Amanda Stoker (Queensland, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister to the Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Speaking at the University of New South Wales, Sir Robert Menzies described the right and duty of universities and academics to pursue new knowledge as one of the most vital for human progress in all fields of knowledge. He noted that a university that treated an academic as no more than a person hired to study as directed and to teach in accordance with rules laid down by other people would be an extremely strange university. It would have failed to understand the immense importance of academic freedom.

As you know, Acting Deputy President McLachlan, intellectual freedom and freedom of speech are two things I feel very strongly about, not for ideological or dogmatic reasons but for really practical reasons: if we can't speak with one another about things on which we disagree—respectfully, with care, listening, with engagement—then we don't sharpen our ideas, we don't make them better. There's a biblical expression 'as iron sharpens iron'—as conflicting ideas meet, they are refined, they are improved. That is how we prepare the minds of the people who come through our universities to engage with difficult problems and to solve them. It's how we equip our society with the tools it needs in order to solve the challenges it will face going into the future. Take away that, on any basis—whether it's the desire not to offend, whether it's the desire to make people feel safe or whether it's the desire to make people feel cocooned—well, we can indulge feelings too much in an environment that is supposed to be about the big ideas.

When I think back to Sir Robert Menzies's statement, which was 56 years ago—56 years on, our universities have failed to live up to this important standard of academic freedom. Over the course of the last decade we've seen a number of disturbing incidents and anti-free-speech policies permeating our university campuses. The list is long. We've seen policies restricting the use of unwelcome, 'mildly unpleasant' or sarcastic language. There was once a time when satire, sarcasm and humour were indicators of a great mind and a source of good and helpful social commentary. We've seen restrictions on the personal use of social media and definitions of bullying that are so broad as to include terms such as 'unintentional offence' and 'emotional injury'. We've seen the introduction of trigger warnings and safe spaces to protect people from exposure, to mainstream ideas that they simply don't agree with.

We've seen the termination of academics, including, at James Cook, Peter Ridd, for having a view that challenged the professional research of his colleagues, based on his own professional research. Fancy having an employment contract that limits your ability to engage intellectually! We've seen the withdrawal of a textbook because a quiz question offended international students from China. And this is just the start of a very long list. It is of serious concern that universities—the institutions designed to facilitate a flourishing debate—have instead become hotbeds of censorship and entirely lack viewpoint diversity.

I'm proud to say that I played an important role in making the case for the establishment of the French review into intellectual freedom in our universities. It was in Senate estimates, following some really egregious cases of deplatforming, that I took the public servants from TEQSA through the legislation, through the funding agreement between the universities and the federal government by which the taxpayers give their financial support to our universities. I asked, in the context of these egregious breaches of free speech and intellectual freedom, how I could be assured that universities were doing their job in enforcing the funding agreement where it provided, by incorporation of different terms of the act, a requirement that academic and intellectual freedom be respected. The answer was that they were doing nothing—nothing. I'm pleased that led to the establishment of the French review. And while those opposite have made an awful lot of hay out of one line in the French review that said that there wasn't a crisis, I can tell you that it didn't give a good bill of health, either. The French review identified a lot of room for improvement—and I think that might be the world's biggest understatement.

Following that, former Justice French recommended that our universities adopt a model code to protect academic freedom and freedom of speech. Following that point, after a little time had elapsed, I took to estimates again to check universities' performance by the measures that had been set up in the model code. You will be shocked to find that, for the most part, they failed dismally. I'm pleased to say, following that examination, though I may not have made many friends at TEQSA, I did succeed in encouraging our minister, doing an outstanding job in the portfolio, to commission Professor Sally Walker to review the progress that our universities are making towards implementing the model code.

I'm a senator for Queensland and so I am reassured to see that all Queensland universities have made some commencing steps to put into effect those principles. But I've got to tell you, Professor Walker's review was not all good news either. As at the release of her report, only nine of Australia's 42 universities had academic freedom and freedom of speech policies that were fully aligned with the model code. Alarmingly, nearly half of Australia's universities have been rated by Professor Walker as 'not aligned' or having 'significant areas of policy not aligned' with the model code. They continue to fight against the idea that a university should have, as a foundational principle at its very core, the idea that there is a contest of ideas. Crazy stuff! It's further concerning that no Queensland universities have been held out by Professor Walker as exemplars for free speech and academic freedom. Indeed, there is only one in the country that has done a full replication of the French model code, and that's Victoria's La Trobe University. I salute them. It is good to see a university prepared to show that the sky won't fall in if they're prepared to act in accordance with their founding principles.

Professor Walker identified further deficiencies in current academic freedom policies. Thirteen universities were found to be diluting their policies with quite imprecise restrictions on academic freedom: limits of one's right to speak strictly to their areas of expertise, substituting terms like 'standards of scholarship' for the more fundamental freedom, or trying to sub in alternate but more restrictive concepts like 'professional standards' and restrictions so that speech is only allowed 'when done in good faith'—greying the edges to be able to keep people in fear about what they can and can't do and say and speak about and learn about without facing the ire of university disciplinarians. They're also diluted when they're spread over multiple documents or undercut by other policies that leave room for the exercise of administrative discretions that could limit freedom of speech or academic freedom. The result is academic freedom in name only.

As we work to implement the model code, amendments to the legislation are necessary to ensure consistency between legislation and university statutes, to support regulators and universities alike in promoting academic freedom. This bill, the Higher Education Support Amendment (Freedom of Speech) Bill 2020, does just that. The bill amends the Higher Education Support Act to repeal and replace the use of the phrase 'free intellectual inquiry' with the more precise reference to 'freedom of speech and academic freedom', adopting the language of the moral code. It defines 'academic freedom' in the Higher Education Support Act, and the amendments appropriately distinguish freedom of speech as a common freedom from elements of freedom of speech and intellectual inquiry that are central and distinctive aspects of academic freedom.

The consistency of language to be achieved by the measures in the bill will facilitate compliance with and adoption of the code, provide for more consistency and more transparency in the policies that are adopted by universities, and result in stronger protections for academic freedom and freedom of speech in Australia. But an on-paper commitment is not enough. We need all of our universities to have a clear cultural commitment to academic freedom and free speech. The French review makes this very, very clear. Culture here is key. Policy is not the end of the story; it's only the beginning. Universities have to actively create and engender a culture of free speech and academic freedom so that the words they must live by match the words they now say they so strongly support.

Vice-chancellors have an important role to play in this, and they need to lead from the front. That's how we send a strong message that this matters and it matters at every level of the institution. The academic board should have a prominent and direct role in this too. Professor Walker also suggests more novel measures, like induction programs on academic freedom for new students. I'd suggest that there should be consequences for those who are intolerant of free thought and expression, and that those should be made very clear to academics and students alike. When we wrap our universities in cottonwool, when we protect people, like snowflakes, from ideas that challenge them, we deny them the opportunity to argue their case strongly. We deny them the opportunity to become the iron that is sharpening the ideas in this country that will solve the problems we face going into the future, and we deny ourselves the resilience that it takes to confront our most challenging problems.

But it's important that we make it very clear this isn't designed to have unintended consequences. There are some parts of the sphere that have different needs. One example I give you is higher education institutions that are established, funded and structured around their religious ethos. In that circumstance, a theology college, say, needs to be treated in a slightly different category, because for it to require its staff and students to exercise freedom of speech and academic freedom in a manner that deviates from the beliefs the establishment was set up to teach, uphold and defend would be very strange. It would be very strange to see a departure from the core ethos of an institution like that. It's very important that we don't, in establishing this important principle for public universities, have the inadvertent effect of undercutting the foundation of institutions that are established for specific purposes. It's very important that in such an institution the beliefs and practices of the faith for which it was established and the adherence of the staff who work there to those beliefs and practices can be maintained in a way that ensures the institution is meeting its purpose. While a public university is established to pursue intellectual freedom no matter what, as its core and defining belief, a religious educational institution actually might have a different purpose. It might be balancing trade knowledge or professional knowledge with a faith based rigour that puts it in a slightly different category. So I'd make that distinction as we put in place this very important regime.

This government is steadfast in its commitment to ensuring that education is effective, and that means making sure that intellectual freedom is meaningfully operating in our university campuses. This bill is just another example of the steps the coalition is taking to restore universities to their traditional role as bulwarks of free speech, as crucibles of original thought and as places that meaningfully and genuinely prepare students and academics alike not only to confront ideas with which they may not initially agree with tolerance, respect and dignity but to use those ideas to solve the problems we face as a nation.