Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Hansard source

You might think that this is humorous, but the fact is that Paddy McGuinness, along with three other lay members of the ARC quality and scrutiny committee—which included a retired judge, a newsreader and Paddy McGuinness—insisted on going through all the applications, which you could understand. There was a view taken by this lay committee that 27 grant applications should be vetoed. As it turned out, three of those identified were among the 10 that were vetoed by Dr Nelson. So we have the sorry and shameful record of the previous government in attempting to silence critics and interfere in the legitimate scholarly processes.

What were these 10 projects that Dr Nelson sought to suppress? Three were in gender studies. Two were in feminist studies, one of which was so bad according to the government that it had to be rejected twice. There were two in Asian studies. There was one in conservation studies. There was one in media studies. Their projects were so terrible that their titles were changed and then they were subsequently refunded. This is the level of micromanagement and authoritarianism that they wanted to bring in. This is the level of contempt that these politicians have for our academic institutions. This is the real motivation behind the amendments that this opposition is seeking to present to this Senate today.

We are told that it is about accountability. What it is about is their obsession with their enemies among the intellectual groups in this country. What is clear to me from their history is the obsession that the Liberal Party have with trying to deal with people they do not like. They cannot cope with intellectual debate. They cannot cope with dissent. They cannot cope with people in our universities who might have a different view to that of the Liberal Party. That is why we had under the Liberals a shocking record of neglect when it came to the funding of our university system.

Under the Liberals our capacity to maintain our position with our intellectual institutions and research agencies was seriously undermined by serial and systematic abuse of our university system. We saw the funding capacity of our universities stripped away. We saw it in terms of our position versus the OECD. We were the only country in the OECD that actually reduced funding to its universities. As I understand it, there was a 23 per cent reduction in support for research and development throughout the Howard period—a 23 per cent reduction, as measured by GDP, in our contribution to funding for our university system.

What did we see in terms of our PhD students? What did we see in terms of our capacity to meet the challenges of the future? We had a government that looked on universities as being hostile, as being the enemy. Under the previous government that group had to be punished. We have tried to fundamentally reverse that philosophical position. We have taken the view that it is very important that we treat our universities as places that are critical to the nation’s future. Instead of a reduction in public funding for tertiary education, which fell some four per cent between 1995 and 2004 compared to the average rise of 49 per cent across the OECD, we have seen a fundamental commitment by this government to reinvestment because we were the only OECD country to cut the total level of public funding for tertiary education during that time. Our ranking on research collaboration between industry and universities went backwards.