brutal suppression of the minority Muslim Uighur population and fear what may come.

The Chinese Communist Party for its part is clear about its intentions.

On Tuesday at the 70th anniversary celebrations, China's dictator-for-life Xi Xining said "there is no force that can shake the foundation of this great nation."

Xi also promised the "peaceful" integration of Hong Kong, as well as Macau and Taiwan with mainland China.

Hong Kong might seem like a universe away from Australia.  But through a sophisticated web of power and influence, China is seeking to export its brand of Communism around the world including into Australia.

This can be seen with the one-belt-one-road and Made in China 2025 initiatives.

One-belt-one-road is a land and maritime economic infrastructure program.  It involves creating a vast network of highways, energy pipelines, railways, sea-ports, stretching though some 60 nations accounting for more than two-thirds of the world's population.  It has even reached Australia's shores with the Andrews Labor government signing onto the Communist Party initiative in 2018.

The purpose is to draw signatory jurisdictions closer to Beijing's orbit in a bid to boost Chinese economic and political influence and pry nations away from the United States.

Alongside sits the Made in China 2025 initiative which is a state-led program aimed at turning China the world's foremost producer of advanced manufacturing, including in areas involving robotics and artificial intelligence.  The program uses state-owned and directed enterprises, government subsides, and the acquisition of intellectual property to become an advanced industrial super-power.

What all of this means is that the free world is facing an increasingly assertive and belligerent China, seeking to shape the global economic and political order around its aspirations and preferences.

And this is why Hong Kong matters.  The values of freedom, independence, and self-rule are at stake.

These values speak not just to the protestors in Hong Kong, but to what it means to be human.

There is no dignity without the freedom for individuals to start a small business, form families and communities in which they can flourish, experience the dignity of work, and to collectively and democratically chart the course for their nations' future.

These are mainstream values not just in Hong Kong, but in Australia and across the western world.

The battle for Hong Kong is the defining civilizational battle of our time.  It is the age-old contest between freedom and human dignity over oppression and subjugation.

Braving Two Terrifying Tribes: Academics And Racism Warriors

Anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, who died this week aged 81, was in the last generation of that profession who could claim to have studied an indigenous culture more or less unsullied by contact with modernity.  And he was among the first of his generation to experience personal attacks from the ascendant cultural left in full flight;  subject to deplatforming, character assassination, professional ostracism and all the other tools by which conformity to the canons of identity politics is enforced.  I mark Chagnon's passing this week, because his life and times are a study in miniature of the destruction of an academic discipline by identity politics.

An American, Chagnon graduated in Anthropology from University of Michigan and went and lived amongst the Yanomamö Indians who live the region which stretches across Brazil and Venezuela, and he produced books of field research on them.  He famously labelled them "the fierce people".

His field research started in the 1960s when anthropology in the popular imagination and in the Universities was dominated by Margaret Mead and a sort of noble savage view of what native peoples are like.  There is of course a classic contrast in views of life among native peoples;  you can either take the Rousseauian view of the noble savage or the Hobbesian view that life prior to the imposition of sovereign authority is poor, nasty, brutish and short.  Mead became famous with the publication of Coming of Age in Samoa (1928), which famously portrayed a native people living in harmony and being unfussed about premarital relations or even post marital relations.

This was somewhat what Changon expected to find.  Instead he found a culture among the Yanomamö that was strong and impressive in its own way, but which was unmistakably violent, with lots of raids against competing groups, and he noted that much of the violence was over women.  Adultery was not indulged and could lead to fatal outcomes.  Thus were the battlelines drawn — Mead's book was said to be the most widely read book in the field, until it was overtaken by Chagnon's Yanomamö:  The Fierce People (1967).

Having observed this behaviour, Chagnon developed an explanation that ultimately fed into the emerging fields of sociobiology and evolutionary psychology.  The idea essentially is that human behaviour can be explained a lot by reference to the desire to maintain bloodlines whether consciously or otherwise, trying to preserve our genetic material.  So you would go to war with those in your kin groups against those who were not in your kin groups, which is what Chagnon observed.  And this is what drives small pre-political societies.

It was this, in the 1970s that led to Chagnon being targeted by the cultural left, as were other "controversial" figures such as the founder of sociobiology, E O Wilson.  This narrative of traditional cultures being violent, and pursuing the narrow interest of their genetically defined in-group, conflicted with the new movement's determination to show that all social pathologies found in native peoples could be attributed to colonialism, exploitation and the general corruption brought to them by the West.  Anthropology was being transformed from a social science based on empiricism and hypothesis testing, to a cultural movement based on identifying with the oppressed and documenting the wrongs of the oppressor.

The ferocity of the attacks on Chagnon was such that he titled his 2012 account of his life and work and battles Noble Savages:  My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes — The Yanomamö and the Anthropologists.  Chagnon in that book made no bones about tracing the Marxist inspiration for cultural anthropology as now found in Universities.  It is worth noting Mead herself wanted to resolve issues through debate within the bounds of the academic discipline, but the new left had no interest in that.  The validity of Chagnon's work continues to be recognised by figures such as Stephen Pinker and Matt Ridley, who draw upon evolutionary psychology in their explanation for social behaviour.  Pinker makes the argument that levels of violence can be attributed to the absence of institutions that can bring peace — this is the classic Hobbesian argument of The Better Angels of Our Nature.  The Yanomamö are not inherently better or worse morally than, say, the average Australian, they are just responding to the incentives they and the institutions within they live.  As institutions improve, violence decreases.

In Australia we had a bizarre echo of the Rousseau v. Hobbes smackdown when a Channel 7 documentary aired in 2011 portrayed a Brazilian tribe who live in the Amazon as violent and superstitious, along with claims of infanticide.  Survival International, a trans-national group which claims to act on behalf of tribal people, lodged a complaint with the Australian Communications and Media Authority alleging the report was inaccurate and racist.  ACMA was duly "satisfied that given the highly evocative language used in the report to describe the killing of babies and the judgmental tone used (in) condemning the alleged practice, it is likely that in all the circumstances these contributory factors would have perpetuated and provoked an intense dislike and contempt for the Suruwaha."  Channel Seven's subsequent appeal to the Federal Court was unsuccessful.

Given that ACMA has explicit powers to restrict free speech in broadcasting (and it is not clear whether truth was actually a defence for Channel 7), the issue is much more general than the legal grounds on which such decisions run.  The question is more whether, 50 plus years after Chagnon started documenting life among the Yanomamö, it would be possible for any anthropologist or other social scientist to put forward any descriptions of tribal life that are less than laudatory without facing (a) professional ostracism and (b) sanctions by state agencies empowered to police speech against the various sins of identity politics.

Something to reflect upon as Napoleon Chagnon goes to his rest.

Academics Spending Big In Search Of Racism

If you were not already convinced that Australia's humanities departments have truly lost their way, the latest research project from the faculty of arts and social sciences at the University of Sydney should get you over the line.

Resurgent Racism is the seventh "flagship" theme of FutureFix, a program devised by academics at the university to show taxpaying Australians their money is being put to good use.  Resurgent Racism will "address the emergence of new forms of racism manifesting as national populism and far-right extremism".  Researchers will "seek to explain the logics of emboldened white racism in Western liberal democracies", which they predict "will be applicable to majoritarian racism elsewhere".  These self-appointed sages have looked into the crystal ball and have seen a future blighted by white supremacists.

But we can be pulled back from the brink of this dystopian nightmare if the team at the faculty of arts and sciences is permitted to spend taxpayers' dollars, and the next few years, "mapping the changes of racism, including anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and white supremacism" in Australia.

That Islam is a religion, not a race, seems not to matter because a great many academics have shifted from focusing on what is real to what is not — in this case an imagined crisis of endemic racism.  They are knee-deep in the quagmire of identity politics, that most dangerous and divisive of ideas that insists on distinguishing individuals by their differences rather than by their similarities.

Like so many in the humanities, they view the world through a Manichean lens, in which everything can be explained as a struggle between the forces of good (light) and evil (darkness).  Everything they think about, write about and talk about in their capacity as historians, sociologists or political scientists must support the belief that Western civilisation is a white male patriarchy that wields power over, and oppresses, women and racial minorities.

Last year, Sydney University invited American professor, author and "renowned anti-racism educator" Robin DiAngelo so she could tell all the white people attending the launch of What Does It Mean to be White?  Developing White Racial Literacy just how terribly, but perhaps not irredeemably, racist they were.  According to DiAngelo, white people live in a racially insular bubble that renders them quivering wrecks when it comes to talking about race, a phenomenon she calls "White Fragility".  "Why does race seem to be the hardest word for white people?" she asked.

If she were to take a closer, impartial look at the Australian university sector, she would encounter many white people who have no problem at all with the word.  Many academics are not only not afraid to talk about race but they talk about it so incessantly that if it weren't for gender — the other great preoccupation of 21st-century academe — it would verge on monomania.

Of the 30-odd staff employed at the uni's department of history, for example, 10 make a point of mentioning race or racism as a research interest.  When Greg Sheridan, whose column appears on this site, criticised the Australian National University for rejecting the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, one Sydney University professor, Dirk Moses, compared Sheridan to Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik.

Since 2002, the department has received almost $9m from the Australian Research Council to fund 18 historical studies research projects that focus on racism, in one form or another.  These included The Construction of Race and Racial Identity at the Antipodes of Empire, 1788-1840 (costing $231,000);  Southern Racial Concepts:  Comparative Histories and Contemporary Legacies ($2.4m);  Immigration Restriction and the Racial state, c. 1880 to the Present ($359,000);  Enterprising Women, Race, Gender and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic, 1770-1820 ($323,000);  and The Racial Century ($94,000).

The Resurgent Racism squad comprises, among others, former race discrimination commissioner Tim Soutphommasane, seen by some to have encouraged complaints to the Australian Human Rights Commission following publication of a 2016 cartoon by Bill Leak in this newspaper.  Last year Soutphommasane gave the keynote address at the university's National Centre for Cultural Competence, launched in 2013 to the tune of $5.6m of taxpayers' money.  It claims its mission is to "roll out cultural competence across the university and broader local national and international community", but in reality it is a concerted effort to convince us Anglo-Celtic white culture is bad.

When vice-chancellor Michael Spence suggested questioning the existence of Chinese influence on his campus was akin to the White Australia policy, he was simply ensuring next year's income.  Last year the university pocketed $884m in international student fees, a generous portion from Chinese students.

The Resurgent Racism team is spending taxpayers' money to tell Australians how racist we are.  It is evidence the racism industry is flourishing on our university campuses, which are no longer in the business of producing objective and impartial scholarship that will edify, inspire and educate future generations of Australians.

Watering Australia's Intellectual Deserts

If what happened at RMIT University in Melbourne last week was a one-off event, it could be laughed at as the behaviour of a single rogue academic.

But the pity is that the actions of a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at RMIT University, Hormoz Marzbani, neatly encapsulates the intellectual crisis at Australia's universities.  Our universities now engage in partisan politics and ideological barracking not disinterested intellectual inquiry.

Marzbani informed his students that if they attended the climate strike, they would be awarded full marks for that day's assessment.  The students' work requirement was "All you need to do is email me a group selfie in the crowd".  Helpfully Marzbani enclosed with his message the details for the time and location of the strike.

The administration of RMIT University, in response to media inquiries, replied:  "While the teacher has determined that the conversation at today's global climate strike is educational and relevant to the learning for this project, RMIT will of course be looking at the decision to ensure that assessment integrity is maintained."

Marzbani is only a senior lecturer.  At the University of Melbourne, John Prins is a professor and head of its medical school.  Last week he wrote to students saying they were "encouraged to consider joining with staff" at the climate strike.  Marzbani and Prins occupy positions of trust and respect — positions they're willing to misuse.

At universities a few levels up from professors are vice-chancellors.  Earlier this week, it was revealed that Sandra Harding AO, the Vice-Chancellor of James Cook University in Townsville, has authorised the university to appeal against the decision of the Federal Circuit Court that found that in 2018 the university had unlawfully dismissed its professor of physics, Peter Ridd.  The university was ordered to pay $1.2 million in damages and penalties.  Ridd had questioned the evidence upon which other scientists had based their opinion that the Great Barrier Reef was dying.

For its appeal, JCU has engaged one of the country's leading barristers, Sydney-based Bret Walker, SC, to argue that Ridd as a university employee was not entitled to freedom of academic enquiry.  What JCU is paying Walker and its two other barristers is as yet unknown.  What is known is that someone of Walker's ilk can command fees of $20,000 a day.  It is also known from a freedom-of-information request that until April, JCU had already spent more than $630,000 in legal expenses on the case.  JCU's legal bill is paid by taxpayers.  Ridd's legal expenses are paid from his own pocket and from donations via an online public appeal.

Lest it be thought that these three examples all relate only to climate change and that intolerance of differing viewpoints doesn't extend to other fields of academic endeavour, the evidence says otherwise.  After an outcry from its staff, the Australian National University spurned an offer of funding from the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation to provide the sort of undergraduate course that up until a few years ago would have been regarded as completely unexceptional.

Australia's university students are beginning to realise what's happening because they see it in class every day.  According to a survey of 500 students commissioned from independent market research company Dynata, 31 per cent of respondents have been made to feel uncomfortable by their university teacher for expressing an opinion.  Even more damning, 58 per cent of students feel they are more exposed to new ideas on social media than at university.

Before too long Australia's universities could be hit by another crisis — a financial one.

In 2017, 27 per cent of students enrolled in Australian universities were from overseas and 32 per cent of those students were from China.  Analysis by the Centre for Independent Studies reveals at that at University of Sydney, Chinese students account for more than 20 per cent of the university's revenue.  Many would argue such a revenue model is unsustainable and that short-term economic profit has taken priority over the maintenance of quality.

Australia's universities need to keep in mind that when institutions are in crisis one of two things happens.

Institutions reform or they die.

Two Days In Bankstown Won't Change The ABC's Elitist Culture

The ABC is going to Bankstown.  That's right.  In a bizarre move that highlights how insular the organisation has become, ABC chairwoman Ita Buttrose and managing direction David Anderson will join dozens of staff for a two-day visit to the Sydney suburb 17 kilometres from its Ultimo HQ.

As the Nine Network's tabloids reported last week, staff will engage in a planning workshop focused on making content that is more relevant to average Australians, discuss local issues, eat at local restaurants and speak with community groups.

This could be viewed as the ABC making a genuine effort to get in touch with part of the Australian community that it is failing to represent.  But the fact that Australia's national broadcaster needs to organise a special excursion to visit a suburb that is almost as distant as what the last Census found was the average Sydney car commute says all you need to know about how insular and out of touch the ABC has become.

This is an organisation that employs thousands of journalists, producers and other staff around the country.  It's an organisation with supporters who claim its existence is vital to Australian democracy.  Yet it is now so disconnected from mainstream Australia that it has begun treating people who live less than 20 kilometres away as akin to a foreign population that must be studied in their native environment.

It's this disconnect that explains why so many Australians view the ABC as biased and out-of-touch.

ABC journalists don't lack professionalism or integrity.  They don't wilfully ignore the ABC's obligation "to ensure that the gathering and presentation ... of news and information is accurate and impartial according to the recognized standards of objective journalism".  On the contrary, most ABC journalists are committed to these standards.

But they fail to uphold them because they are in a bubble.  They are surrounded by colleagues who live in the same inner-city suburbs, who have the same perspectives and opinions on everything from politics and culture to science and religion.  Not only that.  They often hire their own — spouses, partners and children — because they know how the organisation works.  They are simply unaware that the views of ABC staff aren't an accurate reflection of the wider community.

This is the perfect recipe for groupthink.  It breeds an insular and sometimes arrogant culture that treats views outside the prevailing progressive perspective as illegitimate.

Of course not all examples of ABC bias can be ascribed to groupthink.  The ongoing ban on my appearing on its daily panel show The Drum is one example that is obviously the result of an editorial decision — at the time of writing it has been over 520 days since I appeared on the program.

But most can be, and a few short trips to the outer suburbs of our major capital cities isn't going to change a thing.

If the ABC really wants to appeal to a larger audience then it should hire staff who disagree with the prevailing soft-left bias that is so clearly detectable in its coverage.

Earlier this year it seemed the ABC might finally have a chairwoman intent on taking this approach, with Buttrose telling ABC Radio in March that the ABC "could do with more diversity of views" because "sometimes I think, people without really knowing it, let a bias show through."

But Buttrose has since done an about-face and indicated that she has no intention of hiring conservatives who don't fit with the prevailing ABC culture.

In a recent interview with One Plus One host Jane Hutcheon, Ms Buttrose was asked whether Scott Morrison had told her that the ABC needed more Andrew Bolts or Miranda Devines.  She responded by saying she didn't think Andrew Bolt would be a good fit for the ABC (evidently things have changed since Bolt was a co-host on Jon Faine's 774 Conversation Hour, and spent a decade as a regular panellist on Insiders).

Ms Buttrose also clarified that what she wanted was for the ABC to become culturally diverse, so that it better reflected the diversity she saw when she visited school playgrounds as Australian of the year.  Presumably, this means she wants more racial, ethnic, and gender diversity, but not diversity of opinion.

There is no reason why Andrew Bolt, in particular, should be hired by the ABC.  As his column on Sunday made clear, he has no plans of leaving News Corp.

But the fact that Andrew Bolt wouldn't be a good cultural fit for the ABC is exactly why the ABC needs more mainstream conservatives like Andrew Bolt.

Having a more racial, ethnic, and gender diverse staff is all well and good, but it will do nothing to help the ABC create content that is more relevant to average Australians — not if the new staff share all the same views and opinions as the current staff.  This will simply prolong the disconnect between the ABC and the mainstream Australians that it is failing to represent.

The ABC's culture isn't going to change while it is protected from market forces by lavish taxpayer funding.  Ideally, it should be privatised.  But at the very least it should be made more accountable to the people who fund it — Australian taxpayers.

This could be done by giving taxpayers a simple choice of whether they fund the ABC, all it would require is a box for people to tick when they submit their tax returns.  Taxpayers who see value in the ABC could choose to fund it while taxpayers who it is out of touch could choose to not.

Given how vital the ABC is for the preservation of Australian democracy — as its supporters so often claim — the vast majority of Australians will no doubt happily tick the box and the impact on the ABC's budget will be negligible.  Such a small drop in funding could easily be covered by donations or other revenue streams.

Of course, if the ABC isn't quite as popular as its supporters claim — if a large number of people think it is arrogant and out of touch, for example — then it just might give them an incentive to change.  It surely has a better chance of success than a two-day visit to Bankstown.

Come Visit The Reef With Me, Misha Ketchell

Fundamental to the scientific method is the assumption that reality exists independently of our belief systems;  that there is such a thing as evidence, and that it matters.

Misha Ketchell, is the editor of the popular academic publication The Conversation, has been quoted claiming to care so much about the evidence that the opinions of "sceptics" must be excluded when it comes to climate change.  But if Ketchell really cares about the evidence, he will immerse himself in it:  he will come with me to see what the consensus claims are the worse affected corals at the Great Barrier Reef — and find instead a beautiful coral garden.

Indeed, if Ketchell really cares about nature and evidence, he will be prepared to test his claims against objective reality.

I've been labelled a climate change sceptic and contrarian.  Indeed, I'm listed in, of all places, the journal Nature as a dangerous dissident who must be shunned, and denied because, it is claimed, that I misrepresent the evidence.

If my arguments are so devoid of evidence, this should be easily proven.  One way of finding the truth is through simple observation.

If we have catastrophic sea level rises, for example, then this should be evident when we visit the beach.  If the Great Barrier Reef is in decline, this should be everywhere evident with the corals.

Coral reefs in shallow waters adjacent to the Australian mainland are considered particularly susceptible to coral bleaching, and also smothering by sediment from turbid water.

This was all lamented the week I was there in late August, including by Sussan Ley, the Federal Environment Minister.  Relying on a review of more than 1,000 reports by academics, she told the nation that the prognosis for the Great Barrier Reef, and particularly inshore reefs, is very poor.

One of the papers that helped shaped this opinion is by Tara Clark (and colleagues including David Wachenfeld, the Chief Scientist at the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority) entitled "Historical photographs revisited:  A case study for dating and characterising recent loss of coral cover on the inshore Great Barrier Reef" published by Nature (DOI: 10.1038/srep19285).

The historical photographs were taken circa 1890 and 1915 of corals in the vicinity of Stone Island, off Bowen, and they show healthy corals including species of the branching coral Acropora sp.

Clark, Wachenfeld and their colleagues concluded in the peer-reviewed paper published in 2016 that:

Using a combination of anecdotal, ecological and geochemical techniques, the results of this study provide a robust understanding of coral community change for Bramston Reef and Stone Island.  In the late 19th and early 20th Century, historical photographs revealed large and abundant living tabular Acropora sp. and massive faviid colonies at Bramston Reef and high cover of both plating and branching Acropora sp. colonies at Stone Island.  By contrast in 1994, no living Acropora colonies were found at either location and the majority of the large faviids that featured so prominently at Bramston Reef in c.1890 were dead, covered in algae and/or mud.

They continued:

In 2012 (eighteen years later), Bramston Reef was still characterized by many large faviid colonies, dead and overgrown by algae and sediment, as well as a large number of small living faviid colonies.  Yet there was evidence of some small increase in coral cover, primarily driven by tabular Acropora sp. and other genera.  In addition, living faviid colonies that appeared to be of equal size to their predecessors were also found in 2012, albeit scarc.  At Stone Island, the reef crest was similar to that observed in 1994 with a substrate almost completely devoid of living corals.

Yet when I visited Stone Island in late August, I was surprised to find an abundance of Acropora spp. forming both plate and branching colonies.

I saw and photographed large pink plate coral on August 25 — some more than one metre in diameter — at the reef edge just 30 metres from where Clark and co ended their transect as published in Nature.

There is dead coral, but this is not unusual in a fringing reef situation for the coral to continue to grow out from the island, with the healthiest corals at the edge.  This reef edge was often 20 metres wide and extended for perhaps two kilometres.

If the transects used in the Clark analysis had been extended by just 30 metres to the south they would have found a different story.  Rather the journal article gives the impression that the transect extended to the reef edge, when it did not.

Across the headland, in the northern-facing bay at Stone Island, was more coral and at this location, it covers more of the reef flat with an area of perhaps 25 hectares of almost 100 per cent coral cover.

This beautiful coral garden — with so many foliose and also branching hard corals — will be featured in a short film I'm making with underwater photographer Clint Hempsall.

The film not only includes spectacular underwater cinematography showing so many different species of soft and hard corals all at this one coral reef near the entrance to Bowen Harbour, but it also includes drone footage.  It is possible to get a good idea of the extent of a reef using a drone.  The film is entitled "Most corals are Beige".  But you can see from the underwater and aerial cinematography that there were also purple and some green corals at this reef.

Science is a method that relies on evidence.  That there is a beautiful coral garden existing as inshore reefs where the water is especially warm and turbid — not a kilometre from the Australian mainland at the entrance to a harbour — is hard to reconcile with the idea that we have catastrophic human-caused global warming.  It is impossible to reconcile with the published literature that claims these corals fringing Stone Island have been destroyed by climate change.

Science is never settled.  We must therefore always be open-minded, tolerant and ready to be proven wrong.

So I'm more than happy to take Misha Ketchell to Bowen, to test the evidence, in particular, this is an invitation to come with me and visit the fringing coral reefs at Stone Island.

Our Universities Have Caved In To Lazy Groupthink

In the lead-up to Friday's Global Climate Strike, enlightening emails have found their way into staff and student university in­boxes.  These communications are as illuminating as they are disheartening, as they once again reveal the extent to which our institutions of higher education have been captured by ideologically driven activists.

The array of carefully crafted messages that have been doing the rounds at Notre Dame, Queensland, NSW, La Trobe and Melbourne universities range from the subtle suggestion that staff may like to "accommodate" striking students, to robustly and actively encouraging students to ditch their studies and take to the streets to yell about climate change.

Without exception, all students have been informed that they will not be penalised for absenteeism and that there will be absolutely no repercussions for non-attendance.  This is completely at odds with standard university attendance requirements, which are markedly unforgiving.

Perhaps the most telling of all emails, however, has come from the desk of Stephen Trumble, head of the department of medical education at the University of Melbourne, who writes:  "All students are encouraged to consider joining with staff in participating in the Global Climate Strike on Friday 20th September.  The medical school supports sustainable development and mitigating the effects of climate change."

It seems that the priorities of Melbourne University's medical school are misguided.  Australians want doctors who are trained to diagnose and cure illness, not doctors who are trained to be eco­-warriors.  "One of our course outcomes," Trumble concludes, "is that Melbourne MD graduates should practise medicine in an environmentally sustainable manner so as not to contribute to this immediate problem."

One wonders whether this might look like a surgeon turning off the operating theatre lights and poking around inside the unfortunate patient by candlelight.

It smacks of ideological totalitarianism, where staff and students at our universities are being compelled to conform to the orthodoxy prevalent on campus.

The question is, what will become of the rebels who choose to go to class?  Their presence in the lecture theatres will single them out as dissidents and they will be judged accordingly as climate change deniers.  Never mind what they may think about climate change in private, their public inaction will condemn them in the eyes of their peers.

As it turns out, the same fate is awaiting those Victorian public servants who, rather than joining their colleagues on the streets of Melbourne, have chosen to remain at their desks.

Unsurprisingly, Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews, who this week achieved the honour of being the highest paid premier in the country, is encouraging his employees to ask for "flexible working arrangements" so they can help bring his city to a standstill.

Taxpayers are essentially paying public servants to take the day off.  It is unlikely that the Department of Premier and Cabinet would display the same degree of leniency towards staff if they were to down tools on a Friday afternoon to attend an anti-abortion rally.

What we are seeing on campus and indeed in government is the spirit of the mob at work.  This concept is explored by Douglas Murray in his latest book The Madness of Crowds:  Gender, Race and Identity.  "We are," he observes, "going through great crowd derangement.  In public and in private, both online and off, people are behaving in ways that are increasingly irrational, feverish, herd-like and simply unpleasant."

One of the most profound impacts that postmodernism and identity politics have had on our universities is the crippling of intellectual inquiry.  When universities are fiercely and repeatedly advocating diversity as a fundamental academic value, the reality is that diversity of opinion has been all but banished from many classrooms and lecture theatres, where the predominantly liberal-left world view, once concealed within the humanities, has become the wider orthodoxy.

The fact remains, students want diversity of opinion on campus.  In a recent survey of 500 domestic students commissioned from independent market research company Dynata, 82 per cent of respondents, no matter what their political persuasion, said university was a place where they should be exposed to different views, even if those views are challenging or offensive.  The results also showed that students were looking outside the university to be challenged or to find out alternative points of view, with 58 per cent of students saying they were more exposed to new ideas on social media than on campus.

Things must be dire indeed if students are finding greater diversity of opinion on the notoriously skewed platforms of Twitter or Facebook.

The Global Climate Strike shows that universities are no longer the chief institutions through which knowledge is preserved, generated and disseminated.  Australian campuses are rapidly becoming places where intellectual inquiry is being crippled and the free exchange of ideas is severely limited.  Collectivism and groupthink have no place in our universities, which to all intents and purposes are failing in their purpose.

Patten Law Will Erode More Of Our Democracy

Fiona Patten's proposed anti-vilification amendments are a supercharged 18C that threaten the legal rights of all Victorians and their freedom to engage in public debate.

The Victorian parliament is currently debating the Racial and Religious Tolerance Amendment Bill 2019, which was introduced into the upper house by Reason Party leader and lone representative Patten in August.  The bill promises to threaten freedom of speech in the state by vastly expanding the classes of protected people under the existing anti-vilification framework.

It will stifle discussion on a range of contentious issues captured within the left's identity politics bingo card.

Currently, the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001 makes it unlawful for a person to engage in conduct that "incites hatred against, serious contempt for, or revulsion or severe ridicule" of another person because of their race or religious belief or activity.  The Patten bill would add gender, disability, and sexual orientation as new "protected attributes".

Just like section 18C of the federal Racial Discrimination Act, which make it unlawful to offend or insult another person because of their race, Victoria's anti-vilification laws are vaguely worded and contain no objective standard for unlawful speech.  It will leave the door wide open for each judge to draw their own conclusions about what kind of conduct is likely to "incite hatred" or "severe ridicule".

In reality there is no meaningful difference between an act that is likely to incite hatred and an offensive act because the standard is based on an emotional response.  It is an inherently subjective exercise for a judge to determine whether an expression is likely to elicit an emotional reaction in another person.

Subjective laws mean you can never be sure when you will be deemed to be breaking the law since you can't anticipate how the law will be applied.  It is a poor basis for designing law, and an exceptionally poor basis for laws which restrict one of our most important freedoms.

Ambiguous laws such as these will throw into legal doubt a range of issues of contemporary debate for all Victorians, including the media, from opinion columnists and commentators like the Herald Sun's Andrew Bolt to journalists such as The Australian's Bernard Lane, who frequently writes about important but controversial gender identity issues.

Dealing with frivolous complaints mean the process is itself the punishment.  The risk of expressing an opinion will frighten people into silence.  This is known as the chilling effect on free speech, and is a feature — not a bug — of so-called hate speech laws.

Ms Patten responded to criticism in The Australian last week that the bill is about "public hate speech that principally threatens or incites hatred and violence ... limiting people's right to abuse and incite hatred and violence is not limiting free speech."

It is misleading to conflate the issue of inciting violence — which is rightly restricted among a litany of state and federal laws without controversy — with the amendments before parliament which primarily deal with inciting severe ridicule for instance.  This bill is not about stopping violence — it is about stopping debate.

Our experience with the federal section 18C should tell us why we don't need an equivalent at the state level.  The long running and infamous complaint made against several students at the Queensland University of Technology arising from Facebook comments about an indigenous-only computer lab on campus in 2013 exposed the failure to respect principles of natural justice and procedural fairness behind the scenes at the Australian Human Rights Commission.  Is there any reason to believe that expanding the role and powers of Victoria's human rights commission, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, won't lead to similar results?

We do know that the Patten bill seeks to give that very organisation the power to apply to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) to compel people to produce documents to identify online "trolls" after a vilification complaint has been made.  The power to force people to give information to an authority is clearly in conflict with an individual's right to silence, and runs contrary to the traditions of common law liberties and the rule of law dating back to the sealing of the Magna Carta in 1215.

Coercive powers like these should be strictly limited, and only exercised by a proper court of law.  VCAT, by their own admission, are not a court, and should not be given court-like powers.

The Andrews government has not confirmed whether it will give its support to the Patten bill, and has kicked it off into a parliamentary inquiry for review.  It should realise that freedom of speech is central to human dignity and human flourishing.  A functioning democratic system depends on the ability of people to put forward their views without fear of legal restriction and state punishment.

Rule Of Law Gets Lost In Commissions

If you were to ask the average CEO of the average ASX 100 company to talk for 10 minutes about climate change or Indigenous recognition they would easily be able to do so.  If you asked them to talk about "diversity" those 10 minutes would likely stretch to 20 minutes or even half an hour.

That is of course unless you asked the CEO to talk about one particular type of diversity.  Your average CEO might be less forthcoming discussing the opportunity their employees have to express views inside their company such as, for example, that all Australians should have the same democratic rights regardless of their race.

If your average CEO was asked to talk about the rule of law as it applied to their business, most likely they'd struggle to make five minutes.  That's a pity because the protections afforded by the rule of law to everyday citizens are increasingly being restricted and eliminated if you happen to be a company director.  A person on trial for drug trafficking has more rights than a bank executive being cross-examined in a royal commission.  Literally.

In an important speech earlier this week, barrister and company director Philip Crutchfield QC made this point, even if he didn't exactly use those words.

As he said, "One of the problems with royal commissions for reputations is that the mere asking of a question, no matter how answered, is taken to suggest wrongdoing or the giving of false evidence.  The mere making of an imprecise or misguided submission can also lead to immediate damage.  The reporting the next day of a person's name in association with the damaging question or submission can have lethal consequences."  In a criminal trial the accused gets a right of reply.  A witness in a royal commission doesn't.

The rule of law is not just the principle that rules apply to both the ruled and rulers.  It also encompasses notions that laws should be understandable, consistent and predictable, and that they should be applied fairly, ie according to the rules of natural justice.  The rule of law doesn't only protect an individual's legal rights.  It also protects their reputation and, at least in theory, it should protect their ability to earn a livelihood.

It's not just the growing number of royal commissions and parliamentary enquiries into corporate behaviour that are eroding directors' rights under the rule of law.  In response to the seemingly ever-increasing demand of the public for company wrongdoers to be named, shamed, and presumably eventually jailed, judges and regulators are holding directors responsible for actions over which they can't reasonably have been expected to have any expertise in or knowledge of.

Again as Crutchfield said, "directors now have an obligation that is personal, and cannot be delegated, to understand aspects of the company's business in ways which are simply unrealistic".  Some might argue that given some of the corporate misfeasance that has been uncovered in recent years the "top end of town" deserves everything it gets.  That view might be understandable, but eventually, the laws that at first appear as though they will only impact the large corporates, will impact every company, no matter how big or small.  Eventually, the desire to avoid any sort of risk or mistake will chill all commercial activity.  Arguably this is already starting to be seen as new business investment falls to Whitlam-era levels.

These are the sorts of things Australian corporate leaders should be talking about.  Instead, as Ben Morton, the assistant minister to the PM and cabinet with responsibility for cutting red tape, told the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry yesterday "too often big businesses have been in the frontline on social issues, but missing in action when arguing for policies which would grow jobs and the economy".

Morton is surely correct when he notes the tendency of Australian corporates to pander to "noisy, highly orchestrated campaigns of elites" instead of arguing for policies — like tax and industrial relations reform, like red tape reduction, and yes, even like the maintenance of the rule of law for company directors — that "make Australia more productive and create more employment."

Ban On Mayoral Medals Reveals A Chain Of Fools

Clover Moore's decision to stop wearing the City of Sydney's historic mayoral chains is based on ignorance.  Not just the ignorance of wearing a symbolic outfit for fifteen years before suddenly deciding that it was racist, but a more pervasive problem of Australians completely failing to understand their history.

The Lord Mayor claims that the motto "I take but I surrender" sitting below the image of an Aboriginal man and a colonial settler, refers to the taking of land from Australia's Indigenous population and is therefore insensitive.  However, even brief historical research reveals that the motto was never intended to refer to Indigenous Australians at all.  An administration should not be making decisions to remove historical symbols if they have not even bothered to attempt to understand those symbols.

If not for acting rashly and claiming authority, Moore's mistake would be fairly excusable.  After all the Sydney Town Hall's website, run by the City of Sydney, makes a similar claim.  It says that "The motto 'I take but I surrender' was meant to imply that the early settlers came to New South Wales and took the land, but in doing so, also gave it back.  Today this concept is regarded as ambiguous so the City of Sydney uses a simpler version of the coat of arms."

This is incorrect.  In 1881 the city authorities were asked to clarify the intent of the motto and they said that "it means that the city takes from the citizens in the shape of rates something which it surrenders in improvements and other benefits".  At the time the City of Sydney was one of the few incorporated municipalities in New South Wales.  Incorporation was then voluntary, but few areas took up the opportunity because it meant being asked to pay more in taxes for services that would otherwise be administered directly by the New South Wales Government.  This situation would endure until the Carruthers Government introduced a system of comprehensive local government in 1905.

In such circumstances it was necessary for councils to make a claim that the extra taxation was worthwhile.  The coat of arms did this through both the motto and an image of a beehive symbolising bees collecting pollen that would then be transformed into beneficial honey.  This image was later removed to make way for a set of three coats of arms.  Those of Viscount Sydney, the city's namesake, Captain Cook, and Sir Thomas Hughes, the first Lord Mayor.

The idea that "I take" referred to the taking of land seems to have been entirely extrapolated from this new graphic design and the image of the Aboriginal warrior which had always been there.  The misconception had already set in by the 1930s, though in a more positive form.  In that decade several newspapers reported that "I take but I surrender" referred to the British Government voluntarily giving New South Wales responsible government.  It was thus seen as a celebration of the birth of Australian democracy.

In a climate where people are prone to focus on the shameful parts of Australia's history, somewhere along the line the perceived emphasis of the motto has been shifted so that it is no longer on the British surrendering their Colony to its people, but on the British taking the land in the first place.  Even if we excuse not investigating the motto's true meaning, this is almost a deliberate attempt to find something sinister that was never intended.  Though we should acknowledge the dark parts of our past, it is worth noting that in New South Wales Aboriginal men were not denied the vote, so they too had something to celebrate in the coming of responsible government.

The fact that even the Sydney Town Hall's official website could get this so wrong reveals a bigger problem, Australians fundamentally do not know their own history.  Until this is rectified it is pointless to have a discussion about removing colonial imagery like Sydney University's statue of William Wentworth.  Tearing down symbols through ignorance only promotes further ignorance.  If Clover Moore cares about our colonial past enough to discard her chains, maybe she should engage with it.