Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Recent reports that the Australian National University would be cancelling well-advanced plans for a degree course in Western civilisation and will reject a $2 million offer of funding from the Ramsay centre on what are undoubtedly ideological grounds demand that we ask a simple question: is the assistant minister concerned, as I am, about a growing perception that our universities are not open to debate and are not delivering on community expectations, despite being provided with record funding from the taxpayers who give them social licence to operate? What is particularly telling in this case is the simple fact that opponents of a degree course in Western civilisation clearly see it as self-evident that such a course would present an uncritically positive view of its subject matter. It says a lot about how these academics approach teaching their own courses. Surely academics who believed Western civilisation to be a bad thing would strongly encourage a critical examination of the subject. After all, we often say that those who can't remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

But staff at ANU oppose such a course because they know how their university really works. They know, for example, how ANU's equivalent Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies works. This is a body funded by the governments of Dubai, Turkey and Iran which changed its name from the Centre for Middle East and Central Asian Studies immediately following a particularly large Emirati donation. It's a centre which just five years ago hosted a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, Richard Falk, who dismissed summary executions, repression of women and general human rights abuses taking place in centre donor Iran as 'happily false'. It's a centre whose director, Amin Saikal, presents a single viewpoint so divorced from reality that he described Iran as providing 'a degree of mass participation, political pluralism and assurance of certain human rights and freedoms which do not exist in most of the Middle East', and he has suggested that the coalition operations in Afghanistan and Iraq were the result of a Jewish conspiracy.

The implication is clear. At ANU, to study a humanities subject is to have rammed down your throat whatever predominant groupthink position is supported by the donors. This is not education; it is indoctrination. It will not produce inventive, cutting-edge thinkers for the 21st century but slavish drones to whom new ideas are a threat rather than an opportunity. We can't afford to create a generation of Australians who have been denied the chance to think for themselves in a world where knowledge and innovation will be the economic drivers of our future. Would the assistant minister therefore please outline to the House the importance of a strong and intellectually rigorous university sector in an increasingly competitive world economy, and what threat is posed by the abandonment of intellectual freedom?

Those who've sought to restrict freedom or enforce agreement with their own ideas have always known that the first and most important task is to control the language of the debate. We see a version of it in political discourse in this place, sadly, all the time. That's why the Leader of the Opposition and members opposite insist on dishonestly describing the coalition's ever-increasing, record funding of schools and hospitals as cuts. They know, as the many advocates of a narrow, left-wing, anti-Western world view in our universities know, that he who controls the language of debate has gone a long way towards winning before it even begins. Sadly we're seeing the results in universities in my own state of Queensland, where UQ students report that they have been marked down in assignments for using words like 'mankind' or describing ships with the grammatically correct pronoun 'she'. It is also why, in a stunning piece of doublethink, ANU have claimed that their ground for restricting diversity of thought by rejecting a course in Western civilisation is that it constitutes a threat to academic autonomy. So, finally, is the minister concerned, as I am, by the apparent rising policing of politically acceptable language in our universities and the impact this will have on the diversity of viewpoints which can be properly expressed?

Our universities are the nurseries of Australia's intellectual future. They are the training grounds for our next leaders and the incubators of the ideas that will preserve our nation's prosperity. Rampant politicisation, intellectual cowardice and ideological enforcement— (Time expired)

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