Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Higher Education Support Amendment (Freedom of Speech) Bill 2020. In so doing, I just want to address comments made by the member for Dunkley about the need for an Australian bill of rights. I could not be more passionately opposed to an Australian bill of rights. A bill of rights does not protect individual citizens; it just transfers decisions from elected parliaments to unelected judges. Every tyrant in history has brought about a bill or rights that doesn't protect people, and it will surprise Australians that Victoria has a bill of rights. Despite all of the draconian laws that have been passed in Victoria over the last 12 months, they have done so with a bill of rights. A bill of rights provides an illusory protection to people.

I support this bill because the bill is designed to help universities be the best they can be and not be captured by ideologies and other distractions that threaten their reason for existence. I think undergraduates' impression of universities before they get there is often one that's very exciting. They imagine that they'll meet people who are deep experts in their field who'll engage in Socratic debate with their students. Students imagine that they have the chance to explore and test ideas with people, that they'll be able to freely inquire—I think of the great Edward Albee play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, where academics try to outwit each other. Students imagine a culture of learning and inquiry where they'll have a chance to develop their views and to properly explore and test their ideas.

I think what parents are hoping for is that their children will mature in their thinking but also develop a set of skills to make them ready for the workplace—a ticket for the future, and hopefully an opportunity to explore a better economic future than those parents themselves had. We regularly hear stories of the enormous pride that members of a family feel when the first generation attends university. The ceiling is lifted and new horizons open.

I believe in the idea of a university. I believe in the idea of a place of free and open discussion and debate. I believe in a university system that prepares people for the jobs of today and provides them with a set of skills that are adaptable for the jobs of tomorrow. I believe in a university system that can change people's lives and expose them to opportunities that their parents only dreamed of.

I want to give a couple of vignettes from my own education as an undergraduate arts and law student at UNSW. I was very lucky to undertake public law with Professor Rob Shelly. That class included a discussion of the 1975 constitutional crisis. Professor Shelly and I had very different views on it, but I didn't get marked down for having a politically incorrect view. He let me air my view, and although he disagreed with my stance he always tested my ideas and helped me put my best argument forward. I also remember the late, great Professor George Winterton. We were on opposite sides of the republic debate. We were both delegates at the Constitutional Convention and we became good friends. George was so widely read that he'd always give you the best proposition against his own argument.

In my school days I had some excellent teachers. I had a schoolteacher called Stu Johnston, who'd organised the Vietnam moratoriums and taught me history. Again, he completely disagreed with my politics, but he took the time to invest in me, to expose me to other ideas and to help me with my essay writing, because he saw that I'd need it over the course of my life. That's what truly great educators do.

In the three examples I've given, my education would have been poorer if I'd had to conform to some sort of politically correct idea or wasn't able to debate and have my own ideas challenged. Coming in with a preconception, hearing another view and refining, changing or solidifying one's own perspective is what a great education in the humanities should be all about. Unfortunately, too often the university system isn't allowing for that free inquiry and free debate and isn't properly equipping undergraduates for the jobs they're going on to. Unfortunately, I think a culture has increasingly developed in our universities—particularly, sadly, in our sandstone universities—where debate is not encouraged and where, in effect, the universities are not preparing graduates properly for a workforce where things are rapidly changing.

In our modern world, students need more traditional knowledge and hard skills than ever before. There's no point learning French history through how people collected firewood in the 18th century if you don't learn what French history says about the perception of France's place in the world today. There's no point learning a Marxist view of India's history which laments the British Empire but teaches nothing of Hindu culture, the rule of the Moguls or the glories of India's ancient civilisations. There's no point critiquing texts and ideas without first properly engaging in that text or idea itself. Too often we see great texts and ideas being talked about through the critique of today instead of being read on their own merits and then having rational debate applied to the ideas contained in them.

One of the hallmarks of Dan Tehan's period as Minister for Education was to focus on the question of free speech at universities. It's been nearly two years since former High Court Chief Justice Robert French recommended a national code to strengthen protections around academic freedom of expression. That code would ensure that freedom of lawful speech is treated as a paramount value and would affirm academic freedom. It would also make clear that there's no duty to protect staff and students from hurt by the lawful speech of another. Universities have been generally supportive of the idea. Universities committed to aligning their policies with the French model code. But unfortunately as of December last year only nine of Australia's 42 universities had adopted policies that align with the French model. Many have made a half-hearted effort; some have failed completely.

At the request of Minister Tehan, Professor Sally Walker last year reviewed the implementation of the model code. Unfortunately, what Professor Walker found doesn't come as too much of a surprise. Nine universities had taken these matters seriously, but the vast majority had not, with six universities continuing to have policies that are simply not aligned with the model code. This is not just a failure to do the paperwork. There are deeper problems with how some universities are handling matters relating to freedom of speech and academic freedom, and those problems can't go unchecked. This legislation is therefore necessary to ensure that universities actually do what they're supposed to do and adopt the code. This legislation is not an impermissible interference with university freedom. In fact, it is the very stuff of protecting their freedom.

In recent years we've seen the slow but very real erosion of public confidence in universities. Some have sought to monopolise the ideas expressed and to use universities as platforms for progressing particular agendas. Some of those agendas are ideological; others are actually threatening to Australia's security. Regardless of what form these agendas take, to allow universities to be overtaken by politics instead of learning would be a terrible mistake.

Over the past couple of years since the French review was announced, Labor and too many higher education providers have been trying to say to us, 'There's nothing to see here.' I find this argument staggering, especially after the real nature of the Confucius institutes have come to light. This is just one example of several that should make us wake up and ensure we are doing all we can to ensure universities can retain the character and freedom essential to their flourishing.

The failure of some universities to recognise that we have a problem is what concerns me most. Let me remind the House of some disturbing examples that have occurred in university campuses in recent years. In 2015 Colonel Richard Kemp was shouted down by students and a professor at the University of Sydney when he tried to speak about the ethical dilemmas of military tactics and dealing with non-state armed troops. He previously publicly defended the actions of the Israel Defense Forces, and yet for 20 minutes he was unable to speak. The protesters fought with security, who tried to have them removed. One of the protesters was a director of the University of Sydney's own Department of Peace and Conflict Studies.

In 2020 a student at the University of Queensland, Mr Drew Pavlou, was suspended from the university for two years after he was involved in protests against the Chinese Communist Party. Shockingly, last year the then Dean of Law at the University of Queensland, Professor Patrick Parkinson, an outstanding academic and thought leader in the field of family law, had a paper rejected by the University of Tasmania Law Review. Reasons given for the rejection of the paper included his use of 'offensive' terminology such as 'biological female' and 'opposite sex'. Parkinson had been asking important questions, based on years of experience in family law, about decisions that are currently being taken to define gender identity in new ways. His viewpoint deserves a hearing in an academic journal. If people like Professor Parkinson are being silenced, we're in a worse situation than I thought. Parkinson's referees seem to have objected to his politics, not his argument.

My own experience as a board member of the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation also reflects why I have reason to be alert to this issue. The Ramsay Centre is a philanthropic gift from the late Paul Ramsay offering universities the opportunity to run fully funded courses and provide scholarships for great book study of the sort that prestigious universities around the world like Chicago and Columbia offer. Instead, the universities haven't clamoured to partner with Ramsay, and many have bowed to extraordinary pressure from academics and activists who've got no problem with similar centres being funded by the Chinese government.

One of the key opponents of the great books course is Dr Nick Riemer, an academic who encouraged the shouting down of Colonel Kemp. Another opponent is Professor Simon During, from the University of Queensland. He said that the Ramsay Centre's efforts are causing anxiety. He said one problem with the Ramsay Centre is that 'well-known cultural crusaders in defence of "Western civilization" have leaped to their defence so that there is a quite intense left resistance to the whole thing.' During also challenges the idea that books should be allowed to be read by students without 'mediation'—that is, a student would read books without having lecturers tell them they have to be read through the lens of 'biologisms, materialisms, politicizations of various kinds, cultural relativism'. For him the fact that books might be studied on their own merit is a threat to the university. One is left to assume that he would rather be able to tell students what to think as they read.

How can a university that caves into the pressure of Left resistance be seen to be fostering a culture of academic freedom and the exchange of ideas? Perhaps most alarming of all, without ensuring academic freedom, our universities will become vulnerable to foreign interests exploiting them. While the ANU was rejecting a course on Western civilisation, it was very happy to run a Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies with an advisory board that includes a member of a foreign government. The ANU was also happy to take donations from Dubai, Iran and Turkey. These are real problems that must be addressed. As a member of the PJCIS, I look forward to looking into these matters further through the inquiry into national security risks affecting the higher education and research sector.

We need to ensure that universities have in place policies that demonstrate their commitment to academic freedom, and that's what this bill will do. Over 1.6 million Australians are university students. Thousands of them are young people in my electorate. They put enormous trust in universities to teach them and to assist them in preparing for their career, and so do their families. Families encourage their children to attend universities not so they can learn to watch activists shout down lecturers but so they can learn to think and prepare themselves for the work ahead of them. Parents and students in my electorate are rightly alarmed when they hear news about campuses stifling free speech and meanwhile failing at their essential tasks. It's because of my deep commitment to higher education in this country that I believe this legislation is needed. As someone who worked in the higher education sector before becoming an MP, I have a great and deep commitment to the idea of what a university should do.

I'd like to take a moment to comment on one matter that has been raised with me by faith based providers in recent weeks, and that is the impact that this bill could have on the accreditation of faith based tertiary education providers such as theological colleges. They've identified that, while freedom of speech and academic freedom are something that should be protected, they also have a reasonable concern that the requirement that they have a code upholding free speech and academic freedom will risk giving broad protection to staff and students who may seek to undermine the faith basis and religious ethos of the institution—for example, claiming that a sacred text of that institution is actually a work of fiction. As the former Victorian Crown counsel Mark Sneddon wrote to me recently, 'The current Western secular notion of academic freedom used in the French report implicitly values knowledge derived through empirical, scientific and closed-universe knowledge rather than knowledge which is in part derived through faith traditions and revelation. That sets the scene for an academic staff member or a student to claim an academic freedom to deny the faith tradition and revelation on the basis of the empirical data and secular logic.'

As someone who has worked for faith based institution, including a Catholic university, I believe it is reasonable for faith based higher education providers to expect that academic staff will continue to work within the belief system of those institutions. This bill does not intend to make that more difficult for such institutions, but I believe, given the concerns expressed, that this may be an issue that needs to be looked at more closely in the Senate to ensure there are no unintended consequences in the bill, and that there may be merit in including a statement in the explanatory memorandum to clarify the point.

This bill is not an attack on higher education providers, but it is focused on making standards that are important to our democracy, to our education system, to our economic future, to the future of our children and to the future of our economy. All Australian universities are subject to enormous pressures, both domestically and internationally and both internally and externally, and that makes it easy for them to forget their central purpose and their primary commitments. But the primary commitment of a university is the preparation of the next generation of Australians for the jobs that are in the economy today and the jobs that will be there in the future. Their primary responsibility is the pushing out of new areas of knowledge and understanding, and one can only do that if one can have free and open debate and if ideas can be tested, refined and tested again. That's why this legislation, which is based on the work of two of our most eminent lawyers—the former Chief Justice of Australia, Bob French, and Professor Sally Walker, who was herself a great expert in defamation law before she became a vice-chancellor and who is also a former CEO of the Law Council of Australia—is so important, because this legislation is designed to protect the freedom of universities as institutions, the freedom of our children and the future students of the universities, and the reputation of an incredibly vibrant and important sector in the broader Australian economy. I commend the bill to the House.

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